Firstly - if you have not seen Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last week, here is a link to the full speech. It will be 45 of the most inspiring minutes of your life.

Now, on to the post…

Barack Obama is multi-racial and multi-cultural, son of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas (Dorothy’s daughter who ran away to Oz and stayed there, because there was no place like home, no place better than Hawaii anyway). Obama has been socialized into many cultures - American, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Harvard Law, Black Chicagoan, lefty unionist, and elected officialdom, among others. And he has learned from each of these, learned to speak the language of each of these cultures, to see the world through the eyes of the Law Partner as well as the laid-off machinist, the single mom (like his own) and the soccer mom, the Black teen in the hood and the new immigrant and the Ivy Leaguer and the minor official, to sympathize and dream with each, and in so doing to demonstrate the shared experiences and needs that connect those of us who would otherwise feel divided, in so doing to replace enmity with compassion.

This we know. And those of us whose hearts are not too hardened by rejection, or corroded by media-fuelled cynicism, or poisoned by bigotry, welcome his willingness to dream, and to lead.

There are those who claim that he does not lead, that his words are empty rhetoric. Yet his words are truly the essence of his capacity to lead. His ability to speak truth to power, to listen to a multitude of voices and to distill their sighs and cries into his own, is the most powerful form of leadership that can be. Speaking as Obama does is leading by example.

In their collective blindness mainstream media suppose that leadership consists of something other than speaking and listening effectively and decisively. That it consists of something other than taking public responsibility for oneself and for others. That it consists of everything except this. But they are wrong. Everything follows from the stories we tell ourselves. Everything follows communication.

It was the power of communication (in this case the widely promoted lies about weapons of mass destruction) that got us into the the war in Iraq in the first place. Bush’s power was not divorced from the dishonesty that ruled in the mainstream media during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. His actual power was his ability to create that climate of dishonest communication. Just as it was the power to influence communications in America that resulted in the popular support for the pre-war policy of depriving Iraq of medicine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

This is why Obama’s willingness to return the power of public speech to the citizens of America and the citizens of the world is so important, so transformative, and so powerful. “But,” some will say, “he is the one doing the talking, he is not returning anything to anybody. It is all about him.”

But here too they would be wrong. When, in his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It is about you” he was not just spouting a clever turn-of-phrase. He was using some of that African knowledge that has shaped him. And what is the essence of that African knowledge? It is the knowledge that the individual who gets on stage to speak, to preach, to blow, is not there to speak to people but to be spoken through. That contrary to popular belief, call-and-response is not about the preacher calling and the congregation responding. It is about the congregation calling and the preacher responding. And what the community is calling for is healing. The true leader has an ego strong enough to carry and transmute that burden of need into a song of purpose and possibility, but humble enough to be responsive to the merest suggestion of need, and thus to be directed by the needs of the community that has called him/her into being. That is the power of the bluesman, of the jazz artist, and even some rappers, though sadly few MCs have the humility to heed the call.

So Barack Obama’s words are not ‘just words’. They are leadership incarnate. It is his ability to unite people through his words that will bring him to power. And it is that same ability that will yield tangible results once he is elected. Will they be the results he has promised? Perhaps not. He is admittedly setting the bar extremely high. And yet George Bush has set the bar so very low that we have nowhere to go but up.

Barack Obama is aiming for the stars because America desperately needs him to.

oh man

things are getting very, very interesting
out there and in here alike

in here 76design is preparing a massive music biz strike
but more of that in a moment…

meanwhile, out there…

• out there we have the RIAA finally winning its first lawsuit against a music fan - a single mom who may now be fined over $200k for having a small collection of downloaded mp3s on her computer!
• out there we have Prince giving away millions (yes millions!) of free copies of his latest CD as newspaper inserts
• out there we now have Radiohead pushing the envelope by treating its new recordings as shareware, allowing users to download mp3s at will and to pay as much as they choose for them, from zilch to whatever
• and out there we have this awesome blog post by Bob Lefsetz, music industry veteran and renowned music biz analyst, in which Bob calls it like it is, pointing to the desperate need for a new business model in the music industry, and ripping the pathetic failure of the mainstream music biz to develop one.

