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
Guy Kawasaki interview Part 2
Here’s part two of three in Walter Schwabe’s interview with Guy Kawasaki.
Click on the MP3 above to hear the second part of Walter’s interview of Guy Kawasaki.
What are the top three ways you leverage social web for your business?
“I would make the very bold claim that I get more value out of Twitter than anybody in the world, because Alltop has largely been built upon the shoulders of Twitter in the sense that the Twitter community provides me with ideas for topics and not only that, they also provide me with the best feeds for those topics.”
Guy said his Twitter followers may suggest a topic like ADHD. They may have a child with the condition, are doctors familiar with it or family counselor and already know the best feeds for the topic.
“Not only do they suggest a topic then they send me the feeds and I’m in business. I don’t know how I would have done that without Twitter. I don’t know how I would have reached them. I don’t know how they would have reached me.”
The old way of building Alltop would have been to have created a community interested in dissemination of information and once the community is in place, tap them for more information and help.
“The new way is you just dive into the middle of Twitter and you form no community around yourself in particular to start. You dive in the middle and you get these sporadic sort of gems of and nuggets of information that come to you from the community as a whole; not your community.”
Several days before the interview, Guy mentioned he’d started a Facebook group for Alltop, which he did as an afterthought.
“Before, that would be the first thing you would try to do because you need to get this community to form this community to help you. I didn’t need to do that. I already had this very loosely held Twitter community that is very diverse, all over the world, but I could not have formed a community around Alltop of the magnitude of the overall Twitter community.”
At the time of the interview, Guy had 17,000 followers on Twitter, which has ballooned to more than 55,000 followers now.
“Odds are for every topic that I could possibly come up with, there are five people who are experts in that topic.”
How would a large organization (eg 5,000 people) follow your lead on Twitter?
“I think it would be impossible. (laughs) That’s being facetious but let me tell you why I think it would be very hard. Because in a 5,000 person organization that… with a legal department and a general counsel and outside counsel, they would want to read each Tweet before you send it.”
“They don’t want you divulging anything that’s confidential, that might affect the stock price, that should have been filed with the SEC before you said it. It’s the same reason why I can’t name an interesting blog of a publicly held CEO.”
“Twitter is not a company presence on a social media network. It is one person typing something in 140 characters.”
“Probably the best Twitterer at a 5,000 person organization is a summer intern. How palatable is it to tell a 5,000 person organization ‘rest your reputation on Twitter on a summer intern that you’re paying 15 bucks an hour to who is going to be gone in 60 days’?”
“The way to be successful on Twitter is to establish yourself as an interesting person.”
Guy suggested having a focus, for example baseball. If you’re an expert, you could eventually develop a following of baseball fanatics.
“You always have to ask yourself this question: in the infinite conversations going on in Twitter or any social medium, how do I stand out and be interesting? Some people choose to do this by being assholes and flame the most. So you may get a few followers for that, but I don’t think that’s optimal.”
“The best way is to be seen as a content expert in a niche, whatever that niche is.”
Do you think that large organizations or industry have managed to figure out social media in general?
“No, not at all. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that most small start-up organizations have figured it out either. We’re at the stage where Alexander Graham Bell is calling the guy in the other room right now.”
“As a first step I think companies on their websites should open up forums and let people who are interested in the company communicate with the company and with each other. But how many companies even have the balls to do that?”
How would you help an organization to accept scrutiny online, react effectively to it and help the customer?
“First, it would take a lot of money. (laughs) It’s all about giving up control and stop being paranoid.”
Using a made-up example of a product with short battery life, Guy suggested that it would be better to be open about a product’s shortcomings and that the company is working on it rather than attempting to hide the problem.
Guy had some problems with his iPhone where it would drop calls. He gave up trying to solve the problem with AT&T and searched “3G iphone dropped calls.” He found in the Apple support forum that around 500 people were having that same problem. The solution was to go from 3G to Edge, or 2G.
