Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show.

[music]

Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

And of course, we do appreciate your comments. You're welcome to dial me at (781) 328-2824, or e-mail me: aaron@mzinga.com.

Today I am talking with writer, consultant, nice guy and co-author of Naked Conversations, Shel Israel.  Welcome, Shel.

Shel Israel:     
It’s a pleasure to be here, Aaron.

Aaron Strout: 
It’s a pleasure to have you.  Thank you for doing this.  I will give a quick back story, and that is that Shel and I were at Office 2.0 about a month or two ago.  I was trying to be a show-off and I had my new iPhone, which they gave out at the conference.  I did actually successfully record a couple of podcasts but the one that I did with Shel, we got drowned out down in the lobby and so I am re-recording with him. This testifies that A, he is a nice guy, and B, hopefully we’ll do a better job this time – or I’ll do a better job.  I know that we’ll at least have captured it doing it over the phone. 

Jumping right into the questions, Shel, many people know you from your book, Naked Conversations.  It’s sort of an icon in the new-media or social-media space.  You co-wrote it or co-authored it with Robert Scoble.  I think we could probably spend an hour just sort of talking about the back story, but I think most of the people listening in probably know that back story already.  Tell us what you’ve been up to recently, and do you still keep in touch with Robert Scoble?  I think you probably bump into each other all the time.

Shel Israel:     
Well, I spend a lot of time telling my parole officer where I’ve been recently, and Scoble is very much part of my life.  I see Robert probably more now than I did when we were writing the book and he was up in Seattle.  We began, as the back story goes, screaming at each other for the first month, but we don’t scream anymore; we get along quite well, and he’s one of my closest friends.

As far as what I’m up to, the two main interests are I’m really immersed in online video.  I think online video is moving at an even faster speed than blogging was a few years back.  I’m very interested in the way it penetrates both home users and office users.  Finally, I just completed yesterday a really lengthy SAP survey of the globe. They gave me a very simple assignment: “You get 90 days to find out what’s happening on the planet regarding social media, and send in an unlimited number of words reporting to us on it.”  They did let me blog each interview, which was pretty exciting.

Aaron Strout: 
That’s great.  That actually segues nicely into my next question, which was we did talk a little bit at the event about this work you’re doing for SAP.  What stuck in my mind, I remember you telling me that the research for this ended up happening in a different way than research normally happens.  I believe you had the help of the crowd here, which is one of the focuses of our We Are Smarter Than Me book.  Talk a little bit about how that evolved before you actually put pen to paper for the 8,200-word document that you put together for SAP.

Shel Israel:      Well, in Naked Conversations, we talked a lot about we are not in command, we are not in control, and I learned that really fast with this project.  My method was I was sending out e-mail questions to a series of bloggers and people I knew worldwide, and they would answer and I would post them on my blog, just like we did with Naked Conversations.  This time, I didn’t get past number one.  Number one turned out to be Hugh MacLeod.  He took my questions and he answered them with a cute little cartoon on his post, and sent me a link.  Hugh was always a link slut, but I had to go along with it.  Now, he’s moved away from me, and while I was waiting for answers from other people, Ken Camp, another blogger, took the questions I asked Hugh.  He answered them himself and posted them on his blog, except he didn’t like question number five, so he changed it.  He answered it and posted it, and then I had to send him a link.  A few more came in, but then the next thing that happened is people that I didn’t know were taking the questions off of the survey, and they’re asking them on Facebook, where more than 100 people answered.

A few questions were also asked in LinkedIn.  I was behind them and not so many people answered, and I gave up on LinkedIn after somebody advised me to read Naked Conversations to find out the answer.  But the thing kept taking its own course.  A quarter of my respondents were people that decided to roll their own.  We eventually posted roll-your-own questions, and people all over the world answered that.  We ended up talking to people connected with a Kenyan orphanage, who were using blogging to raise money for running shoes so that the orphans could compete in Pan African athletic games.  I ended up speaking to 48 people in 25 countries, and learned a good deal about what’s going on in the world.  Social media is emerging very, very rapidly all over the world, but at different paces.  Silicon Valley is going at a different pace than Kenya, for example.

