Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

[funny thing is he began with acknowledgments and thoughts -- and he's right, it would have been a much better flow with that having been a running loop of images while everything got settled!]

I think I know what you want: more!

Jacquelyn Novogratz - Acumen - singlehandedly changing the way philanthropy - did this

advertisements for cigarettes with babies and doctors

[used to be]
interrupt people, spam them, because it's our job

then, Internet: ideavirus, people talk about us because we deserve it

those days are ending

[Santa Clause 1836-2000 picture]

no brands recently built on the back of television

system based on money being replaced by

* who is going to be there
* who is going to lead us?

[he'd be so ticked that i'm taking notes]

shortage of leaders
*anyone* can be a leader

once people buy food, shelter, health care
the next thing they buy is meaning

Traditional tribes:
church
work
community (geographically near us)

as an advertiser, how do i create movements so that they can connect

red hat ladies

triathlon: these people don't even like swimming

allowed Ukranian folk dancers to find each other

clap your hands in unison, in rhythm
4-5 seconds, and we had it

Outdoor competitive ironing league

Roller derby
women try to hurt themselves

Shriners

Definitions
crowd - bunch of people
tribe - movement,

Pirates are a tribe [LOL]

this croud going to see Harry Houdini, not a tribe. no outsiders (everyone wore hats then)

this country music crowd IS a tribe

not about number of people in crowd, hits

even though it's more difficult to grow a tribe, it's worth it.

Bigger than word of mouth

make believe data: brand value increases with quality of tribal connection

Barack Obama's fundraising
10 years #1 live grossing act in the world, with only one song hitting the top 40 in entire career
most of their fans went to most of the shows!

Bo Taylor, never met him, hero of mine, died a few months ago

member of crips, fighting against bloods
those are tribes
after the riots he spent the rest

Megan Casey runs the tribe at Squidoo - runs -- you don't get to tell people what to do

very few organizations have someone that does hat all day

Gary Vaynerchuk, Better than Zero
no media connections, people listen
getting better at connecting the people who follow him to each other

United Way - old way, top down, payroll deductions, (and his Dad ran United Way as a volunteer one year)
Kiva - connect loan-makers to loan-takers, fastest growing charity in history probably

I'm talking about movements
groups of people who want to make change happen

[how many are actually tribes of people who *don't* want change? Jimmy Buffet fans even, supporters of the president of Senegal (at the UNITY conference)

Tide has a problem. None of us care about

Whole Foods market fooled themselves into thinking they had a tribe.

then they raised prices, got more stores

instead of being purveyors to a smaller tribe

Tribes are longer lasting
but they are not free
take a lot of effort

most marketers will fail because they will

reading the book just before i sent it in, most of this book is "if you want to do that, no five steps approaches, tricks to manipulate people into following you, you can't do it that way

[old slide about managing tribes? heh]

Mormon church: human spam
but how they actually grow is because neighbors talk to neighbors, family members talking to family members

125,000 books published in U.S.
maybe 12 by new authors
I don't know what Garr Reynolds look like
I sold hundreds of his book through Squidoo
[the powerpoint guru]
Garr really led this tribe, was generous to this tribe. The book was really a souvenir,

Amnash goes around the world meeting with tribes of people obsessed with statistics and analytics

Mdot triathlon rolling in money

Rules about tribes, some which I learned from you

Groucho: I don't want
the reverse groucho rule:
I don't want to be a member of any club that would have you.

Many tribes are content to keep it small, special.

you can make a tribe bigger, or tighter
Oprah Winfrey big tribe-- just two hours

can also be too exclusionary

could this event have 2,000 people here?
You are the right people to be here
lots of hoops to jump through on purpose
makes it tighter

not everyone will join any tribe

if everyone joins, it's not a tribe

oxygen breathing? not a tribe

[there are so many people who want to belong to something and don't have anything]

[but you can have a tribe with everything. there were times and places where everyone had one religion. PWGD can be like that, can be an

Laura Fitt - makes a really good living consulting about social media, working from home, raising two kids

I almost called the book "positive deviants"

went to Vietnam to help
Jerry instead went and looked at the village until they found a family that was doing great
he went to that woman and asked her to teach others

he led from the "bottom up" -- not a good expression, but the best one I have

Triiibes: 100s of groups, 31 other people online 4:30 a.m.
many failures, but no one saw those

Etsy handmade crafts - people who sell also buy
ostensibly your competition - but it's a tribe [i'd say community]

all you need is 1,000 true fans [this is so Changents]

as an author, if you can't get a hundred people to recommend your book, you lose
doesn't matter about shelf space

