While it was fun to recount the community history, I’m more excited about how LEGO fandom can catch up to the rest of the Internet. Mike is the developer behind BrickBuildr, a Flickr API-driven LEGO photo site. What we don’t see yet though is LEGO fan sites leveraging social network application platforms to reach broader audiences. With the news that adults compose not 5 but 20% of LEGO’s sales (link in German, Babelfish translation here), there’s a lot of opportunity to identify and connect people who are under the radar provided such applications are executed properly.

Here’s a link to the interview on the LAML Radio web site. See the small embedded link at the bottom of the page, I come in at about 17:00 on the podcast.

Enjoy, and I encourage comments!

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Someone asked Gary what motivates him and keeps him going. His response surprised me. He said that he’s incredibly grateful for each morning that he wakes up without getting a call in the middle of the night about a family member, friend, or someone he loves having died, and that this fuels his trademark passion and energy.

The very next morning, I received a call at work that one of my favorite XNet customers had recently died. This man had helped me quite a bit a year ago when I bought my first Mac and, was an absolute pleasure to talk to. It shook me, because though I had enjoyed conversing with this man, I hadn’t taken the time to seek him out and build a friendship with him to the degree I had liked. I rationalized that there would be time. Obviously I was wrong.

We make our lives so complicated with everything we’re running after, trying to be, achieve, or experience. I know that I so often forget about these basics and take my loved ones for granted.

Just last night I forced myself away from a fantastic time I was having with the kind of new friends that feel like old friends–to keep my movie date with my mom. Granted, I was two-and-a-half hours late and I felt terrible for that, but at least I made it (it was a Blockbuster nite). We had a wonderful time, just the two of us as my dad was out of town.

I’m glad I kept my date with my mom.

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!

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!

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. Digg this so it gets more attention and so more people write.
3. 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!

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

1. 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.
   
2. 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

• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Video: Mark William Hansen on LEGO Co-Creation

I encourage you this week to turn off your TV and discover activities that refresh you. Here are ten things you can do this week instead of watch TV:

1. Read a Book - The one you’ve been putting off reading. Or, you can read about the media, books such as Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman or Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News by Bernard Goldberg.
2. Pick up a new skill or enroll in a class. Right now I’m reading Rod Machado’s Private Pilot Handbook and studying up on my knowledge before beginning lessons.
3. Two words: Spring Cleaning!
4. Go for a walk/jog/bike ride outside.
5. Attend a cultural event, concert, or visit an art gallery if you’re into that sort of thing (then again, if you are, how much TV do you really watch?)
6. Go throw a ball or play a game with some friends - it’s about that time of year!
7. Cook a meal and eat it together as a family. If you aren’t married or don’t have kids, invite some friends over and cook a meal together.
8. Play a board game or party game. Recently I had fun playing classics like Connect 4 and Pit with some friends. Other current favorites are Catch Phrase and Apples to Apples.
9. Write something - a short story, a long story, a how-to guide or even some thank-you notes. Start a blog and publish what you wrote.
10. Review your goals and catch up on your to-do lists. Don’t kick yourself, just give yourself permission to take a fresh stab and make progress towards things you want to accomplish.

What about the Internet? Shouldn’t we turn that off too?
To that I’d ask: Are you learning and engaging your mind on the Internet, are you doing something interactive? Or are you just surfing MySpace, Facebook, or going from video to video? The Internet is fundamentally an interactive medium. TV is fundamentally one-way. Steve Jobs was quoted in Macworld as saying, “You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.” This week, try dialing back your consumption online, and dialing up learning and creating.

Further Reading on TV Turnoff Week and on TV Watching

• Kill Your Television lists a lot of articles and research.
• TV Turnoff Week on Wikipedia
• Center for Screen-Time Awareness
• Mental Detox Week at Adbusters
• Unplug Your Kids
• Turn any TV off with the TV-B-Gone universal “Off” remote (I just ordered mine!)

What are you doing this week instead of watching TV?

People who act this way suck energy, and if you’re not careful, they can discourage you from moving forward; whether that’s taking on new projects, learning about an area of interest, or pursuing lifelong goals. They can also poison social groups and make them no longer enjoyable for you and other participants.

Are you spending your time with people who cast a black cloud over everything? Or how about with the group that sits in the corner at an event and mocks everybody?

How is that working out for you? Are you happy?

I’ve had to do this reality check for myself many times, and I still do. I’ve been the king of commiserating and a mocker with the worst of them. Nothing good has come out of it, ever. I would leave feeling worse and no closer to my goals. And how do you know you aren’t the target of these peoples’ destructive diatribe when you walk away? You don’t, and you probably are.

Because people and attitudes like this are so common, it’s easy to treat this behavior as acceptable. We live in a society of 24×7 news that’s all negative. War, shootings, economics, scams, scandals, and celebrity gossip. And something about how we’re wired compels us to watch like a bad car accident.

My challenge to myself, and to you, is to stop putting up with it and turn it all off.

• Stop sympathizing with the people who only complain. “Don’t let them rent space in your head.“
• Ditch the watercooler gang, the rumor mill, and those who thrive on being divisive.
• Turn off the TV (and go do something positive). Especially the news and entertainment shows. Lifehack.org posts 10 things you can do instead.
• Find like-minded, positive friends who share your interests, goals, and dreams.