At one point Bob rants:

“The public is no longer unsophisticated. One reason fans are paying Radiohead is because the money is going directly to the band. If they buy the major label product, they believe the money goes to the man, who is SUING THEM!

The fan has no interest in the label’s business model. The fan is just that, SOMEONE DEDICATED TO A BAND’S MUSIC!

How do you get someone dedicated?”

And this - dear readers - is where the rubber hits the road. Very soon now, by the end of this year at the very latest, 76design will unveil a revolutionary music industry platform that specifically addresses these fundamental questions and issues. Bob Lefsetz gets it. He understands exactly where we’re at and why. Bob is asking the right questions at the right time. We at 76design are about to answer them.

Sounds like a lot of hype, right? Well it’s not. Our platform offers fans and bands a simple, efficient and revolutionary new way to manage a mutually satisfying musical economy. It’s so simple and obvious that when we launch people will be kicking themselves and asking why nobody else did this before. Because it is a win-win situation for everyone. Everyone except the labels.

Our secret project is in full production but it is still under wraps. I can’t wait til we get to show you what we’re cooking up. It’s really going to shake things up. In a couple months Bob Lefsetz will have something very new and very exciting to write about.
js

I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red.
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

This may be the first time anyone has ever tried to link two such disparate practices as jazz and Public Relations, but bear with me a bit and I think you’ll see that the comparison is useful and revealing.

The first principle of jazz is: “mean what you say”. If you cannot commit yourself completely to a musical statement, if you cannot breathe yourself fully into your sound, your solo, your story - then you will fail as a jazz musician. You have to believe in yourself before others can believe in you.

Now this principle runs directly counter to the popular notion of the public relations practitioner as a ’spin doctor’, i.e. as a shill, a sophist whose duplicitousness is a given and whose silvery speech and sly strategies are sold to the highest bidder without ethical consideration.

I’m not going to argue that such spin doctors aren’t real. Obviously they are, and I despise them as much as any citizen should. But I will argue that there is another model, an emerging model, for public relations practice, that is aligned more closely to the core principle of jazz expression: “mean what you say”. I will even go so far as to argue that in the era of instant access to all information, this emerging model should be considered a ‘best practice’ in the PR industry.
The model I’m referring to is one based on the understanding that stories define a business organization. The stories that are told by employees to each other about their company, that are told by customers to each other, told by management to staff, told by marketers to the public, told by executives at conferences, told by the media - a company’s reputation, its business objectives, its brand, its products and services, its recruiting and much much more, are all deeply bound up in this matrix of living stories that are told by and about a company. Someone needs to be thinking about those stories - as coherent meaningful forces and not as shallow fragments to be manipulated - within an organization, or else this vital factor shaping the success or failure of a business burns like a wild fire out of its control.

In other words, every organization needs a Chief Storytelling Officer who considers how stories work their way through an organization’s ecosystem (internal and external, top to bottom) and ensures that their impact is as positive as possible. And in this age of unprecedented transparency and global communication that means ‘not bullshitting’, i.e. not relying on spin, not trying to fool people with phony promises or silly distractions or lame excuses. Because people see through that today. As a professional culture, employees today are too empowered as communicators (with our blogs, emails, TVs, phones, etc.) and too media savvy to be easily taken in by old-style PR. Unless you ‘mean what you say’ your stories will be dismissed as bumpf and your business will suffer on many levels.

People want to be given the straight goods. And they know when they aren’t. And increasingly, they aren’t taking it any more. They are talking back, through the countless channels available to them. And any business that thinks those conversations don’t matter is just plain dumb. And as more and more young workers who have grown up expressing themselves and sharing information without restrictions enter the workforce, expectations of transparency will only increase.