[his total tangent on the Kindle]
now that my wife doesn't work at audible.amazon
it could be social
most of the people using kindle are women

book readers are only 5% of population, we're desperately looking for

it could make reading a social event, so I can see what other people are writing about each page
see what percentage of the book others have read before they stopped, before I buy

don't you want to know the other 400 people who read the obscure Ukranian novel

you can't right now

all leaders do, all day long, is do things that 0can take

Pentagon one of the

Associate Professor at the War College
made a powerpoint about the future of the pentagon
last stop, showed powerpoint to joint chiefs of staff
he said something that no one wanted to hear
but

by possibly offending five people he affected

you don't need everyone, you just need some people, a few people

[this all maps so well to what I've always wanted to do with PWGD]

one disk jockey just kept playing Harry Chapin, top-down building
his daughter Jen is building a tribe

Jen and her husband Stefan are here

[that's not mch of an intro]

[funky base]
[Passive people]

how to join Jen's tribe?

what's fascinating

can just google Jen Chapin and join and follow

what Jimmy Buffet does for a living is what Grateful Dead used to do, connect people who want to goto a party

Kristen Hirch has been making music for 20 years... even though she looks 15

Del died at 92, after being first to be married in San Francisco to another
when she was 21, she read a book with the word lesbian
first time she knew

create a tribe where there was not one before
bring people who would not be together before

Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected lower class of Venezuela

you can say everything's welcome
or you can say you must apply

both work

The masses don't join tribes when they get started
they join after they get big

Heretics
the only tactic

i've been gearing up to get to the important parts

Martin Luther said everyone should have a bible

he also started a massive branch of a religion

can't be a heretic and "sheepwalker" at teh same time

we still don't know the name of the person standing in front of

Robin worked at Targay before i

Target was KMart but dustier

then they brought in

and she was almost as
until it became the organization

Jim Morrison got arrested, booed offstage, because he stood for something

Faith is human nature, believing in connection, believing things can get better

Religion is the rules invented to support faith, the status quo.

Heretics have so much faith they have no choice but to challenge the religion.

What's so hard is lots of people have faith but all these religion rules are around, to control people

if you try to control the system, the tribe will not show up

rules get in the way

Joan of Arc taught people if you stand up you make things better

[i don't think his balloon factory example is effective, but hey... who dislikes unicorns?]

Lisa made me change the title from "Unicorn in the balloon factory]

Heretics don't let rules or religion stand in the way of their faith.

"nothing bad ever happens if you help your organization or company meet its goals]

[uh-huh...]

why would your boss say yes if you ask permission? Then she gets the blame if you fail and you get the credit if you succeed.

Rob Bell
Velvet Elvis
- evangelical christians

Meg Ryan
climb rocks and maybe fall
coaches

Being a community organizer, organizing people to [work together]
is how you make change happen

leadership = marketing

Seven elements for leaders
[i thought he said we wouldn't be given this, heh]

Challenge [people in group]
Culture - set by leader]
Curiousity - decide if want to embrase something on its merits]
Charisma - charisma doesn't make you a leader,
Communicate
Connect - to people in grou
Commit - they are committed to

on the back of my business cards is pictures of my readers
reminds me my job isn't to find more readers, I have enough
it's to write

Tribe members want to:

Connect with each other
Create meaning - everyone wants more meaning
Make a difference
Be noticed
Matter

the most important one
Be missed

People want to be missed if they don't show up

informs so many of the tribes in our community

Starbucks blew it.

They lucked into a tribe. Coffee, location, attracted people who liked each other.
the expensive coffee was the admission fee

if they'd asked, how do we empower this tribe, they would be a little smaller and a lot more successful
instead they said "how do we sell coffee to people who go to dunkin donuts"

Tools don't matter. Just use the ones you need

my job is to inspire you to be inspiring

We don't need another widgit, another thing, we need to

[Seth's wearing the sox]

For my tribe or to my tribe? 4v2

telemarketers think they are entitled to do things to us

Nathan Winograd - 4 million dogs and cats murdered every year
historically, they were started to get dogs off the street

committed to make

insider community freaked out

members from humane societies across the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them
he raised

95% no-kill in San Francisco - only rabid,

Went to Tompkins county NY

went from 100% kill to 5% kill

North Carolina
then Reno Nevada

and changing the lives of tens of thousands of volunteers too

Where's your tribe?

