Aaron Strout:                             

I'd like to introduce our special guest today, Dave Summers.  Dave is the producer of new media for the American Management Association or the AMA.  Welcome, Dave.

Dave Summers:                      

Hey, Aaron.  Great to be here.

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, I appreciate you joining us on a snowy Friday.  Dave, I'm going to jump right into the questions.  One of the things we like to do for these We Are Smarter podcasts is I like to get to know the guest a little bit better.  Talk to us about what your background is and how you came to become the cool new title.  I'm the director – or I'm the VP of new media for Mzinga, this producer of new media, and I think you do some of the podcasting for them.

Dave Summers:                      

Yeah.  Well, I guess it was a bit of a long, winding road, but hopefully what you're good at rises to the top.  I've been with the AMA about – in February it will be two years, and they created this position.  It didn’t exist before.  The AMA was running webcasts to get the word out on some of their seminar offerings or whatnot, and they really weren't meeting too much success with these webcasts.  Every one was run as sort of what I'll call community theater effort where they'd sort of get everybody together, decide on the content, and then they would hire a service provider.  Many times it was a different service provider, so the user experience was all over the map.  They wanted to unify that experience.  They wanted to make it scalable.  They wanted it to be fall tolerant, and they wanted to be able to host their own archives.

So, I was brought in with my background being sort of a combination of technical and production related stuff to fill this brand new role.  Prior to that I was with a boutiquey – what do I want to call it – medical, pharma, health education agency that was doing a lot of training in pharma rollout support stuff.  My academic background I have a fine arts degree in film and video production, but I have a minor in business.  So, I'm a little Jekyll-Hyde.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's great.  I think that's – my understanding is the Jekyll and Hyde makes all of us better, new media or social media folks.  I have sort of an interesting background myself, which I won't get into, but I'll just through out there Russian area studies and sort of online marketing and a host of other things.  I think we're all – we're mutts.

Dave Summers:                      

Yeah.  It's interesting when these windows of opportunity open and you can sort of leap through them.

Aaron Strout:                             

Absolutely.  So, to that end, talk a little bit about what you guys are focused on these days.  You have a fairly large member base.  You help people in the business space.  What are you guys doing?  You touched on it a little bit by sort of taking the webinars that you had and sort of pushing that forward, but what is the AMA in general focusing on these days?  What are the top things they're helping their members with?

Dave Summers:                      

All right, I'll give you the back of the napkin what is the AMA real quick.  The AMA has actually been around – I imagine people are familiar with it.  It's a real legacy-type of organization.  It's been around for more than 80 years.  It is an association.  It's a not-for-profit.  It's a membership-based organization, but the bulk of people who attend our seminars and buy our books are not members. 

We have executive conference centers all over the United States, one in Atlanta, Chicago, obviously headquarters here in New York where I'm speaking to you from, San Francisco and Washington, and we run a fair amount of our seminar business out of big conferences in hotels that we have relationships with.

Now, the AMA has portfolio-driven types of programs that they offer.  By portfolios I mean in the project management space, which is aligned with the PMI or PMI catalog, finance or accounting, people continuing education credits there, business communications skills, which runs the gamut from speaking in public to how to write better email.  There's stuff that's related to contracting with the government and working with the government, supply chain management, whatever.  It's a real sort of overall business curriculum.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, I was going to say, to that end, obviously, new media or social media, community is starting to play a little bit more of a role in businesses, and I think companies are starting to figure out they need to have a blog strategy.  How much have you guys started to push into this?  Obviously, it's a big step for them having someone like yourself that's focused on new media.  So, they get it to that degree.  Are you starting to be able to impart that wisdom to some of your members, or are your members asking for this type of content?

