>>
[Piano music playing]
>>
[Pause]
Robert: Hi. I'm Robert Scoble and I've been doing online
communities
since about 1984 and I have a story -- a historical story.
I grew up here in the valley about a mile from Apple
Computer and I
belong to one of the Apple user groups that -- that was
going and we
had a friend -- a friend of the club, one of the people on
the -- in
the club had a garage and we turned it into a BDS.
We had six computers with six 2400-baud modems that made
horrible
sounds when somebody called in, you know?
And it was incredible.
People could call in to these modems from around the world
and trade a
few files which were very, you know, nothing like facebook
today;
right?
Just a few text files.
So we would get e-mail from, you know, Korea, or Europe or
something
like that and it would be very asynchronous.
We would have to wait a couple days for somebody to dial
back in to
get our e-mail over to the other half of the world; right?
Because they would have to connect their BDSs around the
world and
join in, and call into our modems, and trade those text
files; and now
we have YouTube where I can post hi-def video.
I mean, I was at Loic's conference in Paris and I was
uploading video
in ten minutes that was 10 ADP hi-def video and putting it
out on the
internet and people around the world were watching it and
interacting
with it in live time.
It was really, really incredible age we're at compared with
the 1980s
when things moved a lot slower than they do today.
I actually that's why I wanted to pull up Google Buzz so you
could
just watch a little bit.
I have something I'm following maybe 600 people right here.
Let me just refresh this and make sure it's going.
And this world is moving very, very quickly and so if you're
trying to
build a brand in this world and get noticed, if you're a
musician, or
a CEO, or a business, or a social project trying to help
Haiti or
whatnot, you're gonna have to compete with this world that
just keeps
moving at this speed and keep in mind I'm only seeing a
very, very
tiny slice of this world; right?
There's 400 million people on facebook and I'm only seeing
8600 people
here on this screen.
So -- and you can sorta get a sense of it just keeps moving
all day,
all nigh.
You know, you can get on at two in the morning and see, you
know,
twittering with this friends and but it just keeps moving
like this
all day long.
Umm, hey, Scoble.
Robert: Yeah.
And you guys can do this, too.
>>
Robert: Umm, and so I -- I just wanna put that up there
because how
do you get a business going in this kinda always on, always
streaming,
constantly increasing speed world; right?
I -- say start with four people, or maybe 40.
ICQ is a good example of this.
They released to 40 people on November 1st 1996.
How many people here have heard of ICQ?
Yeah.
So 40 people November 1st, 1996.
I got on it because Chris Corillo, a friend of mine, told me
oh, you
gotta get on this cool new thing; right?
And I joined around November 15th, which was six weeks
later.
I was the 65,361st person on the system; right?
So in six weeks they went from 40 people to 65,000 people
and that was
in '96.
So today everything has compressed.
How does that happen?
When I quit Microsoft -- so I worked at Microsoft for three
years, I
was a blogger and videographer there going around doing
interviews
with all sorts of people there.
When I quit Microsoft I told 15 people at a conference
smaller than
this room and I told them to keep their mouth shut until
Tuesday;
right?
This was a Saturday 'cause I hadn't told my boss that I was
actually
quit -- I mean, I was in discussions with him, he knew it
was coming,
but I hadn't actually made the call and said I'm quitting.
And of course it leaked but it leaked from a guy I didn't
even know.
It wasn't an A lister, it wasn't Mike Arrington, or Arianna
Huffington, or anybody like that.
It was a guy I didn't even know; right?
And I know thousands of people.
I study this world every day.
Wagner ***, of the Microsoft PR teams was tracking how many
media hits
they got and they said within three days, 50 million people
saw that I
had quit Microsoft from those 15 conversations.
I didn't do a press release, I didn't call up the wall
Street Journal,
I didn't try to build a, you know, a PR thing.
I just told 15 people and they found the story interesting
enough to
tell their friends about it.
It leaked from a guy I didn't even know and the story
started
doubling.
So it leaked 7:00 p.m. and every eight minutes it doubled.
So it went from one blog, to two blogs, to four blogs, and
when I hit
about eight blogs I called my boss and I said I'm quitting '
cause I
knew within 15 or 20 minutes he was gonna see it on his
screens can
then he would have even more pissed than he would have been
had I not
called him.
Likely I caught him before he saw it but yeah.
It just kept doubling every few minutes just like ICQ kept
doubling
every few hours in the early days and then later it was
doubling every
17 days.
Fun story.
If you -- one of my favorite questions is, would you rather
have a
hundred thousand dollars today or would you rather have a
penny that
doubles every day for a month?
To me an innovation is a penny that doubles every day or N
days or
doubles every N hours.
