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Today I’m at the Loyola campus downtown at the TECH cocktail Conference. This is the first “tech” conference I’ve attended in a while, and I’m pleased that it’s here in Chicago with the local business perspective that sits firmly outside of the echo chamber. Plus, it’s the perfect combination of an impressive speaker list with a great track record and familiar faces I’ve gotten to know over the last couple years at area mixers.
Here are a few personal highlights from the speakers:
- Mike Domek of TicketsNow, a company that now does over $200MM in revenue (2006 figures), shared highlights from the early days of bootstrapping through to receiving funding and investing in scaling the business to where they are today. He said that too many people start with an exit strategy in mind, and encouraged entrepreneurs to start with a passion instead. Mike also entreated the audience to step out, take risks, and make mistakes.
- Corey Brown of Squidoo highlighted the benefit of speed when working with small teams. He touted Squidoo’s “competitive advantage of being 1/100th the size of everyone else” where they would iterate in the course of an afternoon when larger players would take months.
- Nick O’Neill of Social Times observed in the Social Apps & Widgets panel that if you build a business based on an application entirely within a walled garden like Facebook, you’re limiting your audience. Instead, start with a web site that can gather traffic from the entire Internet, use the Facebook app to augment it, and build the application across multiple social networks. Also, one panelist observed that we’re starting to see “application blindness,” much like ad blindness where users ignore areas on a web page that commonly contain ads.
Nick Fera’s Partner Ecosystem. Photo Credit Leora Zellman.
- Nick Fera, former CEO of Parlano, who was acquired by Microsoft, laid out a quadrant of the “Partner Ecosystem” that provided a well thought out framework for evaluating the strategic partnerships you go after while building your company. On picking strategic relationships between competitors, Nick said “We heard earlier today that 90% of these things fail, if you don’t pick a horse and ride it, you’ll never succeed anyways. Pick that horse and ride that horse.” (Note: I will post a photo of this later, unfortunately I could not obtain one myself while it was on the screen).
- Allan Cox brought the room to silence during the lunchtime keynote “Discovering Your Inner CEO” when he observed that as we build our careers, and sometimes our companies, start families, buy houses, and build a net worth, we discover in our forties that we’ve totally lost touch with what we valued most in our younger years. He also exhorted the audience to be alert to flashes of insight that get you excited but so often you allow to fade, either due to distractions or fear. “I’ve never taken counsel from my fears” -Stonewall Jackson
- I sat in on Jason Rexilius‘ talk on Cloud Computing and Scaling, and most of the talk was way more technical than my surface-level knowledge as a non-coder. He threw out some rather practical tips though that resonate with me being at XNet; The label maker is your friend. Label the front and the back of your server. Label both ends of your cables, and color-code your cables - one color for private network, another color for Internet-facing. A bit esoteric, but it surely stuck out to me.
- Gary Vaynerchuk said definitively on community, “It’s irrelevant whether you’re a traditional business or a new media business, it’s all about the community. The community is the entire thing you should care about 24/7/365. What you need to become is a rat. Real, Authentic, and Transparent. Because you can’t hide anymore, everything you do is documented.” The core of his message is that people, marketers, companies, everyone — needs to be real with their audience or they will be exposed and leave open a vulnerability for smaller players who are authentic to come up and usurp your leadership position. My thoughts: Your character is who you are when no one is watching. Gary observes that the times when “no one is watching” are getting fewer and fewer as people adopt social tools. This doesn’t make character any more important, but your actions are becoming far more public so character flaws and inauthenticity is now more exposed.
For a summary of the tweets relating to the event, see this Summize link.
Overall, the conference was a great event and a wonderful job done by the TECH cocktail crew. It was a bit like drinking from a firehose as so many speakers, panels, and topics were crammed into a one-day conference that could easily fill two days. But that’s good news — there’s no shortage of activities and speakers, and it sets the stage for the next tech conference here in Chicago.
And at that, I’m off to dinner and John Barleycorn for the TECH cocktail Mixer!
