There’s a parallel here with basketball, lot’s of free agents in the NBA this year are figuring out where they want to play next year. It’s interesting to watch as a fan because you’ll see if players value winning, they’ll go to a team that is set up to win or can get other free agents and become successful, or if they value making maximum dollars.

Knowing why you do something is really important to doing it right / well. When I graduated from B school, I focused on the commute, focused on the location and the brand of the company I wanted to join and that meant a big US company, so I applied for and got a job at one. It looked great on paper and on Linkedin but I wasn’t really happy. I didn’t have the “why” right. Now I know I want to create something, make a difference, create some jobs, and build something that makes an impact, so I know the “why” and I’m much happier professionally.

Don’t get me wrong, there are basic needs like a salary or the availability of a job in a location, but aside from the life basics I think real happiness comes from knowing why you’re doing something. So before you take on the next job, move to a different place or whatever it is you do, make sure you know why you’re doing it.

Here’s the thing, it’s nothing new! Sony Ericsson had a video calling phone more than a few years ago. A colleague at Yahoo! reminded everyone about this with his tweet and link to some Germans on YouTube making avideo call using the Sony Ericsson k-800.

The difference is that the experience is way better now than it was then. The resolution, the camera’s and wifi mean that you’re not dependent on network access and it can be a pretty good experience. That’s all pretty big. Overall the technology is ready for mainstreaming, and Apple is great at releasing a technology when it’s ready for mainstreaming.

Launch a service too early and it’s restricted to the UberGeeks’s of the world. I have friends who had Sony Ericsson phones with video calling capability, problem was as most of us weren’t ready for the calling capability these friends spent most of their time using the phone and texting rather than video calling. It’s like people using email in 1991, facebook in 2001, twitter in 2008 etc. If the network isn’t ready for the technology it’s not going to really get adopted. I call this my technology mainstreaming theory and I’ve drawn up a little visual explaining the principle and how this might apply to video calls. Apple is potentially right on the money, launching right when the technology is ready for mainstream, I expect Android to follow suit quickly, and the fine folks at RIM, Windows to lag a bit – don’t even get me started as to when Nokia and Samsung will catch on.

(Note – if you have trouble seeing this, click on it for notes on the flickr page)

This seems to be a general trait with Sony Ericsson, they seem to be great at creating things when the technology is there, rather than when the technology has matured to a point where it becomes a really good experience. Which is what Apple’s doing here and done since their foray into smart phones.

As well, by launching Facetime as an open standard Apple’s hoping other phone manufacturers will build on it, but I’m sure they’re banking on most people wanting to buy and use the video calling capabilities on the iPhone 4. Not a bad bet by Apple.

Two bloggers/business folks I trust, were on either side of this issue last week
First, I came across a tweet by Umair Haque last week which said:

“every great company reaches a transition point: founders must cede to professional ceo’s. that’s facebook’s real problem. google did it.”

I don’t agree. We had a bit of friendly back and forth on twitter which ended with a great analogy of comparing Zuckerberg to Jobs as being like comparing NWA to T-Pain.

Another blogger/entrepreneur/investor writing about a similar problem was Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) who wrote a blog post about how worrying that whether an executive’s ability to scale is can be corruptive.

Let’s look at this specifically (in the case of facebook and Zuckerberg) and philosophically.
In the case of Facebook – Zuckerberg might not be Steve Jobs and he might not be Gates or any other founder-turned-exec who managed a company that he founded and turned it into a multi billion-dollar company. Doesn’t matter, what matter’s is that he has a solid advisory group around him as he learns. Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO) is pretty frakin smart, as is Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel and the folks at Accel and Greylock who are either investors or advisors in the company. Not to mention the numerous managers and leaders that Facebook has brought on board from Google and other large well established players.

To say that Zuckerberg is running the ship on his own is like saying that Jobs didn’t get any assists from the likes of Jonathan Ive or the other designers/engineers/leaders within Apple, not true.

Philosophically speaking, people learn throughout their whole life, as young people we learn with mentors and structures to help us learn the lessons others have learnt before us. Or we learn through experience. The first time entrepreneur or the executive learning to lead. And we continue learning throughout our lives, whether as a pensioner learning how to put videos on YouTube, or a grandparent figuring out Skype.

It’s not always easy or intuitive but that doesn’t mean that skills can’t be learnt. What people need are people to mentor them and the structure to learn effectively.