It's not an opportunity, it's an obligation
you have to do this
the only reason is because you don't want to, not because you can't

[Questions]

Kate: my clients ask me, how many fans do you need [true fans] what's my member

Answer is, you're not doing this for the first time. There'll be something analogous.

it hurts when you ask people directly, and they reject you. but that's what I'm asking to do
can you *personally* get seven people to be in the tribe? because they actually like it

Dane wrote a book about photography that's not really about photography

Dane: does tribe get to decide the strategy?
Seth: no
tribe gets to
tribe leader can elevate someone

Martin Luther King Jr.
if he'd compromised on a bunch of things, he'd have been more successful in the short run
I could run that tribe but I don't want to
Strategy you can't let up on

i was a washed up author, got a big advance and sold only 10,000 copies after Sept. 11
went for a while without writing a book

can print a paperback book for 80 cents

how do you make a book itself remarkable?

got 20,000 milk cartons (that caused a promotion)

I got a call the night before going to press
because I was offending pasteurization
i said i didn't know

I took the line about pasteurization off, knowing one day I would be able

most people left the milk carton on the desk

wanted to tell everyone else
i didn't realize, but gave them a cool

Debbie: how clever do you have to b? Do you have to give them something.

The Dip - cheapest possible packaging for a CD - sell as an audiobook for $5
created a method to spreading to more people
it doesn't have to be clever, just something that changes the rhythm
it's not about bribing people
it's about understanding that people now have a choice about how to spend their money
not- do this because you'll get money
do this because these other people are doing it, or do this for your grandchildren that aren't born yet

cult of personality associated with being a tribe?
it's both.
Harley Davidson has a tribe for the ages. Catholic Church does too. You can build a tribe for the ages.

In a very fast-paced world, you may not have time for that.
Capacity of a single human to be a heretic

Steve should have a bench of 8 people so it doesn't matter if he retires.

can i just say something
the action figure is a joke
and all the money goes to charity

Question:
size versus depth of the tribe
you made hoops for this event
but you also lowered prices wherever you could

Answer:
you can have both
there are some people who fast all the time and live in the monastery,
and there are people who come every Christmas and put money in the collection plate

Question:
can you lose a tribe, or can you always get it back?

Seth:
All tribes go away eventually. Even if it takes a millennium.

you see it in personality tribes most quickly, but brand tribes can be lost too

the real challenge is to say, who am I doing this for?
Will

Wall Street wrecks your business because they have no limit on more

i don't need everyone to come to my restaurant
i don't need everyone to read my book

Questions:
we have 100s of chapters in cities

when a chapter reaches 150 people, it drops

magic number of 148 to make connections happen in the real world
turns out in the virtual world you can have way more

there's a reason chapters fade at 150-- when they walk in, it just doesn't feel right

no 3,000 seat restaurants
but if you have a template that can be applied to new people

in my town there's a real estate agent, he sells 80% of houses in town, he knows he can't go 2 miles downtown

Question:
How do you push a leader to form a tribe? What are your personal achievements (joys)

Seth:
1. If you care about your cause, you have no choice
2. Helping people connect, i don't think there's a higher level people can go

almost no one knows who i am, that's fine with me
but if I can introduce someone to someone else

Erin:
interested to know if you think you can create tribes in traditional structures?

Seth: so does this only work on new soil?
while I was selling advertising, went to see a woman at IBM
Ruth said I like what you're doing, but if you keep coming this way
these 8 people make things happen here
and we said Ruth sent us
there was a tribe in IBM
John Patrick was one of those
secret agents within this corporation

Then
they don't want fear, but they do want motion

Black guy, looks like A. Philip
How important is it for the CEO or whatever to be in the tribe, so doesn't feel threatened?

Seth: this is a communications question
the king doesn't want there to be a mutiny

Every CEO has said, why can't more people, more middle managers, try things that are different. We tell ourselves the CEO doesn't want this, but she does
so just FYI, we're meeting every Friday

the last 9 months I worked at Spinnaker software, my boss did not speak to me
the President was on my side
but my boss, a nice guy, didn't want that kind of change to happen

if my job had been to make him happy, i failed
but if i took my job as making David (the CEO) happy

and then I let him take all the credit

It's really easy able to

Tide has no chance of building

[Prediction: Tide will build a tribe.]

you're not going to have Ford vs. Chevy arguments with Tide vs.

for the last 30 years, because they did their job, clothes have been clean enough

Tide gets 33% of their sales from Wal-Mart
which means Wal-Mart controls Tide, not Proctor & Gamble

Clorox green-works?

the follow-up question is on greenwashing

there is definitely a tribe of green

No Impact Man, family uses zero everything
get his book when it comes out

We know clorox greening isn't authentic. They can get some of that tribe's money-- but they can't lead the tribe.

