SOBCon 2010 Interview Series: Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker on Ethics, Trust and Internet Famous

SOBCon is one of the few events that ReveNews is proud to not only attend but sponsor. The collaborative environment Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker have developed is unique in a time of bigger, louder, and more impersonal “social” conferences. The following is part of our interview series with participants of SOBCon 2010. Enjoy.

Why did you start SOBCon?

Liz:  Terry made me do it. (Laughs)

Terry: Yeah, that is pretty close to true actually. This whole saga began back in 06’ when I discovered Liz’s blog, like a lot of people do, because of the uniqueness of her voice.  In this particular post she created an analogy about how blogging was like a Ferrari. That intrigued me and I was compelled to write a comment.  Liz responded to it and the next thing I knew I started showing up at her Open Comment Nights. One Open Comment Night I just sort of blurted out, “Hey wouldn’t it be great if we got together in Chicago so we could meet face to face?” That’s my pragmatic approach to things. I like people and when I start to form relationships with them I want to meet them.  Now Liz, of course, took it to a whole other dimension.

Liz:  I said, “No. Absolutely not! Do you know how much work that would be?”  But Terry insisted, so I responded, “Think about it for six weeks and if you still want to do it maybe we will.” Terry persisted so then I said, “Alright. If we are going to bring all these people to Chicago we probably ought to give them some content or something to do so they’ll have a reason they can write it off the trip on their taxes.”

To give you some context the first event was in 2007 when people were still arguing over whether business bloggers should even have their picture on their blog; whether they should talk about anything personal on their blog; whether they should accept advertising. We had this little conference called The Relationship Blogger’s Conference, a networking event where one hundred people showed up and immediately knew each other from their interactions online so a high trust environment was immediately established. Trust has always been an integral part of the event.

What developed into SOBCon is truly not a conference; (below Liz and Terry at SOBCon ’08) it’s kind of a think tank. Only one hundred fifty people will fit in the room, and so out of those one hundred fifty people, whether attendees, sponsors, or speakers, somebody has to present the content.  Everybody brings something to the table and everybody works as a team to learn from each other. Terry you could translate that into something that’s meaningful I think. (Laughs)

Terry:  Absolutely.  I think so.  (Laughs) During the first we realized, wow, there’s something special here, this trust environment with everybody in the room no matter their business focus or how they classified themselves. Egos got checked at the door. Mutual respect is why those attending were able to forge meaningful relationships.

It has evolved that we have more corporate sponsors, but when they plug into this concept they fit right in. Last year we had some large corporate sponsorships- Allstate, Colgate, Wal-Mart- and they came in and sat down and opened up because of the honest approach we took in discussing their products and ideas.

Big corporations like the Allstates and Wal-Marts of the world are not often comfortable with opening themselves up in that manner. What changed in the SOBCon environment?

Liz:  That is not the ethic of the event. The way the conference is built is that it self-selects who’s in the room, including sponsors. When I tell a sponsor about the conference, the main thing I talk about is the context around the content. The speaker speaks for twenty minutes then becomes the leader of the panel for the next twenty minutes. Afterward they sit at a table with everyone else on a small mastermind team and for the next fifty minutes works with that team applying information and ideas to their business.

Two things come out of that.

One is that you can’t work for two days with three or four other people on your business without developing deep networking relationships. People tell me they get frustrated when they go see a panel, get interested in an idea, walk out in the hallway when somebody stops them and the idea is gone. You don’t get to apply any of your ideas at most conferences and we wanted to create an event with actionable ideas. It’s not simply passing around business cards. When you leave you can actually say you worked with the people around you.

The second thing is the people who don’t want to do this don’t come.  People that do attend want a weekend working on their business as opposed to working at their business.  The people or sponsors who don’t want to do that, quite frankly, we don’t want them in the room.

Terry:  It’s not the cool kids in one corner and everyone else in the other. We just came from SXSW and there was buzz all over the place.  Everyone was off doing their own thing and nobody had access to certain people. And I’m thinking, “Gee, at our event if you come and sit across the table from somebody   they’re just a human just like you and if you want to ask them about this, that, or the other and get some feedback on something you know you’re going to get it”. That personalization is part of the uniqueness of it that we bring.

Liz:  That is the essence of SOBCon.  I would rather have one hundred fifty people in a room that I can really talk to and enjoy and go and do some great learning with. It’s so much work just so people can have the skin of pudding thin conversations. It’s hard to have a rich and fulfilling experience in that environment

How do you see SOBCon evolving?

Liz:  We’d all like to be in one room so that it never loses that highly focused, structured, high trust environment but we are going to branch off into doing some SOBCON verticals that allow for laser sessions in different parts of the country. So people can get a taste of what’s it’s like to do interactive instructional design, learn hands-on, and go home with things they can apply.

Terry: I think focusing on small and micro business is a logical place for SOBCon to go. It’s great to give back the information we’ve learned.  It all revolves around helping people do business and make money. We want to encourage people to do it in a humanistic way that is ethical and is about building relationships.

