Shel Israel: 8 Stories of Global Social Media – CNBloggerCon 2008

Here we go…day 2.  I can liveblog this because it is English.  David Feng translating.

Introduction:

Son of Jewish immigrants who at the time they came to America were not that welcome, and they were a working class family.  So to have come this far and to be in China is an incredible experience.  Thanks to Edelman China, China 2.0 (Web2Asia, CNReviews, The China Business Network), and CNBloggerCon, and Isaac Mao for the opportunity to come speak to this audience

Naked conversations:  how Shel got started with Social Media.

Shel wrote a book with Robert Scoble.  Book was named “Naked conversations” in English but not Chinese.  I wish it were because it really is about conversations without barriers. A free exchange between people.  Now it is called Global Neighbourhoods and has

Global Neighbourhoods

Social media is about conversation like 2 friends talking

Maybe they travel on the same bus together, maybe they live nearby each other, and slowly over time they get to know each other and each other’s tastes.  For example, after a while I know that my friend [Robert] Scoble is very good at advising me on technology but in my opinion he has terrible tastes in movies or books.

Geography less relevant

We can speak with each other, and where we speak you cannot touch it.  But the friendships we built there are very real.  Build neighborhoods on interest.  Since Naked Conversations, I have followed social media.  I follow it wherever it goes.  I have done 115 interviews for 34 countries, 5 continents.

8 Stories of the Social Media Global Survey

1. Isaac Mao

Have talked about Isaac in 20 different countries.  Am not going into detail with Isaac because the CNBloggerCon community all know him already.  What is important is that 1 person on the Internet opened my eyes to the reality of what was happening in social media in China.

2.  Michael Dell, Dell Computer

2 billion people online by 2011.  conversations more valuable than ads.  Social Media is cost effective.  He was a son of a doctor and going to medical school, but instead of doing that he started selling computers because he was a geek.  Today he runs #3 computer company.  Despite the fact that the company has problems right now, he told me that social media and blogging is a strategic component.  When his business comes around, social media will be a higher priority than advertising, bcause conversations are more effective and less costly than advertising.

3.  Laurel Papworth, Silkcharm

Australian. On Twitter she is Silkcharm.  She is a professor at a university where she has a Ph.D in emerging culture.  A while ago she was invited to go to Saudi Arabia where she helped a group of Saudi women start a social network.  She went there with a certain sense that this was a suppressed culture and that she needed to be very careful.  And she discovered that under the Arab/Muslim garments, the women were wearing lipstick, perfume, tight blue jeans, and western clothes.  And in the social network she discovered that many Muslim women were on Facebook.  Like women all over the world, they flirted with people.  But always anonymously.  It has to be anonymous because for a Muslim woman to flirt on the internet is very serious.  a few weeks after she was there, a teenage girl was discovered to be flirting on Facebook by her father and 2 brothers who dragged her into the street and stoned her to death.  But before that I know through that one incident about Muslim women, there is more to the story. As I have learned in China, the story always goes a lot deeper.

Queen Rania posts on YouTube quite often talking about Western misconceptions about Muslim people overall.  But particularly young women, but particularly in Jordan we don’t have fathers stoning their daughters.  But instead they drink too much in bars and come home and do violence.

When you learn a bad story about one place, you cannot assume that that thing happens all the time in that place.

4. Francois Gossieaux, Beeline Labs

Lives in the US.  He is a Belgian citizen.  He interviewed 140 enterprise companies that host online communities. He discovered many many things that I can’t tell you all of them now.   But he discovered that people online are tribal.  They try to find people like themselves.  Which is of course part of my theme in Global Neighborhoods.  People are tribal.  Companies start a community for a business purpose and then people come and do whatever they want.  It cannot be controlled.

5.  Father Roderick, Amsterdam

Catholic priest who also is one of the world’s mpodcaster ost popular podcasters.  He never talks about Catholicism itself.  When he is asked why he is doing this, he explained that it was time for the Catholic church to become more modern and more human.  He also explained that many people are different but they are also alike.

6.  Wael Abbas Egypt Citzen-Journalist

He is a journalist in Egypt but he doesn’t have much work to do because the government does not like what he writes. So it has become unwise to hire him in his professional.  The laws in Egypt say that it can be considered treason even if you are telling the truth.  Wael gets hidden camera videos of police brutality.  And government corruption.  A popular one is of a government person stuffing a ballot box during an election. He has millions of people who see these clips on YouTube of government corruption and policy brutality.  One day YouTube mysteriously took them all down.  And then when bloggers started to complain about it and NYT learned from the bloggers what had happened, they mysteriously reappeared.

7.  Ethan Bodnar, US student.

He is a student in the US.  “Why would I work for a company that won’t let me blog?” he said.  I interviewed him when he was a Junior in High School.  What he told me that was most significant was that he would never work for a company that wouldn’t allow him to blog.  why would he work for a company that would not allow him to use the tools he uses for conversation?  It is a lesson that I’ve learned time and time again in country after country that the young people are making blogging happen and making social media happen.  Youth is the killer application.

8.  Erik Hersman, Kenya

In Kenya, a missionary son called Erik Hersman was concerned about violence in Kenya where he was raised.  So he and Kenyan friends created a mobile wiki and citizens could upload where violence was so that most of the Kenyans could go somewhere else.

Basic lessons – in summary

So out of all of these experiences there are few experiences that are important.

1. Youth is the killer app.
2. Tools change.  People stay the same
3. Conversations are revolutionary
4. Generosity wins

When the hunters came back from hunting in prehistoric times, they would draw stories in the dirt.  Before we had language, they grunted.  And over time they took berries and blood and they drew pictures in the wall.  I’m told that over the centuries the little pictures of people, the hunters, stayed the same size.  But the things they killed kept getting bigger.  In my country fisherman do this today.

What changes is the tools.  they get bigger, better and faster.  And the tools today are social media.

Another lesson I learned is that generosity wins.  When you are a consumer you get shouted at.  Companies want to get more than their competitors.  In my country, this doesn’t work anymore.  We got tired of getting shouted at.  But today, through social media, the ones that are giving the most and getting the most.

China in Social Media

I”ll skip this slide because you know china’s social media.

• 1.2 > 25 mm bloggers in 4 yrs
• meteoric Facebook growth
• Twitter growing
• joining Global Neighborhoods

Social media starts social. Goes everywhere.  It goes to games.  It goes to education.  It gets into business.

In our country in our wonderful election, it began to play a role in changing who our officials are.  And I for one like the results.

A bit about the barriers between people.  First, Language is a terrible barrier.  In Chinese I can only say 谢谢.  If I could only speak your language with you we could communicate so much better.  I have a great deal of faith in technology.  And someday I can type or speak into this computer, and you will be able to see or hear what I said in your language.

Second barrier is that while the world is getting smaller it is still a big space.  Very few of the people in my country get the opportunity as I have to meet face to face. And until somehow we can transcend that, there will be a mutual misunderstanding between people in the two places.  Social media is the best way for people to speak to people across many miles.

Where I’ve gone, I’ve learned one simple, ultimate lesson: people are all alike.

Q & A

Q: How did you choose the interviews from so many social media users?

A:  I’m always interested in an interested story.  I’m always interested in learning something new.  It was hard in the beginning.  Because I’m pretty well known worldwide, stories are coming to me.