People forget that social media allows and moves people to share information and content easily. An ad that is actual a social interaction can be shared with a network fare more than a search query.

Let’s look at an example; I do a search for Virgin America, because I’m looking for a flight from NYC to San Francisco and I’m using twitter because I want to see if anyone’s had any experience on Virgin America flights, I see a “Promoted tweet” from Virgin America saying something like – “20% off of flights between Boulder and Las Vegas from us for the next 24 hours” now I’m not flying from Boulder to Vegas, but that’s a tweet I would send on (or ReTweet) to my network. All of a sudden that one promoted tweet impression has turned into nearly 1000 impressions as it goes to my network.

Let’s say I see a starbucks tweet that says that on the 15th you can bring in a mug and get a free coffee, if I bookmark that, or favourite it, that means that Starbucks has a richer bit of information and knows that I’m interested in their brand and their promotion.

Don’t get me wrong, this is assuming that brands are serious about social media and are actively engaging with the community. Brands need to offer real value and give something of benefits to the audience. The brands that pay attention and give people serious value are the ones who will be able to have their messages amplified.

For the brands who do it right, social is going to be huge for traffic acquisition because of the ability to amplify a message. That’s what all the pundits are missing in their analysis of promoted tweets. The ability to interact with the tweet and send it on to my network is huge. In the same way that building an application for facebook for a brand get’s into the news feed and gets users commenting and interacting with the brand in an amplified way.

Social media does acquisition and engagement in a way that search can’t. And that’s why I totally believe that social media will only get bigger and better as a source of costumers for companies that are smart enough to use it well.

Leave it to those crazy French Canadians to try an experiment like getting all your news from social media for five days (coverage from the Guardian and The Toronto Star). The problem with this experiment is that Social media as a tool depends on your connections. More so today than ever before, who you friend and follow is really important to how successful you’ll be using social media for anything.

Recently, Facebook launched customised news channels, where you can friend and follow CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, as well as individual contributors like Katie Couric and CNBC’s Nicole Lapin.

If you’re following CNN, the Guardian, BBC news and other news outlets on Twitter I think you’re likely to be pretty informed. But it all depends on who you follow! If you’re not connected, not following, not friending then don’t rely on the medium for your news.

The same goes with any task oriented participation through social media. If you want to get a job through twitter, follow people in HR, conduct searches for words like “job” “hiring” etc. Use Linkedin for the job hunt and you should be okay using just social media for leads (I’d never just use any one medium for a task like this, but that doesn’t change the fact that you could do it pretty successfully).

The lesson is social media can be good for almost anything, but if you don’t participate and commit, it’s likely to be good for nothing. It’s a tool, and like any tool it’s only as good as the person wielding it.

I’ve been railing against sites that made it difficult to add comments on their site for a while – my instances of twitter to and fro with Kara Swisher are legendary (if only in my own mind), where the highlight for me was when she called me the #1 guff giver (I took it as a compliment). I’m glad that AllThingsD eventually went to Disqus, I thought it was a good move which will hopefully allow them to own the conversations around their posts.

The Economist on the other hand doesn’t own their discussion. I came across this article on the Economist from Lucy Kellaway discussing the end of the MBA*. There are 10 comments on the post. 10. That’s it. I found a much richer discussion about the article on Hacker News! There is an actual discussion happening there, 52 comments and more coming. It’s a proper discussion not just a couple of blow-hards shooting their mouths off. And the community wins.

The difference between the two is that the Economist has made it really difficult to comment, and as a result you get a lot of the same people commenting and not really reading the other comments. Where as Hacker News and a lot of blogs/sites which use Disqus, make it easy for readers to reply and manage discussions rather then just allowing people to shoot their mouths off.

Whatever system you use for commenting, you need to make it easy to manage a DISCUSSION. Allowing users to reply and follow a CONVERSATION is a much richer experience than having a couple of “comments”.

*For what it’s worth, I think MBA’s are good for some people but not for everyone. Mine was definitely ROI positive already, and I don’t mean just financial returns. Mark Suster has a great post on MBAs for start ups / VCs which is a pretty good read and goes through what you get out of an MBA later on in the post – read through long enough and you’ll find a comment from yours truly – Mark uses Disqus, go figure.