Because the No Logo folks have it wrong. Kids by and large aren’t against branding, against logos for life. They just want to know that the brand is honest, that it is what it claims to be in its marketing. And they won’t give their allegiance to brands that can’t walk the talk. Nor to employers. “You must mean what you say,” is pretty much their motto. And it’s not a bad one either.
So what I’m suggesting is that the emerging role for public relations is that of an individudal or profession charged with managing the stories that shape an organization, and ensuring that they accurately reflect the life and purpose of the business. Which means that to some extent this person becomes, rather than a dishonest spin doctor, an ethical watchdog (to borrow a phrase from my colleague Stephen Heckbert) who actually works to see that the stories that are peddled (i.e. we are a customer-centric innovative and creative company) are not bogus pap but are actually standards to which an organization can and must aspire. And in so doing he (or, of course she) gives those stories legitimacy, the company ‘means what it says’ and as a result wins on numerous fronts. (Hey, we really are customer-centric and innovative now!).

So once again, jazz comes to the rescue, offering a model for progressive and profitable business practices. Once again, The Talking Shop explains how to make meaning, make media and make money. See ya next time!

I spent much of my life immersed in jazz. Playing it, studying it, living it. Eventually my explorations in jazz led me into deep studies of the nature of communication itself. But my jazz roots still inform everything I do today. In particular, my approach to social media is profoundly influenced by lessons I learned about public communal expression from jazz musicians. A while back I inventoried those lessons and realized just how relevant they were in a business context. So with this post I’m beginning a series of posts called Talking Jazz in order to share some of those lessons.

Luckily, in talking about jazz these days, we have an extraordinary new tool available to us: YouTube. Yes, for jazz lovers YouTube is a godsend. In fact I’ve found jazz videos on YouTube that I couldn’t find in the National Library of Congress in Washington! So as a starting point for talking about jazz and social media I encourage you to check out this extaordinary archival video featuring Billie Holiday alongside many of the greatest legends in jazz.

This video was made in 1957, just a short time before Billie Holiday died of a heroin overdose in a New York hospital while under house arrest. Among the giants performing in it are some of the greatest sax players ever, including Ben Webster (Big Ben, the first sax player to solo) and Billie’s all-time musical soulmate, the exceptionally fine and mellow Lester Young (The Prez, who blows second). Sitting in front of the drummer is a guitarist named Danny Barker, with whom I once had the good fortune to spend an afternoon drinking lemonade at his home in New Orleans. Other players include a very young and skinny Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Roy Eldridge (Little Jazz) on trumpet, and Vic Dickenson on trombone.

The point of recommending this video, apart from sharing its beauty, is to encourage viewers to pay close attention to how this group of individuals manages the group conversation that is this song. Unlike written music, this song is completely improvised around a very loose blues structure, and yet without any apparent effort, the players know exactly how and when to make their entirely individualistic musical statements so as to support the coherence of the group. They speak in their own voices, utterly unadulterated, and yet they also mesh seamlessly with each other to form a larger whole of singular power.

What does this have to do with Social Media? Well, imagine if corporate bloggers used the same conversational approach as these musicians. What if they were able to express themselves as individuals but in doing so kept in mind the business objectives of the organization for which they work? What if a community of speakers could manage their interactions this seamlessly and supportively? Exactly!
These jazz musicians know when to support the group by playing and by not playing. When to solo and when to lay out. When to be part of the backup chorus and when to unleash a wild riff that propels the entire group forward. Above all they know how to make room for each other without feeling threatened. They know this because they understand how to converse responsibly. They listen, assess the need for sound, and supply a solution that in turn provides yet another opening, for a conversational response.
In fact, jazz is nothing but an endless series of networked conversations creating ephemeral public communities, (sound familiar?) In future Talking Jazz posts I’ll go into more detail about the structure of those jazz discussions and communities, and how they might be profitably adapted to the networked sphere. But in the meantime, stay cool, cool cat!