I’m excited about the upcoming TECH cocktail Conference that’s happening one week from today here in Chicago, where it all started. This time Eric Olson and Frank Gruber are taking all of the energy that’s built up in Chicago tech thanks to events like their quarterly TECH cocktail mixer and funneling it into a conference centering around building a successful web business. The only thing I don’t like about the lineup is that I’m forced to choose between breakout sessions!
If you haven’t registered yet and plan to attend, do so now. The Early Bird tickets have sold out already, but even with that admission stands at only $350; a great value if you’re local. That’s less than other events with the same quality of speakers and you don’t have to pay for travel either.
I hope to see you there!
Posted on 22 May '08 by Tim Courtney, under Uncategorized. 1 Comment.
I want to give a huge shout-out and congratulations to my aunt, Cheryl Courtney Semick, who held her first book signing today at a Barnes & Noble in her home town of Peoria, IL. She has been a newspaper columnist for several years and is now expanding her writing career to bigger things. I’m so proud of her!
My aunt Cheryl co-wrote Gary’s Rock: A Mother’s Journey of Faith and Healing with Lois Johnson, who tragically lost her son when he drown in their nearby lake while out for a swim with neighbor kids. I must shamefully admit that I have not yet read the book and now I must.
Congratulations, Aunt Cheryl!
Yesterday I received this fax from E! Networks, parent company for G4, denying my request to share a 5-minute video of me being interviewed on The Screen Savers in late 2004. The experience was a memorable and significant one for me, and I would like to share the video with friends and LEGO fans alike. It’s currently not available anywhere online, instead the clip is handcuffed by DMCA laws and relegated to the studio archives to live out what could have been a useful life as a long-tail piece of content. I find this quite ironic, given that cease-and-decist-warrior Kevin Rose was a host on the show at the time and that The Screen Savers emerged from the far geek-friendlier TechTV.
I set myself up for this. I decided to do the right thing and ask permission from the studio to post the video, instead of violating the copyright laws. While I don’t regret my actions, I kinda expected their answer to be no. I believe the studio’s decision is an ill-conceived, antiquated relic of old-media practices.
The whole thing gets even more ironic, considering that:
- The interview happened almost three and a half years ago.
- It has been shared on the Internet before, in MPG format, before YouTube (and DMCA takedown notices) became popular.
- The clip has almost no commercial value to them, but tremendous personal value to me.
Here is a copy of the reply I received from E! Networks. Click to view it full size:
The studios and their lawyers continue to demonstrate that they don’t get it. Locking up content that was delivered over the airwaves for free in the first place is silly, and it limits the clips’ exposure to new and niche audiences that go beyond the mass audience of viewers.
A big PR win for G4 and other studios would be to post old show content and allow people to embed their favorite clips and discuss them. This way the content can live on. In return, the studios will receive even more exposure for their shows. And in the light of all of the takedown notices and restrictive practices of the last few years, they could be seen as revolutionaries for doing so.
I’d still love to share the video online. Here’s what you can do to help:
- Write Marlene Lee, Executive Director of Rights and Clearances at E! Networks, and the one who denied my request. PLEASE keep your notes short and on topic. Also, please focus on the issue and don’t attack her or the studio personally. I have her fax number, but won’t post it here. If someone has the email convention for eentertainment.com I can post an obfuscated email address.
- Digg this so it gets more attention and so more people write.
- Twitter this, especially in reply to people like @leolaporte, @kevinrose, and @sarahlane.
Hopefully with that I’ll be able to show my interview segment soon!
Posted on 16 May '08 by Tim Courtney, under Uncategorized. 5 Comments.
Jake McKee, former Community Development Manager at my favorite toy company, LEGO®, recently talked about the company’s several-year process of opening up and listening to its biggest fans; grown-up builders, collectors, and hobbyists. Whether you’re a LEGO fan, a community manager for a consumer brand, or both, this video is both entertaining and well worth the watch:
Having experienced what Jake speaks of from the fan side, I thought I’d share a fan’s perspective in light of two of the Cluetrain’s 95 theses:
#34 To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.