So did I get all that I wanted out of LeWeb? Definitely. For me LeWeb was a lot like Biz School. When people ask me for my advice about going to business school, I always say business school is about four things, brand, education, experiences and networking. In the same way I got a lot out of the same things out of attending LeWeb.

Brand – The brand is superficial but it is a good starting point for conversations afterwards. Being able to say “I was at Leweb” or “we met at Leweb” is a nice thing. LeWeb is without a doubt the biggest internet tech conference in Europe. So having the sticker, the ticket and the ability to say “Yeah, I’ve been” is pretty cool.

Education – the speakers were great. Gary Vaynerchuck was inspiring, Chris Sacca was super smart. The panels were engaging and the debates were relevant. But like Biz school, you didn’t need to attend this to get the education (in fact, I didn’t sit through all of the speakers because I knew Loic was going to be putting the videos on line.

Experiences and networking – sitting in a room next to the head of Microsoft’s Bizspark programme who I’ve been following on Twitter. An impromptu Canadian tweetup, winning a Nespresso machine, bumping into people whose blog’s I’ve read, whose companies I admire and whose investments are in line with what I want to do, that was the real value for me out of the conference. I’m hoping that the dividends I’ll get from meeting people at LeWeb will pay out for years to come.

Now as for the conference, here are my thoughts, let’s split em up into the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good – the people. Everyone I met at LeWeb was smart, engaged, curious and a valued contact in some way or another. LeWeb attracts a lot of the best entrepreneurs, investors and people in big companies in Europe and indeed the World. I’ve never met so many smart people in such a short burst of time. Also, outlining the participants at LeWeb ahead of time was great. You could identify people, message them on Twitter and meet up. Or if you’re like me, bump into people, sit next to people and just start random conversations with people sometimes after reading their name badges and looking them up online briefly.

The Bad – I don’t think LeWeb used twitter well enough. I would have loved to see all the attendants twitter IDs in the programme, so you could message them directly. It made it too hard to figure stuff out. Sure a lot of presenters were smart enough to engage and put their twitter and other contact info up front but this wasn’t done often enough – LeWeb could have helped this.

Also bad – it was great that LeWeb had a big screen showing live twitter streams with the event hashtag #leweb, but it would have been great to have more of the Q&A run through Twitter. Having people run around with a mic or having to come down to the front in this day and age is pretty crappy if you ask me. How would I have improved this? Hash tags for every session in the programme if you have a question ask it on twitter with the specific hashtag. Can’t ask it in 140 characters? Too bad.

The ugly – Although the conference was billed to be about real-time web it did seem that it was more about Loic, his friends, French start ups, and buzz words for a large chunk. Loic was called out by Gary Vaynerchuck when he said that LeWeb was a community and Gary said something like if this is a community why are they sitting up there while everyone else is sitting in the audience. Too True. A community engages and discusses and grows together (all things that were possible at LeWeb), the plenary room – for the most part – was a bunch of presentations that you could view online before and after LeWeb.

The Ugliest – Too much talk. I’m so tired of the same old “Oh, it’s so difficult in Europe” or the Europe versus the US for starting something debate. The killer for me was the European gang chat, where a number of European entrepreneurs, investors and smart people sat up on stage and ranted about language and legislation, or pontificated on the differences between starting something in Europe versus starting something in the US. This especially pissed me off as a couple of minutes earlier (literally) Gary Vee was on stage talking about how you have to be passionate about what you do, and not be scared of some hard work.

Quit your crying people. Yes it can be more difficult to build stuff out of Europe, but at the same time it can also be far more rewarding. You have access to some of the smartest people in the world, the best education and the best communication technologies available today – 10x what your parents had when they built their businesses. If you can’t succeed it’s not because governments are holding you back, it’s because you’re not focused enough and not delivering what the market wants.

LeWeb was great, I really enjoyed it and meeting people was awesome. I think part of it was the fact that I’m no longer in London. In London you get that buzz and can have meetings with so many more people then you can here in Switzerland. However, if I can afford the time and the costs, I’ll be back next year – which has to be the best indicator of success I can think of. At the same time, I hope LeWeb next year takes my theme from this year and helps more people learn to do.

“Whilst free traffic (as opposed to paid-for Adwords) is highly desirable – and we certainly do well from it ourselves – you should never rely on it as your primary source of new business.”

I couldn’t agree more. Not just because algorithms may change and the pipe you’re relying on may break as Duane writes, but also there’s just so many more ways to drive traffic and raise awareness today.

