Does anyone remember the unconference?

There was hope for collaboration and self-organizing groups, but it seems to have gone the way of the corporate spin machine. I was a massive proponent of the unconference movement (I still am!), but that word has been used so poorly by so many groups that it seems to have all but disappeared. In short: calling your conference an "unconference" just to sound young, hip and with it, actually makes you sound old, out-of-touch and stupid. This past month, I've seen a handful of events that are billing themselves as unconferences when, in reality, they're just very shabby and cheap events.

Your conference is not an unconference if...

• There is a pre-set agenda. The whole point of an unconference is that group comes together to create the agenda/slate together.
• The organizers decide on the agenda. Organizers can help organize the day in terms of logistics (when there are sessions and breaks), but should not be setting the agenda in terms of the content.
• The organizers are doing everything. The organizers aren't there to make the event good for everyone else. The event is actually being "run" by everyone. Everyone participates. Unconferences are not about bystanders or attendees. The organizers are there simply to ensure that a venue is secure and that everyone knows where they are going. I'd even argue that this task can be done by the participants as well.
• You're charging for it. This will be a contentious issue, but the best unconferences I have been to, have been the ones where everyone took both individual and group responsibility for the event. If the venue requires a fee, everyone chips in equally to pay for it. If you're hungry and want to eat, either bring food or go out and buy some. The true spirit of the unconference movement is that this is NOT a traditional conference. Bring your own nametag, notebook, snacks and drinks. If this is a self-organizing event why should any one individual have a financial risk attached to it? Think about getting sponsors instead of charging for it (if you really have to).
• You're attending but not speaking. If you're showing up to consume and not contribute, stay home. Many people don't like to speak in public, that's fine. No one is asking you to give a keynote address. An unconference is a place where like-minded people come to share and challenge one another. Try sitting in circles and think about the event as a live interactive environment, instead of just sitting there hoping the next speaker can entertain you.
• You don't enact the law of two-feet. If you're not learning, get up, use your own two feet and go somewhere you can learn. Hallway conversations are great for this. If your unconference isn't littered with spaces for sudden collisions of conversation, it isn't much of an unconference.

Unconference are an amazing opportunity.

You would think that this Blog post should have been written and published five years ago. You would think that unconference are so passé. You would be wrong. After attending close to seventy events each and every year, the handful that stick out in my mind are the more intimate unconferences that I have taken an active part in. An unconference creates an egalitarian moment in time where people from all walks of life (and all levels within an organization) can simply share, learn, communicate and grow. To run a conference and call it an unconference is a disservice to the unconference movement. Many people don't understand this because an unconference looks and acts nothing like their traditional definition of a conference (hence the name of it ;). It saddens me to see how many people start with the right spirit of an unconference but quickly get stuck in all of the trappings of what they think will create a great event (and this - unfortunately - looks a lot like a traditional conference).

If you've never taken part in an unconference, I would encourage you to look into it... or better yet... start your own.

By Mitch Joel

Your life and your success is not obvious. It's not a given. It's not a direct path.

I often say that the best careers in marketing (specifically the ones that have a digital/new media slant) are very squiggly. They involve everything from stumbling through university and very crappy jobs to bad choices and decisions that were driven by financial debt instead of personal opportunity. Every year, I do my best to attend the TED conference. A couple of years ago, the name Chris Sacca was bandied around as someone who everyone wanted to not only meet, but hang out with. He was (and still is) a venture capitalist with a background at Google (in the early days) and an early investor in companies like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Kickstarter and others (you can see what he's about right here: Lowercase Capital). On one of the nights at TED, we both happened to be on the same shuttle bus (I was shy and didn't say anything). Later that evening we both sat next to one another at a late night jam-session that was being hosted by one of the hotels (I still didn't say anything). I didn't want to look like a fanboy (I was just impressed with everything that he had done at such a young age). People were constantly swarming him. It felt like there was an air desperation in hopes that some of his magic pixie dust might sprinkle over them. It turns out that - shock of all shocks - Chris is a lot like you and I. He's a normal guy that is just following his dream by trying to help others. He was actually two million dollars in debt not that along ago, but was able to turn his life around. He's endured crappy jobs growing up, and as a venture capitalist is first to admit that he's wrong much more frequently than right. His life philosophy and how he thinks about opportunity should be turned into a book. You'll just want to be a friend's of Chris. If you don't want to be his friend, you will be refreshed by his perspective on business.