Dave Summers:                      

Well, yeah, some of them are.  Some of the more with-it, savvy, younger generation, millenials or whatever, they're definitely asking for that.  That's the way the live their lives, but many of the others aren't.  But when they see it and they understand it they embrace it, and there are really two levels I think to the way we're approaching it.  The first level is directly with a specific identified community where we have a blog and a social network that we're establishing with followers and instructors and believers in what is called the Myers-Briggs testing instrument, which is a very well known and well documented personality assessment tool that figures out your type and your cross type and what teams you work best with or where you're challenged in a certain area. 

We have a direct community blog that is related to that, whether you're an instructor, embracer, believer in the technology.  Some of these people tend to be quite – in a good way.  I don't mean this as derogatory, but tend to be quite geeky about their pursuits, you know what I mean?  They want the latest and the greatest information from the people who know.  So, that's a very direct way that we're participating.

Then we also – we'll probably be expanding that into more of the mainstream project management related stuff and maybe HR-related issues.  In an indirect way, the way we handle it sort of case-by-case is following up on all of our webcasts we have basically a collection of the questions that were answered that we roll out into a frequently asked question document.  In 2008 that will evolve into basically an event blog type of thing where people who either attended or didn’t attend can come and then the information that was presented and the [inaudible] position that happened and what the next steps are.  So, there's a higher-level thing that's happening, and there's sort of an event-by-event or web event by web event following that we're working toward right now.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, to that end it sounds like your – you guys are moving in the right direction, or at least the direction that the market is taking us.  Talk a little bit about your leadership.  Are they embracing this?  Are you finding like you're going to have to beat them up a lot to get them to hear you, or is this something that it's a top-down approach where they understand that they really have to start threading these new types of communications into their overall package to add value to members as it starts to be requested or demanded?

Dave Summers:                      

Well, I think there are challenges with any organization that has the deep roots that the AMA has.  I definitely think there's some challenges here.  People are open to those challenges, but there's a great deal of concern about throwing the door open to community-generated material and letting the community edit for itself, the sort of Wiki approach to, again, the best will rise to the top and the truth will rise to the top.  Obviously, when you've got executives and attorneys involved there's a certain amount of concern there because everybody wants to do things the right way.

I think we're pointed in the right direction.  I think the thing that probably helps us out the most is the fact that we're nonprofit, we're an organization, we're an association, and when your whole credo is pretty much based on the greater good you work toward that, and there's some aspirational qualities to that.

Aaron Strout:                             

Part of why I ask that is not necessarily to put you in the hot seat.  I try not to put folks in the hot seat.

Dave Summers:                      

I'm sure none of my bosses will be listening to this podcast, so –

Aaron Strout:                             

Of course not.  But you understand there are a lot of companies now that are grappling with the exact same thing.  Even some of our customers where I now have sort of a back channel into them through a tool called Twitter, which I'm not sure whether you use or not, but it's a great way to sort of have informal conversations with a variety of people, and I'm hearing some frustration coming from them.  These are companies that have said, "We get community and we want to move forward with them," but it is tricky, and there are a variety of challenges that people face because of the fact that it's a new way of doing things.  And a lot of the companies we deal with are companies maybe they haven't been around for as long as you guys have, but maybe 25 or 30 years, and they have traditional sea-level folks that have grown up in the standard they went to B school and they've been in big business for 25 years, and it can be a little bit scary.

Dave Summers:                      

The legacy Peter Drucker models of there needs to be a leader, there needs to be someone in control, there's a command and control structure people feel very comfortable with that because of their defined paths they have to follow.  Kevin Kelly wrote New Rules for the New Economy almost ten years ago.  I think it was ten years ago.  So much of that stuff still sort of percolates up in my mind, this whole idea of letting go.  You know what I mean?  And feeding the net first before you do anything else. 

I realize I'm in that business and I'm going to be pushing that button a lot harder than some of my coworkers here at the AMA who are much more involved in the live seminar business.  I think trust and getting over the fear are probably the biggest challenges we face.