#35 But first, they must belong to a community.
How it all began…
Right about the time some people were stocking up for Y2K, Brad Justus announced LEGO Direct, the new direct-to-consumer division at LEGO, by posting to the LEGO fan site LUGNET. This was a big deal. Until that time, the only LEGO employees who had “acknowledged” us adult fans were lawyers. Brad’s announcement was the first ray of light that our beloved company would talk to us.
Trust was a factor in the early days. Many of us were hopeful, but just didn’t buy the idea that the skies had parted and all would be right in the world. 
LEGO’s early communications to us were mostly announcements. Brad’s Q&A sessions at conventions like BrickFest overflowed with passionate fans questioning company decisions as LEGO was over-simplifying their product line. These same people expressed their enthusiasm for the product by demanding access to purchase greater varieties of parts in bulk quantities. Brad’s terse answers in these were so seen as PR speak that they even inspired this hilarious comic by Brendan Powell Smith, the artist behind illustrated LEGO Bible “The Brick Testament.”
Possibly the most brilliant hire Brad Justus made was Jake McKee. Jake came to LEGO in 2000, having already established his street cred among fans as an avid builder. He positioned himself internally to be the advocate for fans and an ambassador to the company for the fans.
While a LEGO employee, Jake made it a point to visit club meetings and displays throughout the country. He also actively participated in his local club (TexLUG), not as an employee but as a builder, because LEGO was his hobby. He also wrote the book “Getting Started with LEGO Trains” as a fan with an interest in sharing train building with others.
Jake brought more conversational, two-way style to fan-company relations while communicating the company’s priorities in a way that fans could respect. In short, Jake exemplified both #34 and #35 above. Even in the face of very unpopular moves on the part of the company, he never lost that street cred within the community at large.
Steve Witt, a former intern of Jake’s, took his place in 2006 as community liaison, while Jake moved on to new opportunities. I wasn’t very involved with the LEGO community during Steve’s first couple years, but I did have the opportunity to spend a bit of time with Steve at BrickWorld 2007. Compared to Brad and Jake, Steve is the most casual of the three. From my limited exposure, he strikes me more as “one of the gang” than a corporate representative, though he still fielded the dodgeball questions in the convention’s Q&A session expertly.
Lessons Learned
- Break Bad News First: One key to “first belonging to the community” that got overlooked was the keen ability to anticipate what would be interpreted as bad news and preemptively acknowledge it to the community. This is best exemplified when LEGO slightly changed the tints of their gray and brown bricks in early 2004, sparking nothing short of an uprising in the online community. While Jake handled the aftermath expertly, nothing LEGO did could have made the fans happy in this situation. Announcing it first along with plans to make favorite bricks available in the old colors for a while longer would have lessened the blow. Takeaway: If you have bad news to give your core fans, deliver it first instead of letting them discover it.
- Trust Your Fans (skip the NDAs): As the company has reached out to fan groups for input into new product developments and initiatives, more often than not fans would be required to sign an NDA before LEGO revealed their plans. This has caused, and continues to cause, mistrust between NDA’ed fans and the general fan public; either that they aren’t representing the group’s interest well, or that they’re being bought off with privileged information. While I don’t personally subscribe to those thoughts (disclaimer: I have been under LEGO NDA in the past but am not currently), I understand why they occur. My thoughts are simply this: If you’re coming to your biggest fans for input into your products, realize that they only want to help your company, assuming there’s something in it for them. Give them enough incentive to participate and show them that you trust them by ditching the NDA while simultaneously communicating the sensitivity of the information being discussed.
All in all, it’s been a wonderful experience seeing the LEGO company open up to its fan community. It’s amazing how far things have come in just eight short years. The company that before sent their lawyers after domain names and logos now invites these same people to help design products, decide bulk parts offerings, and display at public shows worldwide. LEGO hasn’t been perfect about their interactions, but this is uncharted territory for all of us.
Additional Reference
Posted on 12 May '08 by Tim Courtney, under Uncategorized. 2 Comments.
