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Pondering Motringate, the economy, and my take on agencies playing nice

My latest on JackMyers.com.

What the Motrin Moms Campaign (and resulting MomBlogger reaction) Can Teach Us About Redemption in the Blogosphere

We Can't Fully Leverage Social Media Until Brands, Media Buyers, and PR Learn to Play in the Sandbox Together

 In This Economy, Why Invest in Social Media?

Dispatches from the Monaco Media Forum

This was my second year of klatsching with leaders in the media technology space. This event is a personal luxury, and not just because it's in Monte-Carlo, though that helps. It's also a place where I get to take two steps back and look at the emerging view of new media.

There definitely were some highlights:

--Tina Brown was interviewed by Larry Kramer about her foray into new media, The Daily Beast. This was a big deal for me because I got my career start in print and have always respected her work. Now, here she was, a newcomer in this space. She was asked if she would go back if she was offered a chi-chi print job again. She said no--online is where it's at.

I asked her about a comment she had made on the Colbert Report: something about the Web freeing her to do what she couldn't get away with in print. I thought that was a curious statement, as I've found blogging puts your writing under an even finer microscope. While more voices can be heard, more voices can be heard commenting, correcting, and taking issue with what you say.

Over breakfast with Tina and her General Manager Caroline Marks, I learned what she really meant by that. Tina loves to make changes at the last minute, and get scoops without worrying about losing them. The Web is so much more immediate. While 10,000-word pieces in The New Yorker provide depth, the Web provides immediacy and instant connection to audience. These things are just what freak out most print editors, especially ones that built their careers on print, but she embraces the user on the Web.

My favorite content: Not my session I'm afraid. We suffered from panelitis--too many panelists. By the time we got through with introducing ourselves there was scant time for questions. And I wanted to sit with all of them and talk shop. At least I got to learn about some pretty cool projects:

Amra Tareen, allvoices
Reggie Brandford, Vitrue
Hans Peter Brondmo, Plum
Johan Pouwelse, Tribler
Sadato Tanaka, Enigmo

And our moderator, John Clippinger, of the Berkman Center at Harvard

I think there was one picture taken of me--the only proof I have of attending this year

I'm fighting jet lag at this point. Thanks, eirikso, for the proof.

I took copious notes during Jeffrey Cole's State of the Mediasphere keynote. Some key takeaways:

• "Old media" doesn't disappear; it adapts. Think radio after television was invented; it created partnerships that allowed it to remain relevant. Movie studios learned to monetize in other ways when people stopped going to movie theaters. TV may be challenged with moving ad budget, but it will explode in growth as it moves content online.
• The average household spends $260 per month on services that didn't exist just a few years ago. And wealth doesn't determine usage; the poorest households still spend $180 a month.
• There are three ways to get content: 1) steal it--not viable; 2) make it fee-based, which only works for the most premium, proprietary content; and 3)advertising--now accepted as the price for free content. But if your ads don't work, the public will tell you. (My addition: so now the key is to create better ways of advertising and engagement.)

Social highlights: Wine tasting, BTYB Accel Partners, who shipped over top California wines, along with wine educators in the Napa region (They had one of my favorites, Chapellet) and dinner at the Hotel de Paris--the reason why, this year, I brought a dress. I made a major gaffe last year when I interpreted "Business Casual" to mean what it does in Palo Alto. In Monaco it means not Black Tie, but step it up, nonetheless.

The place was gawrgeous.

Photo by hebig

Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School won the Monaco Media Forum Prize, given by His Serene Highness, Prince Albert II.

Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz of VPOD TV took this shot.

I caught up with some folks I know:

