How about a little time-shifted live blogging?
I just discovered Seth Godin's Keynote speech from SES Chicago on Webmaster Radio. I don't even know when the event actually took place. I wanted to capture what I heard, so I started typing. Why not make it a blog post?
This stuff is in Seth's book Meatball Sundae.
Seth prefaced this list as "14 things that I see going on." Each of these trends can be wind at your back.
1. Direct communication between consumers and producers. Example: Sonos
2. Consumers are louder than ever before - Amplified word of mouth
3. Authentic Stories - People don't have time for fineprint, watch infomercial. They grab stories. At best they'll get a charicature of your brand. Tell your story and live it.
4. Speed. Are you organized around a factory or delivery?
5. The Long Tail - Example: Amazon gets half their sales from books that B&N doesn't even carry.
6. Outsourcing - If you're job can be reduced to manual, sooner or later your company will find someone else to do it for cheaper.
7. Google - Things are being unbundled, divided into molecules
8. Infinite channels of communication. TV, Radio, YouTube, Internet
9. Consumer to consumer relationships - eBay, Kiva (fastest growing charity by far), Paypal
10. Flip in the difference between scarcity and abundance.
11. Triumph of Big Ideas. Stories spread very quickly.
12. Debate about who vs. how many. Were you in the business of harvesting attention when attention was cheap? How many isn't as important today as who and why. Get exactly the right "who."
13. The rich are different from the who the rich used to be. Now we find rich people everywhere we look -- some with extremely bad taste.
14. New gatekeepers and No gatekeepers. You don't control your message. But you can deliver your message without being limited by others.
15. Bonus: Upside-down bell curve. The difference between scarcity and ubiquity and the dangerous middle. People know the information is free, but the event or souvenir isn't.
Good Point: People are looking for a moderator -- not someone to exploit them. If you become that moderator, you have longevity.
The opportunity for the people in this room is NOT to change what goes on at the top of the business pyramid, where sales and marketing happen. The opporunity is NOT to change the busy stuff at the top, but to change the bottom of the pyramid, where products are created and services delivered.
From a conversion standpoint it's this: Make promises to those who come to your site. Promise that you know their problem and will help them solve it. But NEVER NEVER make promises you can't keep.
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