Now that I’ve had a chance to get a few initial posts up on this blog it’s time to get down to business. I want to start by stripping the web down to its most essential level so that we can all see what is really going on , and why. Here is a an extremely simple idea that should be the basis for every single web-based application, campaign or website, but that seems very difficult for many people to grasp, and even more so to apply. The most fundamental principle of the Internet is:

What Works is Enabling Exchange

What this means is that successful web applications are almost always about helping people connect to one another. They enable exchange. After all, that is the end and purpose of networks. They are for sharing and connecting. And there are a zillion examples of this. Off the top of my head I can think of

• email
• hyperlinks
• web browsers
• search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc.)
• chat apps like MSN Messenger
• message boards/forums
• listservs
• World of Warcraft
• Runescape
• Skype
• YouTube
• MySpace
• Flickr
• del.icio.us
• eBay
• Napster
• Torrents
• Blogs

And the list goes on and on…In other words, most of the basic elements of the Internet as we know it today are tools that were developed to enable people to connect and exchange information.

Seems obvious, right? Well, it is and it isn’t. What’s obvious to most people is that if they invent the next YouTube they have a chance to become billionaires. But for the average CEO whose business is selling stuff - real stuff, not virtual stuff - it is less obvious just how to make use of this principle to increase sales and generate profits.

Well, here’s the answer:

1) identify communities that you engage with (supplier communities, client communities, geographic communities, demographic communities, etc.)

2) build and lightly brand a user-friendly online website themed around your industry that enable members of one or more of your communities to easily connect and exchange information and stories using words, pictures, audio and even video

3) actively promote your site among your target communities in the physical world to build critical mass and to offer people as much as possible a living human bridge to your online space

That’s it. That is the key to successful online marketing. Or at least one way to achieve it. It’s simple. And it’s real. And it works.

For example, if you build sailboats, develop a website that lets people who love sailing exchange sailing pictures, swap information about pleasant harbours and scary shoals, find crew members and learn about boatbuilding. Promote your site at boat shows and major marinas by setting up a video kiosk and asking people “What is the most beautiful (or strangest) thing you’ve ever seen from your deck?” Post their videos on the site and get them to spread the word virally to their friends via email. Invite comments and other stories. Then sit back and watch as your brand becomes more and important, meaningful and far-reaching at very little cost. Watch customers and potential customers become members of your community. And the same applies whether you make boats, clothes (just check out the extraordinary success of www.threadless.com) or anything else that some people somewhere care about.

Of course, you do have to get the design of your online community right. Fortunately that’s where we come in. Drop me a line if you want to make it happen. sobol@76design.com

Steve sent around an interesting link the other day:

http://www.37signals.com/papers/introtopatterns/index.html

It’s an article that seeks to apply to web design the notion of A Pattern Language that was famously and wondrously developed by Christopher Alexander several decades ago in a book of the same name. Alexander’s book (the second of a trilogy actually) was about architecture, but his unique approach to thinking about how we create and use space has spawned a kind of minor cult, of which I’d say I’m a fringe member. Which is only to say that when I first came across Alexander’s book many years ago I was deeply affected by his approach to structuring knowledge via patterns, and it has remained an inspiration ever since, though somehow I keep giving away the copies I obtain and never have one of my own (sigh).

Alexander’s ‘pattern languages’ are sort of worlds within worlds, a way of expressing networked relations between objects so that when you think one you necessarily engage the others. In many ways his book entirely accidentally foresaw the basic structure of the hypertextual web, and has proven useful in devising and managing database taxonomies too (just learned this through a quick google search…google is all about pattern languages too I suppose). When I look at this very blog with its categories and trackbacks and various hierarchies, it too is a kind of pattern language.

Here is a link to a site that offers a surf-able (tho stripped down) version of his book:

http://downlode.org/etext/patterns/

One of the things that the 37signals essay picks up on is what I’d call the ’scribble’ effect that Alexander used, or what maybe is sometimes called back-of-a-napkin thinking. It’s a quick and dirty but amazingly effective way of conveying information and organizing thoughts. Of course it has become a bit trendy too, not always in a good way. I remember seeing the napkin on which Daniel Liebeskind submitted his $170-million design for the Royal Ontario Museum redesign, which he won. but it seems that in Liebeskind’s case his quick-and-dirty approach was really something of a masquerade for a lack of insight and research because the project’s way over budget and has gone back to the drawing board numerous times.

Anyway, I think Alexander’s pattern languages are as useful now as they were when he created them, if not more so. The book is an extraordinary resource for thinking about networks and knowledge and design. Not to mention building a house!