Let’s put SEM aside for one moment and talk about natural low cost digital traffic drivers. With Twitter, facebook, Linkedin, digg and other networks driving more and more traffic there’s no excuse for having SEO as you’re only digital marketing channel let alone on and offline marketing channels.
Don’t get me wrong, I do think SEO is important, and not just from a Google perspective. Naming pages appropriately, having simple readable code, good linking strategy, and making sure pages can be read by the search gods can also lead to users having a better experience.

But we’re seeing a shift from search to recommendations with Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and digg as other potential good traffic drivers. There’s others too. Have a solid interaction plan, interact with the other blogs with other great readers and leverage their audience. Don’t be a troll or a jackass but add value outside of your site and lead people to your content for more value.

It’s not just about executing a varied digital marketing plan it’s also about measuring, measuring, measuring! The great thing about digital is that there’s great tracking and analytics available so you can see which channels are really converting and which ones aren’t. I can check on my analytics tool and see that Twitter and Facebook are great drivers of traffic to my blog, I can also see that avc.com also drives a lot of users – and disqus as well. So I know what’s working when and how well, there’s no doubt that this can’t work for businesses as well.

Newscorp feels that Google should be paying for access. MSFT is talking about paying Newscorp for their content. The rationale being that perhaps this will make Google follow suit. Meh. Sorry Newscorp, Google’s not responsible for your declining newspaper revenues, no more so than it’s responsible for the success of Huffington Post.

What is responsible is slow versus fast. Murdoch himself said:

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow”

Google isn’t killing the news paper business, innovation is leaving it behind. Craigslist is doing more for classifieds with less. Ebay is doing more for selling stuff with less. Blogs, like the Huffington post, are doing more for real time news with less. These new businesses are eating the News business’s lunch and the newspaper companies are too slow to respond.

Rupert, dude, go ahead and block Google. Google’s not stealing revenue; you’re not capturing the potential of the internet. What you need to do, is get beyond the Google question, make your papers leaner, more cost effective and start leveraging the internet. Focus on innovation and new profitable revenue models. Ask the telegraph and the Guardian for tips. Do more with less faster. Until you do that you’ll continue to see your bottom line shrink.

I love the way people are more in control of the news now more than ever. Last month Carter-Ruck a law firm tried to threaten and sue into silence media outlets who wanted to report on Oil-traders Trafigura. Twitter users responded in droves, the “hashtag” (which is how you label something as part of a movement on twitter) #trafigura blew up, millions of tweets, multiple blog posts and finally the injunctions promised were overturned. People made sure the news was reported.

Then yesterday Dick Nick Griffin – a man who I cannot even begin to describe, as even a potty mouth like myself doesn’t have words strong enough to describe the hatred he spews – was on BBC Question Time (a political panel show). The BBC has taken a lot of flack for having him on, but as his party has won a couple of MEP seats the BBC’s charter demands that he be given a platform like all other credible parties. Like it or not the BNP is a political party in the British system. Like it or not they’ve won seats. And like it or not there are non-racists who are starting to find commonality in what the BNP is pushing. It’s not right, but it’s real.

Anyway, there’s been a couple of movements/memes on twitter that have really shown what the public actually think of the BNP leader. The first yesterday was a movement to refer to Dick Nick Griffin as #fathitler. I found this amusing. Then Casseteboy went and remixed out the appearance on QT, in a brilliant piece on Youtube (embedded below – if you’re on fbook and you can’t see it, take the 1 minute and check out the video). If that wasn’t enough today there’s a hashtag #ijustsawnickgriffin where Twitter users are tweeting I saw Dick Nick Griffin… here are some of my favourites:

#ijustsawnickgriffin coming straight outta Compton with a crazy motherf#k*r named Ice Cube
#ijustsawnickgriffin in Mr Jerk ordering curried goat
#Ijustsawnickgriffin only eating the white bits in Oreo cookies!!!!!

The YouTube clip:

He’s become targeted as the joke he really is through social media and I love it.

Sure we can protest, sure we can throw eggs, but I believe the twitter treatment of Dick Nick Griffin is the best way of exposing him for what he is… a joke.

Bigger picture; the news isn’t the same anymore. A few people in power can no longer dictate what is news worthy and what treatment the news should receive. People are being united through social media and are able to force the news to be transparent and fair like it was meant to be and I feel privileged to be a part of this change.