It's about your foundation.

Kevin Rose (Digg, Milk, Revision3, etc...) hosts an incredible video podcast called, Foundation, where he has in-depth conversations with, "influential founders, entrepreneurs, and business leaders in the tech community," according to the website. With all of my heavy consumption and infovore mentality, I had not heard about this show until today and somehow stumbled upon this incredible hour-long conversation that Rose did with Chris Sacca from July 2011. I could not stop watching it. Not only is it a fascinating look at Silicon Valley and how relationships are built, it's an amazing education for everyone in marketing to learn from. They talk about the value of networking and relationships, what success looks like, how business models are created and much, much more (including how Sacca thinks Twitter will not only make money and become a big business, but what this means to marketing today... and moving forward).

Stop what you're doing and immerse yourself in this world...

By Mitch Joel

If you publish online get ready for a lesson in humility.

Brands quit publishing content for the exact same reason that many individuals stop publishing content: the brutal reality that nobody cares. As someone who creates and publishes a lot of content online (roughly six Blog posts and one audio Podcast every week), there is both a certain humility and instant humiliation that comes along with the process.

The cream rises to the top.

Even in a world where two hundred billion videos get viewed every month, the cream still does rise to the top (as the saying goes). It's just that we seem to have a lot more cream and it's fallen into many different niches. With that cream comes a lot of stuff that falls to the bottom. And, that bottom-feeding content, is the vast majority - especially when it comes to content that is related to business - of what populates corporately operated content marketing platforms . Not everyone gets the video viral success of Will It Blend? and few will get the same impact from their corporate Blogs as Dell has had. The other challenge is in maintaining this attention and consistently delivering content that rises to the top.

Content creation can be a humiliating process.

I've spent many evenings tapping away at the keyboard, as the ideas flowed in a fast and furious pace. I've hit the "publish" button thinking to myself, "this could well be my best Blog post to date," only to find out a short while later that nobody cared. The post wasn't picked up, tweeted about on Twitter, shared, liked on Facebook and only generated a few (if any) comments.

What did I get? Digital tumbleweeds or virtual crickets.

I don't care what Simon & Garfunkel tell you, the sound of silence is not pretty a pretty sound at all. In the pre-Social Media world, we used to publish our thoughts, but before that stage we had a semblance of validation. The publishers, editors and fellow content creators gave that validation to us, by agreeing to publish our work in the first place. Even when the work may have been sub-par, sometimes the brand that published the content helped carry it. I'd even argue that the public's reaction to that content mattered significantly less than the fact that it was published. The validation of content came from it being published more than it's widely accepted appeal to the masses. Now - in a world where the half-life of a Blog post can be less than twelve hours - you can tell if your work resonates... or if it's digital tumbleweeds.

How to win friends and influence people.

Countless Blog posts and seminars have been produced on how to get your content to rise up and be heard. While there are certain "tricks" that can be pulled off (a catchy headline, a cute picture of a puppy, a how-to-list, something that will make people laugh, cry, think... or all of the above), there is still a "secret sauce" that makes some content work. Having conducted over three hundred interviews with industry leaders, one common thread of thought is pervasive: the majority of content creators are just as surprised as anyone else is when one piece of content works while another is met with digital tumbleweeds. They often feel like their best work is not met with the attention they anticipated and that the content they felt was filler is the stuff that their community ran with.

The real-time analytics is us.

The true humility and humiliation of Social Media is not what the web analytics tell us... it's what the audience does (or doesn't do) with the content. You can buy audience, links and clicks, but you can't buy people who care and want to share whatever it is that you are doing. Ultimately, the humiliation should not stop us... it should drive us. Everyday is a new opportunity to connect and engage, so the brands that give up, don't try or tinker with their content are completely missing the point. Some stuff will rise to the top while other stuff will be met with digital tumbleweeds. It's the nature of the beast. The trick is in being able to identify that - over the long-haul (and yes, it takes a significant amount of time to garner any semblance of traction) - you need to look at the entire body of work as a benchmark for if your content resonates. It's also wise to use those daily moments of humiliation from digital tumbleweeds as a compass for what resonates... and what doesn't.