The problem is, most people can't recognize that doubling
penny until
it hits about 20 doubles.
So on day 20 -- you have about a thousand in your pocket.
So if you know you're gonna die on day 21, take the hundred
grand;
right?
All the money, all the money's due to compound in interest
at the end
of the month and you get five and a half or $10 million at
the end of
the month all due to compounding interest; right, which you
guys all
know.
When I talked with Bill Gates and said go by this company
called
Flickr, go buy Skype -- this was before Skype got to E-bay -
- I said,
these companies are doubling pennies.
You gotta own them, you know?
This is what you want to go and acquire and the answer,
Steven
Sinofsky, who now runs Windows, wrote me an e-mail back
about this
biggy and it had the words "business value" repeated 13
times. It was
too early in the doubling stage for them to understand that
it was
doubling penny.
It was day ten; right?
It was a few dollars.
>>
Robert: And they didn't understand that these things were
gonna
continue doubling until they hut uh hundreds of millions of
people and
became businesses that are worth billions of dollars.
So that's my lesson is I study how people work, how ideas
spread from
person to person.
I, you know, if you come to my Twitter page, you'll see a
list of tech
company executives or innovators, or tech companies.
Let's pick on tech company executives and see what they're
writing
right now.
And these are executives that are everyone from a startup
executive to
an executive at Microsoft and you'll see what they wrote in
realtime;
and a lot of 'em I can tell you something about them.
Like Sacca is an investor in twitter, you know, Jeremy
Toeman launched
five companies at CES and there's one investor of CES I don'
t know,
four times I think.
And so I start learning by reading these people and meeting
them
face-to-face I start learning about who they are and what
kinds of
thins they want to pass along the their friends; right?
So I know Jeremy Toeman's totally into gadgets.
He launched Bug Labs, which is a totally innovative company.
Helped launch Slingbox which many of you have.
Umm, and so I know he wants to hear about gadgets or see
innovative
companies in the gadget space or there's a certain kinda
thing, you
know?
Compare that to MC Hammer he wants to hear a different kinda
innovation.
He wants to hear about music and entrepreneur innovation.
Maybe he has some of the same interests that Jeremy does but
I start
looking at how to create a -- how to pass along a story.
Umm, when I first sold Seagate, so Seagate was one of my
sponsors for
a couple years, I told -- I went in there say said, let's
not talk
about twitter, or face book, or whatever's going on.
I wanna hear what is your story?
How do you want to change your story to the world?
And that started a much better conversation about what to
do.
Don't -- my first advice is, don't get caught up in these
tools 'cause
they're just tools.
Get caught up in what's the story you want to tell?
Do you wanna raise a million dollars for Haiti?
How do you do that?
Who are the people that you want to touch and get in touch
with;
right?
And then you need to study, you know, start with one of
them, like
Pierre Omidyar, which Loik knows, he started E-bay.
He has a lot of money.
So if you're trying to raise money, go where the money is;
right?
Maybe you know -- Loic knows him because Loic is following
him on
twitter; right?
So study who's following him, and study who's going along,
and build
the -- go take Loic out to lunch.
Learn something about Loic first.
>> That's two hours.
Robert: Two hours.
Yeah.
Robert: And buy him a nice bottle of wine 'cause he likes
good
wine --
Robert: -- and then he might introduce you to Pierre which
might --
which will be a much stronger relationship than if you just
tried to
e-mail pear out of the blue and he doesn't know who you are.
This is how I got most of my interviews at Microsoft.
I would start with one guy that I knew, interviewed him, and
I would
ask him, well, who else should I interview?
Oh, there's another guy over in research.
You should interview him.
Well, can you introduce me 'cause if I just call him, he's
gonna go,
you're a jerk.
I'm not -- try to think about trying to do what I did.
So at Microsoft I'd either be 600 employees company-wide;
right?
I interviewed everybody from Bill Gates down to the janitor.
Think about going into General Motors and trying to do that
as a new
employee, not as an executive.
'Cause one thing about executives, they're too busy to do
disruptive
stuff like this; right?
It has to be somebody six levels down that doesn't have the
trust.
Well, how do you get trust?
How do you build these networks inside a company?
How do you ask for an interview?
Well, if you go into some guy's office at General Motors, or
Disney,
or any real company, they're gonna start becoming very
defensive
because they know the camera can hurt me; right?
One of the tricks I used was I used a $250 camera instead of
buying a
real expensive big camera because it helps you relax and
when you're
relaxed, you're more willing to tell me stuff; right?
But imagine you're trying to do that at General Motors,
trying to
change the image of a global brand, you know?
You're not gonna get the front door because you don't have
the trust
and if you do have the trust if you're an executive, you
don't have
the time.
