Guy Kawasaki interview Part 3
Here’s the final instalment in Walter Schwabe’s interview with Guy Kawasaki.
Click on the MP3 above to hear the third part of Walter’s interview of Guy Kawasaki.
Who do you think is probably one of the sharpest minds in the social web environment today?
“Probably Chris Brogan is one of them. The usual cast of characters like Dave Weiner, [Robert] Scoble, Mike Arrington, those people.”
Scoble has a large audience going back to when he was at Microsoft, so is it really that Scoble’s got that sharp of a mind or is it just that he’s got an audience?
“The two are not separable. I don’t think stupid people have large audiences, although you can’t make that case about some TV shows.”
“You’ll find that smart people have large audiences and large audiences find smart people.”
Walter: “He’s leveraging a multitude of technologies simultaneously to get content out the door, video being a large portion of what he does. We all know that. There’s sometimes a tendency for example to get into just reporter mode, if you will, and just kind of report on stuff that’s happening, as opposed to free thinking and leading the way on an innovation basis.”
Do you think he’s really being innovative in the stuff he’s doing?
“I think so. He’s definitely at the leading edge of social media stuff.”
What do you think of FriendFeed?
“We have Frienderati.alltop for the 50 or 100 most interesting people on FriendFeed. I am almost solely on Twitter. I have a FriendFeed account that all it does is aggregate my Tweets. I never go to FriendFeed in the sense that you mean. I never use FriendFeed. I’m just there. I grabbed my name on purpose in advance.”
“I hate to admit this, and it may be dangerous to admit this, but I primarily use these things for real business use of making Alltop better. Whereas I’m not trying to keep in touch with my friends. I’m not trying to get friends. I’m not trying to meet people and date people and all that other crap. It is a very very strict use for me.”
“I use Twitter, and therefore the FriendFeed aggregation of my Tweets, as a weapon for Alltop. Now to be an effective weapon I cannot simply promote Alltop because then it would just be seen as the Alltop channel, how interesting would that be?”
“So I have to put in a lot of things that are interesting in my Twitter feed about stuff that has nothing to do with Alltop: interesting sites that I’ve found, interesting tools that I’ve found, interesting pictures that I’ve seen, etc.”
“So there’s a lot of human nature stuff in my feed but all of this is because I use Twitter as a weapon, and that is probably not a popular thing to say. It’s probably even a dangerous thing to admit but that’s the truth. I am an anti-social social media person.”
Walter: “You’ve stayed exactly on that type of course. I see one of two types of Tweets from you, generally. One, it’s about something new that happened on Alltop or two, it’s some sort of unusual tidbit of information like someone saw Jesus in a piece of toast yesterday. I would have to give you the award for the most unusual bits of information on Twitter; the most unreal stuff.”
Guy: “That is completely on purpose, I hope you understand that some of that is automated. I take the stuff from Truemors and stick it into my feed using Twitterfeed. So that is on purpose but then I also… I spend a few, I don’t know about hours, but I spend a significant time every day looking for interesting websites and interesting things that I can Tweet about so that people want to follow me. It’s very very conscious. It’s not accidental. I do this so I can make Twitter a useful weapon for me.”
Walter: “One of the things that I’ve been doing, just as my own internal case study is I’ve been measuring my own results in a sense. So what I will do is, for example, I might be slightly negative with certain things about certain people or something, whether I get a response or what kind of response I get back. Then I might be overly happy and positive, so really kind of just simple things like that.”
Have you found there’s a type or bit of information or Tweet that gets you more response or more follows than others?
“I’m not that scientific. I don’t have the time to be that scientific. So basically if I find an interesting story about, like last night I found a very interesting website where it’s a web page and it tells you what time it is where you are, based on your computer and location. Then you can set an alarm and at 6 a.m. this alarm went off in my house telling me that it’s 6 a.m.”
Guy said he’s had problems at hotels where he hasn’t received wake-up calls or there have been issues with the clock radio and every one is different. Those are problems you don’t need at midnight.