“This in itself is rather amazing. I just bought a 3G phone and I’ve been told the way to really make it work for phone calls is go to 2G where 3G is spotty. Holy cow. That’s like you go to Toyota, you buy a Prius and they tell you ‘well, to fix that problem you should really disconnect the battery and run on gas.’”
“So there’s a forum and there’s this thread and it’s probably got 500 messages in it by now. Do you think most people in the world have heard this? Do you think it’s stopped the sale of iPhones? Do you think it’s hurt Apple really?”
“Do you think that Apple should fix this problem? Absolutely. You could make the case that Apple now knows the severity of the problem and they cannot deny it. They have to fix it.”
“It’s better that Apple has this open forum and they have seen that 500 people are already pissed off about this and they have to fix it.”
“Even in the worst case, at least I know now that if this occurs with me with my phone I know all I have to do is switch from 3G to 2G and the problem will go away. And then when I’m back in an area with good 3G I just turn 3G back on.”
“That’s a lot better than wondering is it me? Is it AT&T? Is it AT&T’s coverage? Is it something is wrong with my iPhone? What’s wrong here?”
“A great example of social media.”
I would have been astounded if the AT&T operator would have told me the same solution, Guy added.
“The first thing they would have said is ‘are you sure you have the current software installed?’ And the second thing they would have said is ‘we show no outages where you are.’ And the third thing is ‘it’s probably your phone is faulty. You should go back to the Apple store where you bought it.’”
What are some of the other barriers you see that organizations are bumping up against when they contemplate a social media strategy?
“Besides the legal, or the perceived legal risk, is that it’s very difficult to quantify the return. If you allocate a certain budget to social media. Let’s say you get past the legal department, which is a big if, but let’s just say you do.”
“So now you’re past the legal department and you’ve allocated this budget, how do you quote unquote prove that this was worthwhile doing, and I don’t know how you do it.”
“How do you quantify the impact of a social media strategy? Wow. It’s hard enough to quantify click throughs and click actions and TV buys and media buys. I don’t know how you would quantify social media. It’s something you just have to believe it to see it.”
Walter talked about some of the difficulties in being able to quantify the return on investment in social media strategy.
Walter: “Maybe then it’s something more vague. Maybe it’s something like just measuring the amount of sort of interest in a brand or a brand’s products or services after, for example, relationships and rapport have been built up. Because one of the things, I think, obviously somebody like yourself on Twitter who has thousands and thousands of followers is doing is essentially building rapport.”
Walter: “And that is having an effect on your business. By extension, these people who you have some level of rapport with are supplying you with, as you said earlier, ideas and feeds for Alltop. So, in a way you can measure some level of response in terms of success there.”
Guy: “Yes, but I am a unique situation, right? I can measure this because I have a real tangible result. People send me a feed or send me a topic idea. What if you’re Frigidaire refrigerators? What are they going to send you that’s tangible? I don’t know. What if you’re Proctor & Gamble and you’re selling a new kind of baking powder? I have no idea how you would quantify the fact that you have a big social media presence.”
Walter: “I think in the early adopter community online with respect to social media, that has got to be probably the single most, toughest, and probably biggest ongoing question that people are trying to put their own spin on right now.”
Guy: “On the other hand, it’s not very expensive what we’ve just advocated. It’s not like we’re saying spend $20 million to do a Super Bowl commercial.”
Walter: “That’s very true. The cost of implementation is considerably lower.”
Part 3 of the interview
We’ll publish the rest of Guy Kawasaki’s interview next week with the last portion of the audio as well. In this last part Guy will talk about who he thinks are some of the sharpest minds in social media today, how he uses Twitter and how organizations communicate.
Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com
Guy Kawasaki: the interview
If you’ve been around computers, particularly the Mac, for any length of time, you probably know who Guy Kawasaki is.
When I sat down to write about Guy, I realized I just didn’t know that much about him; time to do a little research about Guy Kawasaki. The one thing I did know about him was that he was an “evangelist” at Apple; probably one of the first company evangelists out there.
