Cannes Lions: Talkin' the Twitter Biz-nass

Biz Stone's Twitter talk this afternoon was met with a full auditorium, people clamoring for places to park cameras and laptops so they could livetweet questions in real time.

Kind of a neat format. Stone addressed questions as they appeared under hashtag #hkcannes, the results of which were projected onto a screen. Two problems with this method:

1) Wifi outside the press room isn't accessible for free, meaning those that livetweeted from inside the room were either paying for use or mobiling it up. Questions were never taken directly from audience members, raising their hands, for example.

2) Questions were still for the most part selected by a Hill & Knowlton rep. I'm pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi had a less formidable filtering system.

Stone talked a bit about Twitter's birth, which I'm sure will become the stuff of online legend, so I don't really need to go into it. (Hey look, here it is.) One point of interest: his partner, Jack Dorsey, conceived the idea out of a fascination with AIM status updates.

Then he told a bunch of heartrending stories about how the real-time updating system got journos out of jail in foreign countries, kept people abreast of earthquakes and wildfire locations, gave hipsters a way to convey to each other which SXSW sessions suck, etc.

The hivemind behaviour born out of these instances of Twitter adoption yields zen inspiration to Stone: he likens it to watching birds fly in formation, using instincts to drive activity that seems perfectly coordinated.

Talk was also peppered with proverbs, which appeared above us like pop philosophy at a new age seminar. My favourite is "creativity is a renewable resource" -- something that came to Stone when he was asked, once, to come up with a five-word speech.






Here are a couple of videos of the QA portion, focusing on how Twitter expects to demonstrate its long-term viability by developing a business model.

On that little "definitions" section in right-hand Twitter nav:



On monetizing Twitter:



Nothing you probably haven't already heard. Obviously there's a way to shoehorn sponsorship or premium service opportunities into a site where product/movie reviews and brand opinions are solicited and freely given as generously as on Twitter. For a meatier description on how Twitter can add an e-commerce angle to its value prop, however, check out what one of its investors recently had to say.

Why Yammer Rocks Well

One of the hazards of remote employment is the immense feeling of isolation you get after the hazy honeymoon weeks of beer, donuts and ironic pyjamas have passed. Most of my team members at Watershed Publishing are accessible all day via email, but the messages feel more like tasks than conversations. Have I said the right thing? Do I need to act on this? May I archive you now?

So, possibly because I nagged him like a teeny bopper, the Chief Operating Officer at Watershed created a Yammer account for us. (Think intra-office microblogging.) I just downloaded the desktop app, which is a lot like twhirl for Twitter -- an interface I happen to be intimately familiar with.

Yammer was quiet for the first coupla days (see image above? ALL ME! ALMOST ALL DAY!), I think because we weren't sure what to do with it or how we should present ourselves. I secretly worried we'd feel constricted by its inherent corporateness: the platform was provided by our superiors, and they'd also be using it, so would they quietly judge us if we logged in one morning and went, "Ugh. Long night"?

After a bit of feeling-out time (and a few non-work contributions by the COO himself), my reservations felt inconsequential. Yammer has the dual effect of making everyone immediately aware of tasks that need handling, and of investing us all with a sense of community. 

Oddly enough, it's also a really good way to get to know everyone you work with. Even in an office setting,  that's difficult because people like to cluster and clique. (Of the 20+ in-office employees at my old job, I got to know maybe 5 or 6 on a really personal level. And that's because we were all forced to have lunch together at one point or another.)

So yeah. Yammer: highly recommended, especially for an enterprise team that's geographically far-flung.

Business Cards, Meet Dust Bunnies. Expect to Be Friends for Awhile.

After weeks mulling it over, I wrote a how-to on using Twitter to build brand integrity. It was published on MarketingVOX today.

I was pretty skeptical of Twitter at first; to be frank, I thought it was a load of time-wasting crap. Well, it definitely contributes to my procrastination factor, but it also did something really neat: it reconciled relationships to networking. (I've complained about the contrived feel of classical networking in the past.)

For real-time relationship development, and just generally getting people to give a crap about what you have to say, few things beat Twitter. Not social networking, not blogging. (Although they help.) I actually feel like I have a social life waiting for me every time I approach the monitor.

Which in retrospect is really kind of lame.

But there are offline elements to this as well. At ad:tech SF last week, I met Twitter friends in person and made new ones, too. That, coupled with whomever added me on Facebook, means I don't even feel the inclination to dig through the fresh stack of business cards I came home with. Everybody I want to know, I'm in contact with at any given moment.

Much nicer than the unwanted cold call and awkward martini meeting that follows (if you're lucky!):



While on this big evangelistic high, I considered preaching the merits of Twitter to my parents. Then I thought against it; my relatives are sort of religious. And then I wondered what Twitter could do for religion. 

Ooh. The plot takes a sinister turn.