• Mariana Danilovic: My Monaco buddy. A woman who epitomizes girl in tech. Likes shoes, likes geeking out on business models.
• Kevin Welsh of Antics Digital Marketing. I met him and his lovely wife last year.
• Jason Goldberg: The dynamo who brought you Jobster and is now knee-deep in his latest adventure socialmedian
• Dina Kaplan, Blip.TV COO and Co-founder. I always like seeing her!
• Auren Hoffman, Rapleaf--Since 2000 I've seen Auren just about everywhere, a side effect of working for start-ups in the Valley and at one time living blocks away from each other. He makes Monaco feel like home. Auren, gimme another study I can cite about women on the Web!
• Randall Rothenberg, Interactive Advertising Bureau. No conference that looks at the state of the digital advertising world is complete without this man. Pick. His. Brain.
• Lisa Sounio of Dopplr, along with her entrepreneur husband. Someone who will make the fun if she isn't having it. (Loved the tie!)
• Dave Sifry, Offbeat Guides: Dave talked about his latest endeavor which actually has a PRINT component. Think print on demand meets travel search. Too cool.
• Jennifer Schenker, Businessweek. We met earlier this year in Greece. I love that things are heating up in Europe.
• Spencer Reiss, Wired contributing Editor, and the guy who made the program possible. Nice work! Being a programming Chair is alot like herding cattle, isn't it?
• Alexis Maybank, Alexandra Wilson, Gilt Groupe. I met Alexandra in New York earlier this year and still insist their luxury shopping club would go over like chocolate at BlogHer. They announced their new CEO, Susan Lyne, earlier this year.
• Jamie Kantrowitz, MySpace, UK
• Esther Dyson, always challenging the status quo, and not letting the Facebook person steal the floor.
• Jack Myers: The one and only. My latest post went up while we were in Monaco.
• Nancy Cruikshank of Videojug. Always interesting to talk to her about the business of video content in the UK.

And some new people:

• Jonas Nordlund, Digital Image, SA: Superentrepreneur. He indulged me as I asked countless questions about what it's like to live in Monaco.
• Johnathan Medved, Vringo: A serendipitous connection, as we both were up at 4:30 a.m. to catch our flight from Nice. Great travel conversation about life in Jerusalem (his, not mine), families, the economy, my experience as a Shabbas Goy...
• Simon Waldman of Guardian Media Group
• Dan Scheinman and Danielle Barbieri of Cisco Media Solutions. Cool people who are local! We chatted on the way to the hotel about Cisco's blogging/enterprise publishing solution
• Larry Kramer, Polaris Ventures, (founder of MarketWatch).
• Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital: I saw RIchard when he moderated a panel with MySpace's Chris DeWolfe last year. This year we got to chat briefly.

A lot for 36 hours.

On being a girl in tech

A number of things happened this week that made me think about being one:

 

--Inclusion with Lisa and Elisa on being a top female Web 2.0 Influencer over at the Fast Company site. We join Marissa Mayer, Mena Trott, Dina Kaplan, Kaliya Hamlin, and other ladies I admire. What can I say?

Of course no list can do us all justice, so do hop over to Allyson Kapin's great list, where some other deserving women are mentioned, including Susan Mernit, Tara Hunt, and Mary Hodder.

--While traveling, I read an interesting piece in Inc. Magazine about Columbia University business professor Amar Bhidé's contrarian theories, including his lack of concern about the growing imbalance of free trade. He made an interesting point about Americans: Why should we feel threatened by global competition in tech and manufacturing when our collective talent is taking others' products and commercializing them better than anyone else? The Internet World Wide Web itself was invented by a British scientist in Switzerland; we Americans just took that ball and ran with it.

So that's what Americans do: We are wide receivers, spreaders of the word, supercommunicators. Similarly, with BlogHer, I feel the innovation behind our business is leveraging existing social media tools to allow the full effect of women's influence.

For that reason I've never considered myself a girl in tech. I've always been a girl in commmunications.

Who gives a Tweet? Mommybloggers do

My latest on JackMyers.com: an ode to Twitter and the women who use it.

The skinny--or slender--over at JackMyers.com

I'm still working out my mojo for what I want to write about at JackMyers.com. I was torn about how much I should bring up BlogHer and actual campaigns we've done. I really like the piece I've written that will go up next week, where I'm more a dispassionate observer of the Twitter obsession, but for now, here's my latest one, on body image in the women's Blogosphere.

Giants 17, GoDaddy.com 0: Commentary from a disinterested third party

Thank God for exciting fourth quarters, because this year the Super Bowl ads were a snooze. A word of advice for anyone who is contemplating spending $2.5 million on a Super Bowl ad: have a concept first. It ain't worth it if the commercial sucks.

Some had promise--you always have to give CareerBuilder a chance, but geckos performing the dance theme to Michael Jackson's "Thriller"? What was Sobe thinking? That ad left us all scratching our heads and wondering what decade we were in, and who was the model dancing with them? One vote was for Naomi Campbell, another for Rhianna.

