Leweb 2009 – Gurus and illustrious speakers

Publié le 15 décembre 2009 et mis à jour le 2 mai 2010 - Un commentaire -

Let’s talk a bit about these “TED moments” from Leweb, when spea­kers really shake the audience and create a strong emo­tio­nal connec­tion. In most cases, it was with sub­stance. There were at least 4 to 5 such occa­sions at this year’s Leweb.

It’s always ama­zing to watch the dif­fe­rences of com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles bet­ween spea­kers. Cor­po­rate spea­kers tend to care about every word they say, keep a stable voice, and they avoid to hurt any­body as if their legal depart­ment was hiding behind the black stage cur­tain. Some were even rea­ding their speeches, huh oh. On the contrary, good spea­kers move, shake hands, speak loud, use com­mon sense, and they make a hit. Could you have both? I wish Cor­po­ra­tion could. In the long run, they’ll have to. Other­wise, fire­side chats with Loic were fine.

So, let’s look at the main ses­sion spea­kers in a decrea­sing impact order:

• Gary Vay­ner­chuk, wri­ter of the book “Cru­shIT”, brand consul­tant and crea­tor of a $70m wine busi­ness, did deli­ver the most ama­zing per­for­mance. You got to see this, and it’s bad luck that such video doesn’t run in slow motion. He basi­cally explains in plain words how word of mouth replaces tra­di­tio­nal mar­ke­ting and how com­pa­nies should care about users. He also explains how he spends a lot of time lear­ning on what people write about him. That he ans­wers all mes­sages he receives and that cor­po­ra­tions should do the same. At the end, he won­ders why there’s no Q&A in Leweb ses­sion? Actually, Gary was already at Leweb 2008, but I didn’t see him.

• Vio­let Blue did a speech on the future of sex. It was a strange one, deli­ve­red in a low key tone, but quite inter­es­ting. It’s kind of a follow-up to last year’s talk on the bio­logy of love. I won­de­red whe­ther she was in a need for this future of vir­tual sex and sex with robots. Or just des­cri­bing it as an obser­ver. Looks like she’s connec­ted to sex liber­ta­rians from the San Fran­cisco area. All this and “ins­tan­ta­neous on demand orgasm” relate somew­hat to the “real time web”. Her talk shows a clear split bet­ween sex and love. She didn’t men­tion “love” once in her talk. Look at her own feed­back on the reac­tions she got after her talk.

• Chris Pirillo, foun­der of blog aggre­ga­tion site Locker­gnome, did a good pre­sen­ta­tion on com­mu­ni­ties. The most inter­es­ting mes­sage is that com­mu­ni­ties can’t be built arti­fi­cially by cor­po­ra­tions. “They’ve got to come from people on their own. Consu­mers belong to seve­ral circles of com­mu­ni­ties. Com­mu­nity just hap­pens, no mat­ter the tool. It’s about the culture. You may not like Apple as a com­pany but like the culture of the iPhone. Apple being out of Mac­World doesn’t mat­ter much. You just need to inter­act with other Mac users. It’s all about the culture that sur­rounds the pro­ducts. Com­pa­nies shouldn’t try to control reac­tions on their pro­ducts. Control is bull­shit”. That speech should be watch by all Cor­po­rate mar­ke­ting and com­mu­ni­ca­tions mana­gers who want to unders­tand how to get invol­ved with communities.

• Chris­to­pher Sacca, foun­der of Lower­case explains that dou­che­bags will disap­pear and that the world and the web will become bet­ter. Quite opti­mis­tic. He also des­cribe the mass amount of avai­lable data on the web as a form of “porn”. “Data is porn. We have more data than ever”.