Aaron Strout: 
Now that you’ve done this, and you’ve sort of tapped into your crowd to be able to do research this way – and I think, as you said, you ceded control right up front and you really saw things take off and go in a direction that you didn’t necessarily expect – but ultimately it sounds like it was beneficial.  Is this the way you think you will always do research going forward, and is it something that you recommend to other people?  One of the pluses is you get a lot of people giving you input and things that you never could have known about. But at the same time, as you mentioned, you get people changing questions, probably giving you different levels of expertise – some really good, some maybe not as good.  Thoughts on that?

Shel Israel:     
Well a couple of things.  I should have said that the survey came out much, much better once I relinquished any attempt at controlling and just let it go where it wanted.  I should have mentioned Joe Thornley, who did a video clip for an answer.  I’m not a researcher; my training and education is as a journalist, and as a journalist I was taught to follow the story.  A good journalist never tries to leave the story; he or she follows it.  So I think what has happened is the tools of following the story are much, much better than they were when I was in the ‘60s running around with a steno pad and a Bic pen in my pocket.  I think that the ability of gathering information extremely fast via the social media is a story that’s unfolding very rapidly.

The earthquake in San Francisco last night – or in the Bay Area last night – is an example, where I was watching it at a blogger dinner for Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid, and Twitter beat the San Francisco Chronicle online by about an hour.  Twitter got the word of that earthquake all over the world faster than any structured media organization could do it.  For me, this means that I can talk to people all over the world just by going to Facebook and Twitter and my blog and saying, “Hey, I want to talk to people.”  It makes my job easier and it makes the results better.

Aaron Strout: 
I’m glad that you brought that story up, and I think that it’s interesting.  We talked a little bit about that in our pre-conversation, that there is this new channel that’s happening that’s taking citizen journalism one step forward in that all of our tools are changing.  Everything is moving really at such a fast pace, it’s hard to keep in touch with it.

As a last question: A lot of companies now are starting to embrace this concept of social networking and communities.  Some are doing it through Facebook.  Some are doing it, you know, using some of the Web 2.0 tools, or the social-media tools.  Any thoughts for companies, especially having just spent so much time sort of helping SAP figure this out?  One best practice that you could recommend to a company that is starting to go in the direction of community or social media, and how they succeed or what they should beware of, or the one tool that they should really be focused on?

Shel Israel:     
I’m going to begin with a cliché that I use to answer a question.  This stuff is too new for there to be best practices.  Best practices are proven and refined over time.  All we have now are good ideas.  As the enterprise begins to embrace the huge toolshed, which is the social-media toolshed, they’re doing things that nobody else – or certainly I didn’t imagine could be done and would be done.  If there’s a continuum of what’s going to happen, where very early on and where it’s going, I don’t know. But it’s evolving at an extremely rapid rate, more rapid I think than most people realize.

As far as the one tool, the answer to that is people need to find the tools that are right for them in their situation.  People in companies, people in homes need to find the tools.  Each tool can be used myriad ways.  You can take a hammer and you can use it to build a house or bludgeon a spouse.  The same with a blog, or online video.  The applications for online video are mind-boggling.  You know, there are CEOs who are very comfortable blogging.  Most CEOs are not, but some of those CEOs have the same in-house evangelist came in and said – the same one that said two years ago, “Why don’t you get a blog?  We want you to wake up at 5:00 in the morning and we want you to write one three times a day.  We want you to do a Scoble –” and got thrown out of the office, of course.  Came back now and said, “Hey, boss?  We’d like to bring in a video camera here, and ask you this list of questions.  Then we’re going to put this up on the Internet for the whole world to see it.”  That same boss who threw out the enthusiast a couple of years ago, just might say, “Wow, I should wear the tie my wife gave me for the holidays.”  Tools are very personal, and people need to choose the right ones for their situations.

Aaron Strout: 
Well, Shel, this has been very helpful, and I know we kept the time short.  I could have easily spent a couple hours talking to you today, but I’m trying to be respectful of your time and the listeners’ time.  So, thank you for joining us, thank the audience for listening into this.  So, Shel, thank you for joining us, and look forward to talking to you again in the not-too-distant future.

Shel Israel:     
Thank you, Aaron.  I had a lot of fun.

Aaron Strout:     

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. 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.

[End of audio]