How do you deal with the digital tumbleweeds and virtual crickets?

The above posting is my twice-monthly column for The Huffington Post called, Media Hacker. I cross-post it here with all the links and tags for your reading pleasure, but you can check out the original version online here:

• The Huffington Post - Social Media and the Humiliation Effect.

By Mitch Joel

Episode #291 of Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast is now live and ready for you to listen to.

This is also episode #20.20 of Across The Sound. Joseph Jaffe is widely regarded as one of the top Marketing Bloggers (Jaffe Juice) and Podcasters (both Jaffe Juice in audio and Jaffe Juice TV in video). He is the author of three excellent books (Life After The 30-Second Spot, Join The Conversation and Flip The Funnel). A long-time friend (and one of the main inspirations behind the Six Pixels of Separation Blog and Podcast), we've decided to hold monthly conversations, debates and back-and-forths that will dive a little deeper into the Digital Marketing and Social Media landscape. This is our 20th conversation (or, as I like to affectionately call it, Across The Sound 20.20). This week, we talk about Joe's latest venture, Evol8tion, and what can happen when Madison Avenue meets Mountain View. Are technology startups the future of marketing? Jaffe is banking on it. Enjoy the conversation...

You can grab the latest episode of Six Pixels of Separation here (or feel free to subscribe via iTunes): Six Pixels of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast #291.

By Mitch Joel

Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing BandDeploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (The Book Oven, LibriVox, iambik, PressBooks, Media Hacks) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we're recommending to one another:

• The Antikythera Mechanism. "I'm kind of obsessed with this thing. It's a piece of machinery built in around 100 BC by the Greeks. It's a computer that can calculate astronomical positions - a thousand years too early. It's so awesome, there's even a song about it. The Greeks knew all sorts of things about disease, math and science. But Emperor Justinian, and church leaders after him, made such 'pagan teachings' heresy and human progress was delayed for centuries. In the middle of the Republican primaries, every time I see well-proven, well-understood things like evolution or global warming or vaccination called into question, I think of this mechanism. Where would we be today if we'd had mechanical computers two thousand years ago, and if reason weren't such a dirty word?" (Alistair for Hugh).
• 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore - Open Salon. "The only thing rougher than being a publisher these days is being a bookstore owner. I found this list by owner J L Sathre to be broadly applicable to all manner of small businesses. It's full of obvious -- but seldom implemented -- wisdom." (Alistair for Mitch).
• A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors. "I, for one, welcome our robot overloards." (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Caging Of America - The New Yorker. "The US is prison-mad. Why? This is a wonderful bit of writing." (Hugh for Mitch).
• Jonathan Franzen Continues to Hate Technology - The Atlantic. "This reminds me of that old Saturday Night Live skit where the old curmudgeonly man would say, 'back in my day, we didn't have games! We'd just stare at the sun... and we liked it that way!' I was never one to love sayings like, 'back in the good old days.' In this feature the technophobic author says things like: 'The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology,' and 'I think, for serious readers, a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience. Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change.' Do people who think and say these things even know what they fear? You can spill water on a paperback and still read it? Huh? The last time I spilled a coffee on a book, it went straight to the recycling bin. A sense of permanence? If someone takes my book, it's gone. If my house burns down, my books are gone. I can buy another Kindle and just re-download everything I own. Also, publishers can make available multiple editions and let consumers chose which edition they want. Digital feels more permanent and accident proof to me." (Mitch for Alistair).
• No Joke: Alain de Botton Wants To Build Temples To Atheism - Fast Company Design. "Whether Alain de Botton is doing this as a publicity stunt to promote his latest book, Religion For Atheists, or if is he's dead serious, it is this kind of thinking that we - as a society - should think about embracing. Everyone should have the right to believe in God (or not). That being said, none of us can deny the amazing things that humankind has accomplished in such a relatively short matter of time... whether it was with the help of God or not." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it's your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.

By Mitch Joel

Most companies change dramatically after their initial public offering. There is a reason that Facebook is going public. And while many are speculating as to the reasons by digging through the company's SEC filing, I think Facebook is going public... Read more

By Mitch Joel

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By Mitch Joel

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By Mitch Joel