Orality means speech culture, talking culture, the condition of living in an oral culture. You’ll find me referring to orality a lot in this blog because I think that we can learn a great deal about the ‘conversational’ nature of social media and Web 2.0 by studying the conversational dynamics of oral cultures. If we do this we discover important truths about what kinds of conversations work online and why, but more significantly still, we learn about how and why we are beginning to reorganize our world in response to those new and profoundly subversive conversational dynamics.It’s my very definite contention that certain technologies are so potent as organizing tools that we rearrange our societies, our economies, our landscapes - our civilizations - in order to maximize our ability to use these technologies to increase productivity (and ultimately survival) on a personal and collective level. I’m not saying that any one person designs a plan and the rest of society implements it, but rather that we rearrange ourselves the same way ants do if someone knocks over their anthill. It’s in our nature as animals to strive to build bigger, better civilizations, bigger, better anthills. That’s what evolution is all about.

Cars are a perfect example of a technology that when it emerged it was so potent that we reorganized our cities, our economies, our landscapes, our nations, our families, in response to its extraordinary transportational abilities. Of course car pollution may kill us in the end, but that’s a rational perspective that has had a tough time gaining traction in the face of evolutionary imperatives that impel us towards ease and efficiency.

Either way, no technology is as potent as storytelling. It’s how every species survives - by trading information about risk and reward. Storytelling is the killer app of evolution. Without stories, nothing survives. Not bacteria. Not bees. Not us. And as humans our #1 storytelling tool is language.

The thing that we sometimes forget, however, is that human language is not abstract. It can only be manifested as a specific communications technology, such as the human voice. Or in print. Or as hypertext. And my analysis of the structure and purpose of Web 2.0 technologies is based on the principle that each of these three language technologies invites its users to reorganize their worlds differently. The language of the body, the language of the book and the language of binary data are very, very different beasts. In future posts I will go into plenty of detail about how they are different (or in some cases similar) and why it is so urgent for designers, businesspeople, activists and others to grasp their interrelatedness in the 21st century. It’s a long story that I hope will interest you (if it does read further into this blog) but I want to conclude this first post on my this crucial topic by articulating how each of these three communication technologies (oral, literate and digital language) differs with respect to ‘conversations’ at the most fundamental level.

If we understand that speech is not a given but a technology, then it follows that like all technologies it only works under certain conditions. When does human speech work? When more than one person is present in the same place at the same time. If those conditions aren’t met you can’t have a conversation, the technology fails. If I’m sitting on a bench and tell you something, but you aren’t actually there, then you can’t just show up later and expect the technology off speech to work. It won’t. Sound is evanescent, it doesn’t last. What this means is that speech is inherently ‘dialogical’, but its dialogues are bound by time and space.

Writing on the other hand transcends time and space. You can write something and send it across the world by post or in a book. And you can read what people wrote thousands of years ago. That’s a big difference. Writing is waaaaaaay more efficient as a tool for social organization than speech. And that’s why historically, wherever they met, literate cultures massacred and overwhelmed oral cultures (tanks trumped horses, pipelines whipped calabashes, etc.). But unlike orality, literacy is not dialogical. In fact when you are reading or writing you want privacy and isolation above all. So literacy is a monological technology (a series of monologues) that transcends time and space. And as the most literate society in history it should not therefore be surprising that we are also the most individualistic society in history.

Finally, let’s look at why networked digital communication is so threatening to literate society. Like literacy, online language transcends time and space, but like orality it is also dialogical. This makes it vastly more efficient than literacy as an organizing tool, and we are beginning to rearrange our society accordingly.

To sum up then:

orality = dialogues bound by time and space
literacy = monologues that transcend time and space
digital culture = dialogues that transend time and space

This simple equation should also make clear why I think that there is so much to learn about digital conversations from oral conversations - they are both diaological! And therefore the social, economic and community dynamics of each are in many ways proving to be very similar. In future posts I’ll give many, many concrete examples of those similarities and I’ll invite you to seek out and document your own as well. It’s the clearest way to grasp the nature of Web 2.0.

Til next time…