But I want to talk about more. I want to do more.

The guy in that photo is Mark Horvath from Invisible People. He caters to the homeless. Directly. He and Liz Strauss walked around giving pizza to homeless guys while they were here. They talked to the homeless, made them feel seen.

As well as meeting me, I want you to find Mark and say hi. I want you to make HIM feel the way you make me feel. He’s doing good work.

This is Melissa Leon and AJ Leon from TheLACProject, a human business company. They are doing AMAZING things. Find them in the hallway and talk about Africa and social good.

On another note, Thom Singer. He just wrote about a giving moment that happened at a party at SXSW. Man, I wish I went to that party.

What We Could Do: Networking

We need better networking tools. We need to build a “I’m ____, and I’m into _____ , and I’d love to talk about _____ , and I’d love to meet people into ______ , or just ______ . I like _____ food. If I were to support a cause, it’d be _____ , but I’m open to ____ , too” kind of tool.

We need to give new people the warmest welcome with some kind of “I’m new here” badge.

Can you see it?

What We Could Do: Panels and Speeches

We need to give the new people more to talk about. We need to give them more fundamentals. We need to strip out some of the entertainment value and get back to sharing our big ideas, our golden thoughts. (Me included. I think the panel that Julien and I gave was fun, but not as informative as we could’ve made it. Next time.)

We need to bring our A game, our A ideas. Maybe some of you did. I spoke to a few hundred people, and no one gave anyone rave reviews except for the panel with Jeff Jarvis, and the talk by Clay Shirky. (Note: I didn’t see hardly any panels, so I’m not talking from experience, as much as I’m talking from what the buzz reported).

What We Could Do: Sponsors and Exhibitors

We could do lots more in these regards. I think sometimes, as attendees, we forget that the sponsors are helping pay for the experience. How can we do more things to pay them back for that? Yes, we pay for the ticket. I think we would do well to grab a quick interview with a few sponsors while we’re out and about at all these parties.

What We Could Do: Interpersonal

People still anxiously talk all about themselves. We could ALL just ask about the other person, get to know what they’re doing, and share our best intentions of understanding each other. Sounds hippie, but that’s how things really get done. It doesn’t get done when you start into your pitch before really even getting to know us.

Might Just Be Me

Know what I saw more than anything else when I really took a moment to look around? Lonely people. I saw people not connecting. I saw lots of people who could’ve used a little attention. And I saw many people with lots of energy looking for a place to put it. And that means we have opportunities.

This wasn’t a rant about SXSW. It’s a post begging for a new way, a more engaged way, a human way to bring out the best in our efforts and time and expense.

What say you?

By simply sending money, the problem is softened a bit. But there has to be more.

According to Crittenton, we can help by:

• Donating money.
• Giving other goods.
• Mentoring
• Internships
• Outreach

Some of the opportunities I was thinking about when I wrote when this all gets cool is the opportunity to do more in the form of mentoring, internship, and outreach. When I think about all the moms I met at the DisneySMMoms event, I realize that there are some really hard working women out there figuring out new ways to earn money for their family.

Lori Falcon is one. Erika Lehmann is one. Melissa the Consumer Queen is another. They’ve all found ways to make money for their families using the web. (There are obviously non-web ways to make money, too.)

I wonder what we can do. I wonder how we’ll continue to help. What ways will YOU help? What can you give to the cause in the way of mentorship and outreach?

So today, I wanted to write about my love for blogging, and hopefully, you’ll pull from this some ideas or affirmations for what you’re doing.

I go way back, but the tech is new

I’ve blogged in one form or another since 1998. I haven’t owned my own domain for that long, and my early blogs were on WYSIWYG technology (Trellix, invented by Dan Bricklin, actually), and yes, I had a Geocities account (Area 51, baby) ,and a Tripod account, and all that old stuff before I finally got a blogspot blog, then some other tech I can’t remember, and then finally WordPress. I use WordPress because it’s got a strong developer community, because it has a lot of plugins that are useful, and because I liked the themes I could get for it. I use the Thesis theme (affiliate link) and sell it because I love it so much.

My home on the web

Blogging is like my house, or in most modern times, it’s my showplace. It’s not as messy as my mental house. I keep my blog focused on helping others do human business. If I want to write about my kids, I can do that at Dad-o-Matic. If I want to complain about air travel, I have Twitter. I keep my Facebook account as a personal-ish account.

So blogging, as it were, becomes my showplace, my storefront, my “here’s where to get the best of me” site.

Relationship Building

I love the relationships I have with the people who comment on my blog. It took me 8 years to get my first 100 readers. I cherished every one of them. I even take the occasional screenshot of how many RSS subscribers I have because I’m humble and proud each time I hit a new milestone.

