Russell Davies
Posted by Roo - 23/02/07 at 10:02:19 pmI recently had the wonderful experience of watching Russell Davies present on “blogs, wikis, RSS and podcasting”. I get the feeling it wasn’t a title he chose, because his first comment was to point out that presenting on those technologies was like presenting on steering wheels, seats and tyres. He wanted to talk about the car. And he did. Russell is quite the most powerful and engaging speaker on what’s going on in internetland (while managing to never once use the phrase “Web 2.0″) I have ever heard.
My Moleskine came out immediately, and I didn’t stop writing for the whole of his talk. Here are my the condensed notes. He said…
- Imagine trying to describe TV to someone who had never seen it
- I’m not evangelical. If you don’t like it, I don’t care.
- A new generation thinks paying for music is just odd
- The interestingness test: 1.) what’s interesting about your business? 2.) blog about that. 3.) if nothing, you’re screwed anyway
- Not having a blog is like not having a phone. It’s not bad, it’s just.. eccentric.
- Surrender control to win influence
- If you can’t be interesting, be useful
- Parable of a ceramics teacher: He splits his class in half, saying he will grade half on quantity (as many vases as you can make) and the other half on quality (one amazing vase). Guess which half created the best vases at the end of the year? The ones that had been doing it all year, improving their process. Get started.
- “Brand gardening” (ongoing interaction, rather than a one-off launch. Reminded me of tag-gardening)
- Relax
Throughout all of this he interspersed great examples:
- A Comcast Technician Sleeping on my Couch (and they had no idea how to react)
- Starbucks Gossip
- Innocent blog ($30 p/a. Big reach)
- McChronicles. (McReg’s first instinct: sue.)
- PenguinWiki – a million penguins (collaborative book authoring project)
- beautiful and/or sad (example of letting go on his own blog)
- Kuler (I asked if the swatches shared there are licensed, or belong to Adobe. Not because I’m a legal git but because I wanted the answer to be that the submitters agree to a CC license or something)
- Flickr camera browser
- zefrank 7-11-06 “washington, ideas, brain crack”
- Darth Vader being a smartass (”your consumers are funnier than you”)
- Flickr: our tubes are clogged colouring competition
- Nike football tricks video: the chain
And finally, he offered some advice to brand owners:
- If you’re reading feeds, use a feed reader such as Bloglines
- Search Flickr and YouTube for your brand. Find the best content. Email those people. Give them samples, and be nice to them.
- When searching for yourself, don’t just use Google. Use Technorati.
Unfortunately, when I congratulated Russell on his presentation afterwards, I think I made an arse of myself. Note to self: never again should you start a conversation with a famous blogger using the words “I must confess, I don’t read your blog”. Idiot. At least I was able to exchange Moo cards, but I couldn’t help spent most of the journey home thinking of a better opening line.
In summary, a great presentation from a nice chap with a great style. Russell sounds a bit like Dave Gorman, which is always a plus too. On reading his blog it looks like an updated and overhauled version of his ‘interesting things that are going on’ presentation which he mentioned at the end of last year. I’m finally a subscriber.
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Blimey, that’s very kind. Very decent of you. Hope your session went well. And please don’t think you were an arse. Not at all. It was very nice to find someone sympathetic in the room. I bet we were the only people swapping moo cards. Good point on the Kuler thing. I don’t know about that, but it’s a good idea.
cheers
Comment by russell — February 23, 2007 #
Thanks Russell. My session went went ok (though very rushed, as all you other sods before me ended up over-running between you by over an hour).
Dead on with the Moo cards. Big room full of nice suits. I was dressed my smartest for some reason, but as soon as I saw you realised I’d jumped the wrong way. The day before someone had congratulated me on being “an IBM man in a Creative Commons tshirt”. A better look for me, clearly.
We should talk about virtual worlds some time. I’m convinced there’s something powerful and useful there, despite the hype and the band wagon no longer being at the depot.
Comment by Roo — February 24, 2007 #
Well ” the Agency” are still resisting Moo cards…but I’ll swap on the 8th, Roo!
Dress code on the 8th… Joi Ito For President T shirt or whatever…
thanks again to both of you…you both inspired.
Cheers
Mark
Comment by Mark — February 27, 2007 #
Hey Mark. Thanks. Am looking forward to it.
Comment by Roo — February 27, 2007 #
[...] Sam Sethi was unfortunately stuck in Canada (”Canada Water?” “No, Vancouver”), so we hung around and continued the virtual worlds conversations during his slot, before Tom Bazeley (rhymes with Paisley) of Lean Mean Fighting Machine. He changed his title from “How can we cut through the media clutter to engage with customers?”, taking issue with both ‘media clutter’ and ‘engage’, so it became “How to do interesting things for people who are all over the place doing lots of different stuff”, which I liked very much. Those are probably paraphrases of the real titles, because I failed to write them down. Anyone get them? The thing I did write down was “you only really engage with something after you’ve bought it”. I loved his no-nonsense approach. The fact he was sat down drinking Guinness helped reinforce that too. Tom has a lot in common with Russell Davies, who I also had the chance to see present recently. I wonder if they’re already great mates. They should be. [...]
Pingback by Roo Reynolds - What’s Next? » Blog Archive » Under the Influence — April 13, 2007 #
[...] When I say (of the web or, re-using it for my own ends, virtual worlds) “Imaging trying to describe TV to someone who has never seen it”, I’m consciously quoting Russell, whether I remember to say so or not. I was so struck by the first time I saw him present that I created quite a long post about the experience, which I’m pleased to see includes that sentence in its many bullet points. Had I not been away, I would have paid good money (the amount the organisers were asking, even) to see him use the Ze Frank brain crack clip he always uses when he presented at Wildfire alongside Ze. [Photo by, um, me] [...]
Pingback by Roo Reynolds - What’s Next? » Blog Archive » Attribution and Assimilation — July 12, 2007 #
[...] you may want to subscribe to my site using a feedreader or email. Thanks for visiting – Damien.Via Roo Reynolds was a talk by the amazingly interesting and wizard of interestingness – Russell Davies and one of [...]
Pingback by Damien Mulley » Blog Archive » If you can’t be interesting, be useful — September 21, 2008 #
[...] Russell Davies well worth a read to give Roo’s take on Russell’s ideas [...]
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