Speaking of throwbacks from the 80s, why Tom Petty? I respect the man and his music, but, well, why? I kept wondering if there would be a special cameo or toss-in performance. Where's Timbaland when you need him? Just hearing a little verse or two of "The Way I Are" would have been enough to push the half-time show into the 21st Century.

I get it--Tom Petty won't cuss or have a wardrobe malfunction on stage, but the intro to his set with the arrow approaching and penetrating the heart struck me as 1) too literal, then 2) kinda phallic. Jordin Sparks: great voice but still thinking we're all going to hop on the phone and vote when she's done: she looked nervous before she sang the National Anthem. What's the first thing to remember in the Superstardom handbook: Fake it till you make it, baby. We can't smell you from our living rooms. Make it work.

This year the planning committee seems to have lost its sense of surprise or appropriate nostalgia. Remember Prince jamming to Purple Rain in a torrential downpour? Ca c'est perfection.

Notes from the Stream Event in Athens

So once in a while I attend an event that I can say rivals BlogHer in personality (never beats, of course, just rivals). Stream07 was a special event hosted by Martin Sorrell of WPP and tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi. When I decided to go to this event, I thought, cool, I'll get to see John Bell and Alison Byrne Fields of Ogilvy's 360 Group, go to Greece, and talk incessantly about women and blogging. What I didn't expect was that I would have one of those coming-home experiences that helped remind me why I got involved with a bunch of geeks in the first place.

Stream was not your typical prove-that-we-get-the-new-media-thing-event, but more the decent-looking love child of well-meaning, progressive marketers and devout geeks. Throw in a few European Club Med employees who ensured you were always so very happeee and it was like attending summer camp with an open bar. I had fun, I evangelized, and I learned a lot.

Yossi Vardi hosts an event like Stream in his native Israel, and he brought the quirky, holistic approach to this event. There was a gadgethon one night, which--truth be told--I wondered if anyone would participate in. Shame on me, thinking that no one would shlep gadgets with them half-way around the world. The Israelis are fairly close to Greece geographically and brought robots, instruments, and a fun sense of humor. Dan Dubno, former tech virtuoso at CBS, brought more hardware than you'd see at a Best Buy. A European's contribution of an automated, er, male sexual enhancer met with disapproval from the oddly knowledgeable digital evangelist Peter Hirshberg: "That was around, like, five years ago," he said.

This was a crowd to be reckoned with. It seemed everyone was up to something. I met an entrepreneur named Rob Stokes who moved from Cape Town to London to grow his marketing company, Quirk eMarketing, nine years ago. Caroline Slootweg, director of digital marketing for Unilever, who has worked in mulitple countries and an excitement for conversational marketing that is refreshing. A venture capitalist named William Bao Bean who left Silicon Valley in 2002 and now heads up a fund in China. A bunch of slackers, all of them.

Yossi reminded everyone to leave their business titles at the door. Of course, that's hard to do when we're all there for business, but I found it quite easy to talk shop, then make myself and Peter Friedman s'mores, negotiate having a 1 a.m. burrito from chief strategist and temporary chef Kurt David Kratchman, and dance with Mike Lundgren from VML and Michele Azar at Best Buy until 4am. These people have kids and more energy than me; I had no excuse to let them down.

I learned from Bob Gilbreath that we can market with meaning (actually I knew that already from BlogHer, but now I have a framework by which to describe what we do).

I learned that Andrew Keen isn't the devil--he just played one on The Colbert Report. His session on how Web 2.0 is destroying traditional media was interesting indeed, albeit, limited. I agree, there's shlock everywhere, but this ain't limited to social media. WE didn't start the obsession with Britney or Paris, we only got there after the fact. We don't replace, or threaten, traditional media, we hold it accountable, and we get into those hard-to-reach places where marketers are trying to have substantial conversations.

I learned from Katharina that being a woman in digital media editorial is still a rough thing. Apparently some people still have trouble accepting that women are able to do things like read, write, and innovate. Her stories of the sexual insults she received when she became the internet editor for the WAZ Mediengruppe is all-too-similar to the madness Kathy Sierra experienced earlier this year.

Most important, I learned that I can live with minimal bandwidth. Not very long, mind you, but a couple of days before I starve from Internet deprivation.