And the number in and of itself isn’t interesting. What’s interesting is that so many of you are wonderful contributors to my community, to my education, and to the great pursuits that we all share.

Lead Generation

I went from a blog that only 100 folks read to being a blog in the Top 5 of Advertising Age’s Power150. It was a total lark that I joined. I forget who was kind enough to tell me there was a list. Well, the few times I’ve spent time at number 1 were fun, but to be honest, that’s only a little bit of social proof. Here’s how I get business leads from my blog.

I write about the way I see things, bits about how I might implement it, and ideas that companies can see themselves considering. Companies then reach out to me to either speak or bring New Marketing Labs in and do work for them. The blog got me the book deals for Trust Agents and Social Media 101. So, it’s really paid off well, my time in blogging mixed with my ideas on new ways to do business.

Homebases and Outposts

My blog is my home base. It’s where I want you to go when you find me on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/wherever. Because it’s the biggest part of understanding who I am and what I know how to do. I give you a “Best Of” page so you can find some of the meat of what I believe in an easy-instead-of-chronological way.

My outposts are things like Twitter, Google Wave, Facebook. Those are places where I connect and do something, but it’s not to replace the homebase. I think all these posterous and tumblr side projects can be cool, but rest assured that they detract from the value of growing a solid community. Outposts are where you meet people in the commons. The homebase is where you derive most value.

The Blogging Practice

I write all the time. Blogging helps me with this. I wrote about the writing practice not to long ago, and I write about writing often. It’s not that blogging is hard. It’s that blogging is a lot like going to the gym and it requires a constant practice, like playing the horn, like drawing, like dating. Meaning, it’s a verb. The more you do it, the better it can get.

Blogging as a Storefront

I sell things via this blog sometimes. For instance (and much of this is affiliate links):

Thesis WordPress theme
Third Tribe Marketing (our members-only marketing forum).
Beyond Blogging, an ebook I participated in.
Trust Agents, my book with Julien.
Social Media 101, my own book.
Countless books on Amazon.com, as I read and review quite often.

You don’t have to sell on your blog. It’s just an option that’s there if you want. Those projects above have helped me go to events that I otherwise couldn’t attend, and they’re helping me save for a new home for my family. Blogging gave me that, too.

My Own Magazine/Show/Media Empire

Growing up, none of us had the opportunity to “really” make our own media. We could do magazines by photocopying stuff. We could waste all the ink in our deskjet printers and pretend we were doing desktop publishing. We could record wav files and email them to our friends if we had a week.

But these days, you can be a podcaster, a videoblogger, a blogger, and you can make your own media. You maybe didn’t think of it this way, but the Huffington Post is what “feels” like a mainstream newspaper put together with blogging technology. It’s grown to be bigger than lots of newspapers, a top blog for years running, and yet, it’s just what we’re doing, done bigger.

Meaning, you can be whatever you want. You win on a huge mix of things, but you CAN do it. Distribution is free. Opportunity is nearly free. It just takes a powerful plan and a lot of execution and refinement.

I Love Blogging

And I hope you continue to do what you’re doing. We don’t need fewer blogs. We need more passionate blogs. We need more blogs that educate and inform and instruct and give us what we want. We need more Copyblogger and more Jon Swanson and more The Oatmeal.

And we need you.

You in?

You probably had this idea, too:

Can’t see it? Click click here.

Direct link to the video

The difference between you having an idea and what they’ve done is that they’ve executed. If you’re not executing, you’re talking about doing something. Big difference. If you’ve missed over 20 years of Tom Peters in any format, that’s what he says. He’s been totally saying it for 20 years.

If you can’t see it, click here.

You’re New Here

In business, we are all new again. All the major car companies can’t assume anything about their customers. Banks aren’t guaranteed to be there forever. Cornerstone institutions are rolling up, sailing away, moving into new modes that don’t benefit us any more. We can’t count on anything. Oh, and on the business side, your customers are losing jobs, merging, consolidating, changing the rules.

Accept that you’re new here. What do you need? You need eyes, ears, intuition, intent, and anthropology.

Your Eyes And Ears

Listening tools abound. You can now see people’s intentions writ large on these various social networks. No, not everyone is out there voicing their opinions, but you can start with the people who are. Use the searching tools to see what people are saying on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook. Listen around in forums. Google yourself blue. And then process this.

Listening is deafness if you do nothing with it.

Intuition

Want to change the world? Ask thousands of questions. Ask the same handful of questions thousands of times. Ask yourself, “How can I help my customers during these tough times?” Toyota is giving free maintenance for two years as a way to win back sales and customers. It’s a solution that will benefit both sides of the equation. How is your bank treating you during these economic woes? What have you said about it? What will you do?