Betty - strong detractors of your approaches, any people you've won over?

Seth:
I don't think about the world that way
I was very outspoken against banner ads, spam
most marketers have come around

what a lot of tribe leaders do-- I don't look at the macro
i have no idea how

I can tell you what Micah sent in e-mail a couple days ago about how something I said

I B.L. [Hockney - blog]
there's something I don't understand
that was a campaign started around a particular kind of iron

Seth: I didn't know that.

So why couldn't Tide make something cool.

If a corporation starts it, and
it's a marketing stunt

I said, how could this be, these people are really committed

the fact that it was a corporate stunt,

built the whole company on one giant magical trend, spend $1 in advertising, get $2 in profit
you can't take a money built on that, with that much money behind it, and hope it works

[we have very little control over our own lives]

If you work for a big, publicly traded company
you're in trouble

I think the future is smaller organizations making things around tribes

B.L.:
No chance there's a Seth Godin working at

inconceivable that the shift at Proctor & Gamble

the discussion in the meetings was not Seth will save the da

"Radio was invented for marketers"

The internet was not invented for marketers.
Tribes do not exist for marketers.

Post-consumerism recession world

You have to take three steps back and start over

a lot of the tribes organized, identified by dress or phrase

how do you tell the difference
seems you want o create some of those intentionally

what's the difference between that and religion [rules]

Seth:
yeah, they are the same
the difference is, what happens when you break them
when a tribe gets very serious about itself

in our 3 month old online tribe
there are rules being created

the leader, to grow, gets rid of bad rules in the way, reinforces good rules

for instance, a ski area says no snowboarding
they lost an entire generation of young people

Question:
How do you get permission to get permission?

Seth:
Not by spamming "can I get permission"
making something remarkable enough that people tell their friends

CEO read. [I'm guessing 1-800-CEO-READ]

Dan the car guy:
willing to give away for free
when do you look at it as a business?

Seth: Are you *really* doing it for free? Then you'll know, because that's when you have

if you really were planning to do this for money
the communication
grandfather in your first 300, so they never have to be free

if you start to charge

There's a lot of teaching people a lesson thinking by people in tribes
i saw an organization shrink to half its size because he got in an argument about a parking lot
half the people quit

People debating short versus long

Question: Business to Business versus Business to consumer?
Just as - more important - in B2B

Businesses aren't rational at all-- it's just people /spending other peoples money/

Most surprising thing about how Triiibes developed
most surprised by international, ethnic, goals of people who joined
fascinating mix that never connected before
i think it represents a big step for our culture-- it's not just on Triiibes, it's happening in lots of places
going from world of
I'm sure it's a trend

scared by how many people came back and posted
I had six weeks of stuff planned and it was over in a day and a half

Question:
Free prize inside?

Tiffany's should act like they're selling the blue cardboard box-- the CEO should offer to call your wife to see how she liked the ring if you spend $10,000

Question:
successful start fringe
and many stay fringe
won't you eventually hit a wall
how could Whole Foods or Starbucks do it differently?

Your job is to
build a company around what society wants

My dad makes 90% of the child pediatric cribs in the world [or something like that]
United Auto Workers bending steel

problem is they never break

So my dad invented a crib that costs ten times more
supercomputer and a digital scale
5 times a day disengage and weigh the kid

How do you sell this thing?

Found pediatric nurses who really, really cared
they told others, and bugged the purchasing agents
gave the tribe something to surround, gave pediatric nurses a cause

Brian: triiibes web site? when to pressure and when not?

Seth:
I should have said, I wasn't managing as much.
stepping back is a leadership role
mob rule almost took over when someone said "we don't like monkey pictures" - suddenly 30 vigilantes. I had to stop that.
More fun: Identify the positive deviants and highlight them.

Casebook gave the tribe a chance to amplify.

300 active, 3,000 signed up

a tribe with nothing to do is a social

Tribes are not a democracy, and if you try to run one as a tribe, the vocal run it in a way a lot of people may not want to

I don't ask people

Research?

Have you come across an idea of a nation of tribes, with a link to a source tribe, a hierarchy?

Meetup.com is a classic example of a tribe of tribes.
Witches is one of their most popular group.

The leader of the Dauschund meetup in Austin has the same needs as the head of the coven in Salem.
Making a living helping leaders lead.

Activating people who already care over and over and over again is far more powerful than getting the undecideds.