Approaching My Blogging MidLife Crisis

I spoke on Friday at an event for small business owners in Phoenix. The topic of my talk: The power of blogging for small business owners. This is a favorite topic of mine, as I've practically lived the results and seen great things happen among my peers. I have to try and control my excitement as I tell people stories of how people have gone from office job to guru consultant in 12 to 18 months. Making success sound that easy scares people; it scares me, anyway. And I don't want blogging to be perceived as the Dexatrim of marketing tools--the quick fix, no-sweat-equity solution--despite my obvious excitement. I'm not selling Amway, after all; I'm evangelizing an important shift in media.

I tend to tone it down a bit; I insist that it takes work, time, and resources to successfully leverage blogging for your business before telling my stories of people's meteoric rise--at the very least a boost in the search engines.

Note: While I don't question the permanence of blogging as a media option, I do think that there will be a shift in the attention paid to bloggers, a shakeout if you will, of those who are simply doing this for quick spurts of Google Juice and free iPods from those who have integrated blogging into their lives as a means of authentic self-expression and self-promotion.

Also Note: I couple the words "authentic" and "self-promotion"; they don't cancel each other out. People can and should make money, get press, get attention from their blogs, if they wish. You CAN be an authentic self-promoter, but currently there's little distinction made by the bulk of marketers between people who blog and people who shill. Editorial standards and personal integrity will have to prevail if we are to make the Andrew Keens of the world wrong about blogs being the death of quality media. We'll have to determine which rung of Maslow's hierarchy we're operating from, and if it's a lower one, know it, own it, and expect fewer and fewer links in coming years. At the end of the day, things level out. The cream rises. Paris goes to jail, and the inauthentic lose attention. 

What's 'The Secret?' Sure, you know it already, but watch the DVD anyway

H-band tells me he got his Subaru WRX, six years ago, through manifesting.

He explained: "I had been wanting that car, and I said, 'I will have that car.' I just wish I had been more specific about the circumstances."

Shortly thereafter he was hit by a truck while cycling. He bought a WRX with the settlement money.

This stands as H-band's proof of concept--that thinking about things, and declaring that you will have them are the first steps to getting them.

I must confess I've always been a manifester myself, though I never quite made the connection that I had created these outcomes. As a teenager I would ogle a boy and poof, I'd get a call out of the blue from him. I always assumed I would live in New York, so when the opportunity came through a friend to come live with her and work as a college intern at a New York City publishing house, I took it in stride. BlogHer has been a result of manifesting possibilities of teaming up with smart people and building a platform that bucked the standard of one-size-fits-most media. I have handwritten pages of material showing that at some point I had already imagined these things.

I've visualized throughout my life, though I never did it to get anything; I just have a VERY vivid imagination, and imagining these outcomes felt good. What scares me is when I stop visualizing, when my life becomes too complicated that the natural manifesting mechanism shuts off. When I become stressed to a point where negative energy fills my brain, and I can't focus on the positive.

My friend and coach Elisabeth suggested that I watch The Secret as a way of getting me back in touch with my positive imagery, to get me clear again on the importance of positive thinking to realizing outcomes.

I asked H-band to watch it with me, knowing that he has always been a proponent of manifesting, but that he also qualifies his desires by what makes sense, how much we currently have in our bank account, the number of hours in a day. Basically he and I have become entirely too reasonable.

Still Alive! Just back from BlogHer Business

Just got back from the marathon business trip that culminated in an absolutely awesome inaugural BlogHer Business Conference. I didn't know what to expect. Of course, we would have awesome speakers, but would we still be able to pull off the energy that is normally experienced at the summer BlogHer Conference (which I've dubbed, BlogHer Blowout)?

There's something about getting a bunch of women bloggers together, whether they are Mommy bloggers, business bloggers, or, as I learned, companies seeking to learn more about social media. Every woman (and man) that I met at BlogHer Business oozed curiosity. There was a generosity of spirit--attendees who offered up their best practices--and humility. Veterans mixed it up with the newbies. Publishers chit-chatted with consultants. The business bloggers ate Twizzlers with the agency execs. Media behemoths pow-wowed with tech giants. And there were shoulder rubs to boot. One big business love-in, without singing Kumbaya.

THIS is why I do this.

BlogHer Business conferences