Aaron Strout:                             

Absolutely.  So, I'm glad you mentioned those because those are some of the things that we cover in the We Are Smarter book.  There are conversations we have regularly and I have regularly with some of my colleagues that it is about trust and it is about a new leadership style.  Now, I think what we found in our observations are that I like your discussion or opening up of the discussion that people have traditionally liked the command and control-type leadership, and they feel like that's what is most effective.

I think you can't go completely communist, and by communist I mean the real version of the word not the Soviet version where everyone has an equal voice.  You do need facilitative leaders.  You need someone to sort of help steer the ship, but I think one of the things that you do is as a company you're willing to hear more voices, and that can be a little bit tricky, and I think I'm hearing that in terms of what you're saying and some of the challenges that you guys face.

Dave Summers:                      

Yeah.  I think that's really what it comes down to, and it's evolving from this "we know best, sit down and learn at the feet of the master" to "let's create an environment where we can set up some guidelines and give you some tools and techniques, but you've got your own unique problem to solve; how can we help you?"

Aaron Strout:

Exactly.  So, with that why don’t we talk about a final question?  I want to be respectful of your time.

Dave Summers:                      

Sure.

Aaron Strout:                             

Where do you see you guys going in two or three years?  Are you going to be doing a lot more of this stuff?  Will your management do you think get over the hump, and will your audience really start to demand this type of training, whether it's through the seminars, webinars, conferences, etc.  Will you guys get to a place where people truly understand what Dave Summers does as a producer of new media and how they can really thread that through their business and make their businesses more valuable?

Dave Summers:                      

I think two year – god, two years sounds like a lifetime, but I think within that span of time there'll be a much better appreciation of what the offering can be and what the structure can be.  Because even if you let go, there still has to be some type of structure there, framework that people are comfortable with.  Yeah.  I see us gearing up much more in the new media space with webcasting and podcasting. 

Probably more importantly for this conversation is the fact that the feedback loop will be much wider, will be much more open.  Right now in our podcasts we even feature the voices of the people who will be participating in our seminars, so it's a way for – it's not just the AMA preaching at you.  It's here are people in attendance who have real issues and problems.  So, I guess the big thing for me is the feedback loop will open up wide and will be a little bit more open to that.  It'll allow for better customization.  So, I feel pretty optimistic about it.

Aaron Strout:                             

That's great.  So, I said that was my final question, but I have sort of an add-on question that you spurred and then we'll wrap this up.  You do get an opportunity to podcast with a lot of different folks.  Any two or three that come to mind that have been some of your best, and talk a little bit about why they've been engaging.  That could be anyone who's an office manager all the way up to a CEO that you've talked to.

Dave Summers:                      

I would say the two that really have stuck in my head for this past year one was with Stephen MR Covey, who is Stephen Covey's son, actually, has written a book called I guess something like The Speed of Trust.  And it has to do with how this concept, this sort of ephemeral concept of trust has bottom line impact. 

He was just really interesting perspectives into the ripple effects of trust, and that stuck with us a long time.  That was one of the more popular programs we had, and a matter of fact, he's opening our new season in a few weeks in 2008 we liked him so much.  So, he really made an impression on me, and kind of a personal favorite of mine was we got to meet and spend some time with Mayor Ed Koch, the ex-mayor of New York who is just – he hasn't changed at all.  He's the same person, and the great thing was it – the conversation really centered around the value of being yourself and being true to yourself and leveraging or sort of creating your own buzz as it relates to being the go-to person and rising to the occasion.  So, I would say of the 35 or 36 of them we've done this year those are the two that probably stuck out in my mind most. 

Aaron Strout:                             

Great.  Well, Dave, I really appreciate you taking the time with us today.  For those listening in, we're talking to Dave Summers, who is the producer of new media for the American Management Association.  So, Dave, thank you for taking the time.

Dave Summers:                      

Thanks a lot, Aaron.  It was great.

Aaron Strout:

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the WeShow podcast.  To find other podcasts like this you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."  Thanks so much for joining us.  We look forward to seeing you next week.