There's a New Conversation

Schedule for Thursday

There's a New Conversation

revised schedule:

8.00AM - Registration set-up (DC / VC)

8:30 - 9:30 -- Continental Breakfast

9:30 - 9:45 -- Intro, Ted Shelton

9:45 - 10:30 -- Doc Searls - Intro

10:30 - 11:00 -- Find your teams + Morning Break (same room)

11:00 - 12.00 -- Deb Schultz - Stop Yelling & Start Weaving: the Human Skills + Breakout

12:00 - 1.00 -- Lunch & Networking (upstairs balcony)

1:00 - 1:45 -- Thor Muller  - Customer service from the outside-in

1:45 - 2:30--  Giovanni Rodriguez - Positioning Today

2:30 - 3:00 -- Breakout + Mini-break (same room)

3:00 - 3:45 -- Andreas Weigend - Conversational Data

3:45 - 4:30 -- Jeremiah Owyang - Getting Your Company Conversation-Ready

4:30 - 4:50 -- Breakout

4:50 - 5.30  -- Peter Hirshberg - Wrap up / Future

5.30 - 5.45 -- Ted (+ other or all speakers) Closing remarks / conversations / open discussion

5:45 - 8.00PM  -  Reception (upstairs balcony)

Blurb Sponsorship

We are excited to have Blurb on board as a sponsor for our May 29th event, "There's a New Conversation." 

SNCR Joins Sponsors of There's a New Conversation

The Society for New Communications Research has joined us in sponsoring our celebration of the 10th anniversary of Cluetrain!

The history of our company, The Conversation Group, has been very connected with SNCR. I originally met TCG co-founders Giovanni Rodriguez and Chris Heuer at SNCR's annual event in Boston in the fall of 2006. Giovanni continues to serve the organization as a Senior Research Fellow.

Having SNCR executive director Jen McClure and many of her members attend will certainly enrich the event for everyone -- welcome SNCR members!

Don't forget to register before May 10th for the special discounted price:

http://conversation.eventbrite.com

May 29th - Event Details

Registration now open at http://conversation.eventbrite.com

In setting the schedule for the May 29th event in Palo Alto, we wanted to make sure that there was ample time for interactive discussion.  Fortunately the fabulous SAP facility makes it very easy to have numerous break-out sessions and so as you will see from the schedule below, we will be alternating between presentations and conversations.  Each conversation time slot will allow the larger group of 120 attendees to break up into smaller groups and have more interactive sessions with each of the conversation leaders attending the event

Schedule for "There's A New Conversation" - Cluetrain at 10

8:30 - 9:30 -- Continental Breakfast

9:30 - 9:45 -- Opening Session

9:45 - 10:30 -- Doc Searls

10:30 - 11:15 -- breakout conversation groups

11:15 - 12:00 -- Thor Muller

12:00 - 1:00 -- Lunch and Networking

1:00 - 1:45 -- Deb Schultz

1:45 - 2:30 -- breakout conversation groups

BREAK

2:45 - 3:30 --  Giovanni Rodriguez

3:30 - 4:15 -- breakout conversation groups

4:15 - 5:00 -- Peter Hirshberg,

5:00 - 5:30 -- Panel, closing conversations

5:30 -- Cocktail Reception

May 29th - The Cluetrain is coming to Palo Alto

Announcing the second in the series! We are bringing our celebration of Cluetrain at 10 to Palo Alto -- Graciously hosted by SAP at their offices just off of Foothill Expressway.

We have expanded the format from the February in New York event to respond to the many requests for more networking time and more discussion time. 

The full day event (including cocktail reception afterwards) will now include both presentations and breakout sessions for discussion with all attendees. This larger format is more costly to produce, and so the fee for attending the event will be $185 (continental breakfast, lunch, and cocktail reception are included).  But until May 10th you can register for an "early bird" rate of just $95

More on the event:

Ten years ago, four authors came together to start a new conversation about marketing.  The result was a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto and with it, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger nailed 95 Theses on the door of the Internet and challenged us all to wake up to a transformation underway in how companies and people engage in markets.  Looking back over the past ten years we have learned a lot about what happens when mass markets adopt collaborative online communities and it is time to revisit this vital document that played an important role in starting a new conversation about what it means to be a marketer.  What have we learned?  What was right and wrong?  What was left out that we should have been thinking about?  What should we be thinking about for the next ten years?    

* Doc Searls, co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute    
* Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Technorati and Chairman and Partner at The Conversation Group    
* Jeremiah Owyang, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research    
* Deborah Schultz, independent social media expert

Register for our May 29th event in Palo Alto CA at http://conversation.eventbrite.com/

Two Social Media Camps

An interesting debate is developing around whether Doc Searls and the Cluetrain Manifesto are somehow "pro" business or "anti" business.  The latest volly is from Shel Israel, entitled "Josh Bernoff and the Purists." This was in response to a post by Josh (one of the speakers at our event) entitled "Purists and Corporatists"

Josh is making an argument that, in his words "Corporations, like people, have interests. They can talk about their products and services honestly."

Shel raises the concern that perhaps Josh is offering companies bad advice -- "if his implication is that corporations can treat social media as another traditional brand extender, as another place to push messages into the foreheads of people who do not want them..."

Critiquing the Cluetrain Manifesto

John Cass, always a thoughtful contributor to any debate has a great thought piece exploring questions he has been wrestling with on The Cluetrain Manifesto -- Critiquing the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Personally (as I commented on his blog) I think that one of the reasons that the conversation about the Cluetrain Manifesto is still interesting now, 10 years after the authors began their discussions on the topic, is that the world they envisaged still has NOT come to pass. 

As any of the authors (I think) would readily agree - the book is not prescriptive, it simply seeks to point out a shift that is underway which companies will either explicitly adopt or will be overwhelmed by -- but not all at once.  Shifts in the organization of something as complex as global markets take years, indeed decades.  But business will change.  It already is changing.

How LEGO Caught the Cluetrain

Jake McKee, ex-LEGO and currently founder of social media consultancy Ant's Eye view talks about his experiences building community at LEGO.  44 Minutes

Higher quality video on our video blog at blip -- The Conversation Group Videos

Doc Searls at There's a New Conversation

The video of Doc Searls' presentation at our New York event on February 13th, 2008 is now live!  Go to our site on blip TV to view -- The Conversation Group Videos.  Doc talks about the origins of Cluetrain, how the ideas has developed over the past 10 years, what the next 10 years will bring, and about his current research work into what he calls "vendor relationship management" (VRM).

You can also listen to the audio which is available on our iTunes podcast

The Conversation Group Podcast

We will be working to get the other speaker's presentations up as video and audio soon!

Jake McKee on Cluetrain

We have just posted an interview with Jake McKee, founder of social media consultancy Ant's Eye View conducted by Blog Talk Radio's John Havens --> http://tcg.libsyn.com/

Jake talks about the impact that The Cluetrain Manifesto had on him and how it contributed to his work in developing community relationships at Lego.