I’m not going to bore you with typical “about” details you can find on his website. Guy, as you know, worked for Apple to evangelize the Macintosh computer. He was there for a few years and helped start up some software companies and ended up back at Apple.
Upon leaving Apple once more, he started up Garage which went through a few incarnations providing services to venture capitalists. He recently sold one venture, Truemors, and is doing quite well with his latest venture, Alltop.
Alltop.com is billed as an online magazine rack that pulls in RSS feeds from blogs and other websites on almost any topic you can think of.
He’s no stranger to controversy, and his latest involves his site Alltop.com, something Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch calls a “big pile of nothing.” For a big pile of nothing, Alltop is doing pretty well, with an Alexa ranking of 88,348. Not too bad for a site that’s been around for less than a year.
Of course not all the comments on Tech Crunch are negative. One commenter pointed readers to a quote from Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, with the quote: “Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.”
Guy Kawasaki: the interview
Click the above link for the MP3 of the interview.
Walter Schwabe, fusedlogic CEO, got on the phone with Guy Kawasaki for a long chat ranging from his latest ventures to social media and how he uses Twitter.
We’ll give you a synopsis of the interview in print and cover the highlights, but you’ll want to download the MP3s for the full conversation. You won’t be disappointed.
truemors.com, how long did you have it? And what was the inspiration for it originally?
Guy had truemors.com for a little more than a year.
“We truly wanted to democratize information.” Instead of wealthy people and religious leaders having had the power to publish in the past (through scribes, printing presses and then desktop publishing), it’s now in the hands of everyone to post anything, spread information, or disinformation.
Truemors is good for people who might like to set up a blog but don’t have the time or capability to do it, but would like to post information.
Sale of truemors
A few weeks before the interview, Guy sold truemors to NowPublic.com and had breakfast with Leonard Brody, owner of NowPublic, a site where people collect and broadcast news.
“Rather than having several hundred reporters, you have tens of thousands of reporters,” Kawasaki said about NowPublic.
I suppose you could call that crowdsourcing?
“Yes, Twitter might be an extreme example of that.”
“I think today, for most events, the first place you would hear about it is Twitter. Even if there are people who are tipsters, who are professional tipsters, and they listen on their scanners to police, and emergency and fire broadcasts right and then they call up the San Jose Mercury and they say I just heard there was an armed robbery at the Ikea [for example] in Palo Alto.”
Guy said newspapers are the next day, online might be a few hours, but someone could be in that Ikea and be on their cell phone immediately on Twitter talking about that armed robbery 30 seconds later.
Walter talked about a similar situation he went through when his wife and daughter were with family visiting Disneyland in the fall and there was a fairly major earthquake in California. He first heard about the earthquake on Twitter and combined listening to CNN with Twitter to try to find out how bad the damage was. The advantage was with Twitter in that he could talk to people who were actually going through it.
About Alltop.com: how is it different than truemors.com?
Guy said he got the idea for Alltop from Popurls.com that had been aggregating the RSS feed from Truemors.
“PopURLs takes about the top 15 or 20 news sites and puts all their feeds together on one page so that you could see the all the news happening from various feeds in one place rather than having to go to 15 individual websites.”
“We noticed that PopURLs was sending us as much traffic as Google. So I got in touch with PopURLs and I said just ‘what’s the story here? How does this work? How can you send us so much traffic?’”
“I got to be friends with him and I said well ‘you’re covering tech and business do you have any intention of covering things like celebrities, fashion, wine, food, cancer, ADHD, autism, sports,’ going down the line, and he said ‘no, I’m just going to stick with tech and business.’”
“So I said ‘alright, so if you’re not going to do it, I’m going to aggregate the news in all those topics’ and so that’s how we started Alltop.”
What’s happening on Alltop and how big will it get?
Guy said they’re adding three to five topics per week and will have a big software change coming up that will allow them to add three to five topics per day.
Initially the topics started out quite broad, like sports.alltop.com but they soon found they needed more specific topics like baseball, cricket, hockey, etc. This will progress to things like newyorkyankees.alltop.com because there are large number of blogs specifically about them.
