You're In The Publishing Business...

I ran across this hallway interview from 2010, when I had the chance to keynote one of the earliest conferences on social media - the Social Media Conference NW.  (We "got it" early - the first one was in 2009.)

On a quick re-watch - yeah, what was true then is true now.

You're in the publishing business, whatever business you're in.  Content is the currency of relationship-building and a web site alone isn't enough.

If you don't understand the question about "weak links" - the math area called 'network theory', which is critical to the social-media system (and many others.)  I read this book years ago - there are quite a few more now, but it's a good one if you're interested.

In that speech, I "published" a new video with the audience's help.  The video was already done, but we made it public and had the audience post/tweet about it during the keynote.  Then we watched the network traffic (geographic) in real-time.  Remember that this was 2010 - smartphones weren't ubiquitous, more than half of the folks posting were using notebooks!  Great fun.

This is the video we published at the time:

On the whole, I think it's still a pretty good conceptual framework for social media (in less than 4 minutes!).  I think the style undercuts the subject a bit. That was a deliberate experiment - you learn from those and move on, right?

--md