“This is a web page that just sets the time and your computer starts chiming at that hour. This ain’t exactly… paradigm shifting, Nobel Prize winning technology, but it’s very useful for a traveller. So I Tweet that.”
“Now 17,000 people could have read that and a handful said this is really cool and useful. So now I just want to keep building credibility that when you read my Tweet or when you follow me, it’s not just Alltop. It’s also interesting stuff like this online alarm clock that is really useful when you travel.”
“Every day somebody sends a message to me that ‘I am no longer following you because you promote Alltop too much in your Tweets.’”
Walter: “I was one of those guys at one point, Guy. I was one of those guys at one point
Walter said he was one of those people and got frustrated with Guy’s Tweets and stopped following him. He blogged about it and Guy responded. Walter and Guy began to have a conversation.
Walter: “I started to recognize ‘okay, there must something else on the go here.’ And so you very quickly restored a positive feeling with respect to what you were doing. I was literally one of those guys at one point.”
Guy: “I think my model is sort of like NPR [National Public Radio] or public television. You know that the content is really good at NPR and public television, but every once in a while they have these donate-a-thons.”
Guy: “I want to have good enough content, interesting websites, interesting pictures, interesting things, whatever, so that you tolerate the advertising for Alltop. That’s the model, and if you can’t stand the advertising and if you can’t stand the fundraising at the public television station, you don’t watch it.”
Guy: “Life goes on. On the other hand, if you do value or humor or entertainment out of my other Tweets, then you tolerate my Alltop Tweets. If one person dropped me a day in 17,000 days I would have no followers.”
In light of baby boomers exiting the workforce in the next several years, how do you thing those organizations that resist change are going to fare versus those that really embrace change and are jumping into social media with both feet?
“This is a question that gets asked every 10 years for the last 200 years. Right? So, the people who don’t embrace change die. That’s why when’s the last time you used an NCR cash register or the last time you used a Data General computer? That’s the way it is.”
“This is not to say everybody has to embrace every thing but certainly if you embrace nothing you will die. …Even the most recalcitrant person who doesn’t want to adopt social media has to realize that to adopt nothing… maybe those people are still on rotary dial phone. Maybe they’re still on telegraph. That’s just the way it is.”
Do you think social media could be an effective HR tool to reduce attrition?
“I guess, conceptually, yes, but compared to what? Having clear goals set with clear functions and clear reporting and well managed? I would say if you do those things you don’t need Twitter and if you don’t have those things, even with Twitter, you’re going to have turnover. So social media is not going to fix everything.”
With the younger segments of the workforce, already labeled as transient, do you think social media can help them stay engaged?
“I think it’d play a role, however, it’s a small role. You’d do much better if you had clearly defined jobs with good supervision, interesting challenges and fair compensation. If you do that, you don’t need social media.”
“If you don’t do that, social media isn’t going to keep someone who doesn’t have a good boss, isn’t well compensated and has a crappy job.”
What about communication, in general, in an organization?
“That’s like saying 20 years ago, if you said do you think organizations with internal email systems will be able to retain people better? Well, yeah, I guess internal email and messaging will help, but the fact is, if you’re an organization that doesn’t communicate, slapping email isn’t going to fix the problem.”
What’s your personal mantra?
“Empower people.”
If you had to explain social media to an un-savvy audience, how would explain social media to them?
“It enables you to have conversations with anybody, anywhere, anytime.”
Feedback?
And that was it. It’s not often you get a chance to interview someone like Guy Kawasaki for such a long time. I’m sure I can speak for Walter in saying that we appreciate the time Guy spent talking to Walter. Long interviews aren’t always so interesting but I have to admit that after I listened to this one for the first time, it really didn’t feel like almost one hour.
Let us know what you thought of what Guy had to say and about how he uses Twitter.
Do you agree or disagree with what he has to say? Do you follow @guykawasaki?
Coming soon
We have an interview with Seth Godin that we’ll be putting up here soon. Keep checking back for that or sign up for our RSS feed.
And if you have any other questions or comments, you can always pass them along to me.
Alain Saffel alain@fusedlogic.com