One of the magic of Microsoft was the upgrade path.
activate people with latent interest

Endless fundraising notes - bad idea
need to end the process with "who do you know that I should know"

Question:
How do you say Whole Foods failed? they're on twitter, have a blog
Seth:
not failed-- missed opportunities
all these people came to whole foods because food was treated with respect
it could have connected people with this huge common interest

make every Whole Foods a community center

woman question:
I'm trying to be a better leader with my tribes, my students
since school took on the corporate model, was that the kiss of death for education?
teachers not interested in teaching?

Seth:
what used to call academy, way too ethnically homogenous, but it was a common purpose
when two people who go to school together, what do they talk about?

do they talk about how it got them a good job or some experience that transformed them?

give an experience that transformed them, people keep coming back

Gene: photographer's association, similar needs with others
inability to come together as one tribe
frequently warring tribes
do we lack a significant enough leader,

Seth:
Trade associations, 150 years ago, a guild, controlled access, and was continuing education
then lots of trade associations run by people who did it for a living, not passionate
$1500 you can pretend you're a professional photographer, Google can educate you on anything
So trade association has to ask

How do we make the pie way bigger, not do photography as a commodity [referenced Dane's book again]
make it valuable to be an insider
not spending time on someone whose going to take a share of your business

I thought we would find the big wins in the associations, that they would do Squidoo templates. It didn't.

Association of Associations neither.

Question:
days at Yahoo?

Seth:
I taught people at Yahoo
I didn't really have anyone working for me.

Still have the most popular portal in the world. Still huge opportunities.

Question:
Flash mobs:
how do we give back to you
go to the nearest Borders, demand your book

Seth:
Thank you, very nice offer.
If I say, let's do this. Some would like this.
some people would say, why is he doing this?

I'd much prefer you go to people you know, people who trust you, where you want to make change, and talk to them about this. I don't want them to buy the book.

if everyone do this

Girl: something that struck me on the site
Brand evangelists
so worked up in the rules, ruins the fun
Office, typical web 2.0 company, obsessed with rock band

one person in group lays down all the rules
What do you see as the best way of managing that zealotry to not poison the tribe?

Seth:
A lot of people get great satisfaction from making and enforcing rules.

Or you can give them things to do that worry.

So it's great that he's making rules about rockband, and not

the annual banquet committee, I hate them
waste all the money, obsess over the table decorations
thank god you spent 11 months doing that and not bothering me

What's the philosophical dividing line on exclusion?
If you can visualize what the tribe is like
those are the kinds of people you want to bring in

Sometimes
doing that with your customers is also critical
you have to give those people the phone number of your competition

Either Charles Schwab or Fidelity figured out that clients with 1% of their profit was a huge percent of their calls.

Is it possible for an organization to do both? Spam and build a tribe.

Harley Davidson makes more money from the clothing than the motorcycles-- most of the people buying the clothing are not in the tribe

red-haired girl:
social media is just connecting people in new ways
but on sites like triiibes, communication is not like it is face-to-face

Seth:
what we're talking about is human nature
the web and social media did not enable more tribes, it exposed them
[that's not true, certainly meetup.com and such is enabling groups that couldn't otherwise exist]
there was always a tribe of people who went to the school, Facebook exposed and amplified it.

Just because you have this tiny sliver of

You're not my friend.

No one will cross the street for you just because you're connected on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Triiibes there was the entrance cost, possibility of being
find little tiny cues about how people really are in real life

real life tribes are far more connected
but internet lets them be orders of magnitude bigger
and that's important -- everyone chips in a buck, votes

my job was to connect people

John Patrick had to get IBM CEO's permission to let pizza guy in

question from a younger woman [a lot like my 'the down side of tribes' post]
expand to the entire world
what do we do about a 4-year-old in Tucson clinging to life
we don't have room for everyone in our brain
if your circle of people is 6 billion people, at least a billion are not going to be doing well, how are you going to enjoy that hot fudge sunday

Our circles will keep getting better

we can't care about everyone all the time

[English accent] how do
Seth:

you don't take people to a place
you let them take themselves there

I had the first mac on the east coast, doing page layout
then a restaurant review
if they didn't have a break

[argh, what was the last person's name?]

Next:

go to one or other (he will be at Bryant Park outdoors]
Bryant Park

1250 Breadway @ 31st

Natural tofu even better, but a bit funkier

this role of connecting people, you talk about it as your passion, you don't often put it so explicitly

[My takeaways that weren't articulated:
there are tons and tons of structures holding back the formation of groups-- lack of time and space, but also the discouraging of it in organizations