“It is kind of endless. Someday we’ll be as big as Google maybe.”
Alltop relies on qualities feeds of information.
“I can’t think of a topic where you can’t find 15 or 20 feeds about it. You could take the most esoteric disease that only 5,000 people in the world have and you’ll find 20 feeds or 20 blogs about it.”
Guy hints at how Alltop might change in the future
“At that point we have a different issue. We have a user interface issue because right now you can come to our home page and it’s an alphabetic index. But what happens when we have a thousand topics. You don’t want to be scrolling through all that, so the next version of our homepage you’ll be able to look at things a la index, which is what it is now, or categorized. For example, sports versus arts.”
The third option he’s looking at is a search feature where you’d type in something like “baseball” and you’d see all the different baseball-related categories.
Criticism of Alltop and Guy Kawasaki
Walter recounted some of the criticism of Alltop and Kawasaki that the site is not breaking new technological ground and it’s the same as POPurls.
“In a sense they are correct. This isn’t revolutionary, patent-pending new technology. Anybody can do what we’ve done. All you need to do is set up a little program to aggregate feeds. So there is no proving them wrong in the sense that, you know, it is revolutionary, you are wrong by not calling it not revolutionary.”
“Where we can prove them wrong is they think that it’s not a big deal. I think it is a big deal.”
Guy Kawasaki gives it to Tech Crunch with both barrels
“Now, to be honest, whenever a story breaks in Tech Crunch or in some place like that. No matter what you do, let’s take a far-fetched example. Let’s say that somehow I invent a new kind of battery that will charge in five minutes and will run a Macintosh laptop for 25 hours with absolutely no impact on the environment that can be made for $5 each… and by the way it only ways two ounces.”
“Let’s just say I did that. The comments in Tech Crunch would be ‘I thought of this five years ago. How hard could this be? I could have done this but I didn’t think it was worth doing. The only reason why Guy is in Tech Crunch is because he’s Guy; it’s not because this is revolutionary.’ And so that’s the nature of Tech Crunch.”
“It’s a bunch of angry little people living at home with their mothers who have never even French-kissed. Nothing you could do would impress the Tech Crunch crowd because, according to them, everything is easy, they’ve already done it, they thought of it ten years ago and it’s no big deal.”
“So the bottom line with that is that you just have to ignore those comments.”
“If there were a Tech Crunch the day that Google was announced, people would have said ‘there’s already ten search engines, I thought of doing a search engine by counting the number of links to a site and prioritizing results that way, there is no business model for this and the only reason why it’s in Tech Crunch is because it’s coming out of Stanford.’ Right? That’s what they would have said about Google.’”
“The bottom line lesson is: we need to ignore the bozos in the world.”
Part 2 of Guy Kawasaki interview
In the next installment of our interview with Guy Kawasaki you’ll hear Guy talk about Twitter and how he leverages it, blogging CEOs, who should be Twittering at your company and how you can be successful on Twitter.
Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com
Guy Kawasaki interview: a question for you
I’m editing an article that Walter Schwabe (@fusedlogic) has written about Guy Kawasaki. It’s kind of a far reaching article and the 55 minute interview covers a lot of ground.
I’ve done these kinds of long interviews before when I worked as a journalist, and normally the majority is never used in an article.
Considering this is site is far different than a newspaper, it brings up some possibilities. Should I:
- Put up the audio & a transcript
- Put up the audio & an article
- Put up audio, article & transcript
- Transcript & article only
- Article only
- Transcript only
- Audio only
What would you prefer? I think it’s a really interesting bit of audio. Is it really worth putting up a transcript? It’s a heck of a lot of work, not that this is the issue, but if nobody would read it, what’s the point?
Given my journalistic background, of course I have a preference for articles. They’re more compact and get to the point.
So, I’m in the middle of editing the article and listening to the audio to see what hidden gems there may be in that Guy Kawasaki interview. It’s quite an interesting conversation that Walter and Guy are having.
Let me know what you’d prefer.
Alain Saffel