You're too busy chasing the business.
You're like Steven Sinofsky with billions of dollars of
business in
front of you and hundreds of -- or thousands of employees
that you
have to manage and you're too busy to try something new and
disruptive.
So how do you -- how do you go deep into the company and
change your
company's culture?
I talked to Tony Hsieh, who runs Zappas.
I'm sure you all know this.
Did you know that when you get hired there, you're forced to
tweet?
Why?
Anybody have an idea of the principle behind that?
>>
Robert: He -- he forces you to tweet for a couple reasons.
One, he wans everybody from the janitor to the CEO to know
that they
are a brand ambassador, that they are responsible for the
way we view
that brand.
We -- he knows that brand -- that we all change opinions of
brands at
two in the morning on a Saturday when I need help with
something, when
I have a bad experience, or a good experience, I need some
help, or I
need some ideas.
Hey, I need some shoes for a party I'm going to Tuesday and
I don't
know what to get.
So you start writing, you know, help me, Zappas, you know?
And if you get an answer back, that builds a brand.
There's somebody listening at two in morning on Saturday
who's
passionate about what they do and is willing to engage with
me.
Well, the employee could be a janitor, could be somebody
eight levels
down from Tony, could be Tony himself.
Tony answers my -- my tweets all the time; right?
>>
Robert: He knows that this new world is we need to be
empowered to
take care of people and that brands and movements happen at
weird
times.
Loic is gonna tell you about his post he wrote last night.
One of his tips was you gotta be on 24 hours a day.
You gotta figure out how to get your company to be on 24
hours a day,
you know?
Zappas has 300 people on twitter, the company I work for,
and we do
that exactly for that reason so that if you're a down, if
there's a
problem, or if you get a new job and, oh, my God, I gotta
build a web
site for the National Football League and I have three weeks
to do it,
you get some help, you get somebody to talk to, and you have
a public
face.
We all know -- how many people know news media Jim who is
Jim Long?
He's a camera guy in the White House with NBC.
He's on twitter; right?
Let's actually pull his tweets up here.
>>
Robert: Yeah.
To me, he is NBC to me; right?
He's a camera guy and I -- and I -- if I see something
happening in
the White House, if Obama announces something, I can ask
him, what's
going on?
You know?
What's your opinion?
And I met him; right?
So he's credible to me.
I met him face-to-face and he'll answer back.
You can see, he's answering people back.
Umm, you know, if I have problems with my come cast line, I
go to
Comcastcares.
I twittered him and said, hey, I'm having problems uploading
videos --
videos.
After I got home from Loic's conference he had a gigabyte
line and my
videos have gone up in ten minutes and the same video would
take an
hour and ten minutes at home and I said, "how can I -- is
there any
way to increase my Speed? "and he actually -- while I typed
with him
he said, well, you can't get high speed lines in half-moon
bay but we
can upgrade your router.
So reboot your router and you get another half a megabyte of
upload
speed and it made a little bit of a difference.
Now it takes 50 minutes to upload the same video.
But that made me feel better about this brand that was a
faceless
megacorporation that I would have to sit on hold for an hour
and a
half just to get to a human being like this, you know?
Ford, Scott Monty, you know?
>>
Robert: How many people have heard of Scott Monty before
today?
A few; right in this guy is changing how we think of Ford.
Francine Hartaway, one of my friends, is driving a Ford
Focus just
because of this guy, you know, and how he's personalized a
corporation
and how he's communicating a brand message that's very
interesting.
And now Ford is winning innovation awards.
Why?
Partly because of Scott and his social media team that he's
working
with because it's getting you to believe that Ford is a
different
kinda company than it used to be; right?
And I could keep going on and on but I wanna get these other
two guys
on stage and get some questions.
But this gives you a taste of what's going on out here and
the tools
that it lets somebody change the global --
>>
Robert: -- meaning in my head of what Ford is and this guy
might even
be working out of his house in his pajamas.
I don't know.
He has a DSL line like I do or a Comcast line.
It's an interesting world we're living in.
Some other -- one last thing that I wanna leave you with '
cause now
that I'm studying tens of thousands of people -- I'm
studying 17,000
people coming to me on twitter and 8000 people in Google
Buzz and I
watch this on a big screen so I have two big screens that I
can see a
lot more than I can here -- I'm find that, umm, we -- the
people in
this industry who have studied this and bit online networks
around the
world were craving intimacy now and that gets back down to
the four
people.
Umm, we're craving less of this kind of experience but --
what?
Yeah.
Okay.
We're craving less of this kind of experience and more of an
intimate
dinner conversation with four people and turn that around
you find the
right four people, you can change the world.
[Applause]