• Queen Rania did a good 14 mn speech on how social net­works can change the world. She’s pro­ba­bly the only Queen in town using Twit­ter (@QueenRania) and broad­cas­ting about what she’s doing and her invol­ve­ment in NGOs. Some sni­pets of her speech: “Deve­lo­pers and blog­gers are … a new field of digi­tal anthro­po­logy”, “Online acti­vism can change the offline world”, think about “How the death of Michael Jack­son chan­ged the course of the green revo­lu­tion in Iran” (with redu­cing its impact). “Social net­work could solve social pro­blems”. “Real-time is the new prime-time”. She cares about the kids who are out of schools, par­ti­cu­larly lit­tle girls and wants to drive good qua­lity edu­ca­tion to increase ave­rage income. At the begin­ning of her speech, she asked for her writ­ten notes to Loic but was never loo­king as she used two tele­promp­ters. After her speech, she had lunch with the top web guys like Jack Dor­sey from Twit­ter and also Julien Codor­niou from Micro­soft. Oh, and you guess, how beau­ti­ful she is. A hea­ven for a pho­to­gra­pher as exem­pli­fied below!

• Fabrice Grinda sur­pri­sed me. The guy, native from Nice, France, now speaks a per­fect English. He foun­ded the auc­tion site Aucland in France in 1999 and sold it to QLX in 2002 and left France. He’s now the co-CEO of OLX an online locals com­pany esta­bli­shed in many coun­tries out­side the US. It a suc­cess­ful “rest of the world Crai­glist” with $1m a month in Google Ads. He inves­ted in 30 com­pa­nies. His sites gene­rate 100 mil­lion uv/month and are big in Latam and South East Asia.

• Yossi Vardi is now a regu­lar spea­ker at Leweb. He’s using sar­casm, ana­lo­gies, absur­di­ties, humor and a wealth of You­Tube videos and Fli­ckr pic­tures to make his points. Just watch it on your own and have fun, although it was not rela­ted to the “real time web”.

• Natha­lie Kos­ciusko Mori­zet, France Minis­ter of State res­pon­sible of For­ward Plan­ning and of the Digi­tal Eco­nomy did talk in English after war­ning she may not be able to do it. She went through all the stuff the French govern­ment does with the Inter­net. The part of the eco­nomy reco­very plan inves­ted in web 2.0 and serious gaming inno­va­tions. The “invest­ment loan for the future” that includes 4,5 bil­lion Euros for the digi­tal eco­nomy (2 for broad­band access in all unde­re­quip­ped parts of France and for FTTH and the rest for new appli­ca­tions, RFPs, and subsidies/loans for inno­va­tive com­pa­nies). Her main point: “I’ feel I’m more the Minis­ter of Digi­tal Society” (than digi­tal economy).

• Timo­thy Fer­riss, author of “The 4 Hour Work­week” explains how to create a book phe­no­me­non for less than $10K. 200K books are publi­shed every year in the USA. Only a few suc­ceed and for a short per­iod of time due to the length of their TV ads cam­paign. He inves­ted on Google ads, rea­ched out blogs rela­ted to his prio­rity cus­to­mer seg­ments. Data is king and he uses a lot Google Ana­ly­tics to opti­mize his mar­ke­ting and blog post­ing times. This is a lot of good basics but worth lis­te­ning for any Cor­po­rate mar­ke­ting per­son. And a motto taken from War­ren Buf­fet: “Think about it when you are in the side of the majo­rity”. Real time web? Not really.

• At last, Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, acqui­red for $1.2B by Ama­zon tal­ked about com­mu­nity and culture. Befo­re­hand, he crea­ted Lin­kEx­change and sold it to Micro­soft. His com­pany phi­lo­so­phy is to invest all his mar­ke­ting money on cus­to­mer ser­vice and drive good word of mouth. Watch it.

There were other good spea­kers but not as memorable.

Other­wise, Leweb hos­ted many round­table panel dis­cus­sions. I don’t like it usually and I didn’t like it either here. In the last two ones (Euro­pean Gang and Gil­more Gang), with about the same folks as last year, we heard again and again about the dif­fe­rences bet­ween Europe and the USA. Nothing really new nor lin­ked to the real time web. So I’ll skip it in this report.

Publié le 15 décembre 2009 Post de Olivier Ezratty | Internet, Post in English, Startups, Traveling Geeks | Un commentaire