Intuition about what others need is a powerful tool in this world without maps.

Intent

Do you really care about your customers/prospects? If not, it will show. Do you value them? Show it. Demonstrate it with intent. Make decisions that don’t always benefit you as much as they do the customer. You don’t have to sink the business, but just by showing more intentions to the positive of your customers, you’ll win more opportunity.

What do your actions say about your intent?

Anthropology

You’re looking to better understand the social and cultural development of humans. It’s all we have left, because all the history we had attached to us before has shaken itself off, or it’s clinging to our backs like a prison.

Why are we sending kids to schools that train them to be industrial cogs? What are we doing to help them rebel? How are we reshaping the world, now that the unit of measure is knowledge/information? In a world where we don’t all have to work side by side in a factory, why are we building so many offices?

If you dig into this area, if you start looking for new trends, whispers of what curves are coming next, you see the big stuff. You see the boomer generation growing huge. You see India taking over the creative side of the stick to go along with their dominance of engineering and process management. You see shifts in who’s spending, where we’re paying attention, and more.

This one’s the biggest to consider in that world without maps. Because we need to understand the people more than we need to understand the systems. If you’re trying to re-rig your marketing tech to account for these new territories, you’re wasting time by not starting with understanding the shifts in what humans want/need/are moving towards.

Is This Crazy Talk?

Anyone who just nodded yes, I’ll see you a few years from now and we can talk more. Those of you who get a glimpse of this, who see that we’ve got a new opportunity to really take meaningful action, let’s work in that direction.

What’s your first move? What have you already been doing? What will you do next?

Without maps, where will the lay of the land take you?

What do you think?

We are experience facilitators.

My take on his line is this: we’re building bridges between companies and customers in how those two parties experience their interactions. Want that a little less fuzzy? (Remember, this is a thought in progress.)

We social media marketing types can help companies build better experiences back and forth between companies and people. So, the project New Marketing Labs did with Sony about DigiDads was to work with dads and their children to tell interesting stories using Sony products. Our role, NML, was to help the DigiDads experience some new things with some new products by recommending some interesting group projects. Our role with Sony was to facilitate that relationship and help make that bridge.

There are other projects with other clients that make sense of this, too, but maybe you’ve done this yourselves.

Do you see that? This is related to my ideas on guest experience design. How can we improve the experience of customers (b2b or b2c)? And part of this is the facilitation we can accomplish via social media tools. Be it communication or media exchange or idea sharing, etc, there are many possibilities.

Do you see this at all?

More coming soon. I’m really really really big on this idea of guest experience (instead of customer service) and the value of things like social media to participate. I’ll wait for Trey to write up the idea I had for his new client. : )

What do you think?

The Anywhen Manifesto

We believe that time-shifting is every bit as important as work-shifting.
We will push back on the unintentional urgency people put on us.
We will seek out time-shifting-friendly means of interacting (like Google Wave).
We will attempt to respond in a timely fashion, but as it meets our other duties and obligations.
We will do our damnedest, but forgive our occasional drowning spells.
We will create in ways that promote time-shifting-friendly consumption.
It’s not all about realtime.

There. It’s not much, but it’s what’s on my mind. Maybe it’s just further purging.

Photo credit col adamson

Sometimes, I go on Twitter to share information. I push some of it through my @chrisbrogan account. I have a more “pure” feed at @broganmedia.

Other times, I go on Twitter to connect with people and build/strengthen relationships. I go on there to read what they’re saying. I spend a little time “showing up,” because in business, just showing up is important.

Part of what I do on Twitter – maybe most of what I do on Twitter – is work-related. Even if I’m chit-chatting, it’s because that’s part of my job, part of my role as someone in the space. This is the important thing to think about.

I’m not there because I’m taking a break. I’m not there because I’m bored. I’m not there because I’ve got some extra time for a phone call or to check out your video. It’s still part of my job.

Now, I’m not complaining when I say this. I’m explaining. I’m telling you that what I’m doing looks quite often like it’s leisurely. But it’s not. And there’s a lesson/opportunity in explaining all this.

Business isn’t always about the sale. Business isn’t always (is it ever?) a straight line. Business is sometimes a conversation long before I need the sale. Business is sometimes just connecting to stay on the human side of the fence.

And leisure isn’t always how we use these tools.

A Request

Here’s something new that happens:

1. You email me.
2. You then tweet me to tell me you emailed me.

Doing this right after emailing me just eats up more cycles of my time. My inbox happens to increment just fine. No need to tweet or use other communications channels to underscore your contact with me.

Acceptable: a few days after you sent it, if I’ve not yet replied, then you can check via any channel you want.

Not as acceptable: the double-tap.

Your Take

How do you see it? How are you using these communications channels? What’s working or not for you?