You can still be a capitalist and a humanist.  They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Terry:  Exactly.  If you walked up to anybody that has had a SOBCon experience, maybe started a business or gone forward with the ideas they gained, I think they would say, “We want to do business from the heart.”  And I think we’re unabashedly pro-active about that.  Aren’t we Liz?  I think we are.

Liz:  (Laughs).

Terry:  Unabashedly.  Aren’t we?

Liz:  Unabashedly.  You find that word in Playboy.

Angel: (Laughs).

Liz:  It’s true.  It’s like running a saloon.  You want to have a lot of people in there who are having a good time. But if somebody gets out of hand you want to be in control so they don’t spoil everyone’s fun.   Our role in the community, part of the intentional serendipity thing, is to set up the experience. You know everybody talks about experiences online well you can do it offline too.  You set up the experience in such a way people are free to share ideas and have their conversations but not be rude or let things get out of hand.

What my dad did with a register in a bar, I do with a blog and a computer. There isn’t a whole lot of difference.  He got out from behind his bar and went to the local restaurant and left tips for everybody in the restaurant as an invitation, an excuse, a reminder to come back and visit his bar.  I leave my blog and go out to Twitter and Facebook and places like that as a reminder and excuse to come back to my blog. What’s the difference?

I think the word social media is going to go away soon enough.  They’re using it to mean technology, well crayons are social media and so is alcohol.

One would be a social lubricant.  The other one is social media…

Liz:  It’s media that gets us to rely and talk to each other.  The bar wasn’t what made the difference it was the people in it.

Building off of Liz’s saloon analogy, how has the recession impacted the way we do business online?

Liz:  When the Great Depression hit what happened?  Everybody didn’t have jobs and corporations couldn’t hire them. Folks had to go out, find their own way in their own kind of work. Now we are in a time when there are lots of people finding their own way and creating their own kind of work. We also are becoming very discerning consumers. We don’t simply follow the lead of big business anymore, so if companies want to win us over they have to listen to us. With the resources we have on the Internet I think learning is the most important thing we can do right now.

I just watched Dune again last night, and one of the great quotes from Dune is the Muad’Dib, “the first thing he learned was how to learn which made him a very great learner.”

Terry:  Think of the entrepreneur mindset. I think the Internet is a medium that has allowed people to explore and if they have the yearning to pursue building a business.  I think that is the uniqueness of our time. I think when we fully come out of this they will call it the Great Recession, but it really is a good time for folks to go out and pursue what they want to build. It’s great to be around such people because they are always talking about ideas and you can’t help but get caught up in that passion.

Liz:  And what is so exciting is a company, Intuit, one of our sponsors this year, has gone from a huge exploding brand to this small business focused brand and broken down all the silos in between. They are handing ideas over, showing people how to integrate their small business on many levels. They have technology where I can invoice you from my phone and you can pay me from yours.

Or take Rick Murray who is President at Edelman Digital.  He says to me,  “When we started measuring things we started to lose the art of marketing. Marketing is being able to talk to people.”  I thought that was an awesome statement.

The web is not straight lines. You know it’s not me across the counter from you and you across the counter from the next guy. The ideas are connected and who the hell can remember who had the original? The smart ones are simply acting on them.

With all the fragmentation of the web there might be a large consolidation of things. Do you guys feel that is true?  Do you have concerns from a business standpoint about net neutrality?

Liz:  I’m about as apolitical as things get.  I don’t like anybody telling me what I should think, end of story.  You tell me to take my hand off the table I’ll lift everything but one finger.  Net neutrality is too big of a subject to answer and way too complicated to put together simply. At the end of the day I don’t believe that anyone should own the Internet and the Internet should probably stay dumb because the people on it are smart enough to figure out how it should work.

As far as consolidation goes, innovation doesn’t come from consolidation because the bigger you are the more you want to protect what you have. You’re more likely to take a risk when you’re smaller. Fluid partnerships make for more innovation.

I think businesses and people in general are always looking for what’s next in the next five years. What’s the big paradigm shift?  What business should be paid attention to online?

Liz:  We should be paying attention to what evolves offline.  It’s the merging of online and offline as people integrate their devices into their lives in ways they can’t even imagine now. Digital is going to be everywhere and you’ll be able to contact people everywhere. You won’t be able to get away from it. That is not necessarily a bad thing.

I wrote an answer to a comment today on my blog that there are dangerous and scary things in every part of our world, it’s just that we grew up and got used to most of them. Now we are just getting used to some new ones because of the new technology. In terms of privacy they may seem more dangerous and scary. We’ll bring to it whatever we bring to it and were all going to take from it whatever we take from it, but it’s going to seamlessly integrate into our lives just like television has.

How will that impact the so-called “Internet famous”?

Liz:  You know Internet famous is not Oprah famous. But you know Internet famous is going to be bigger than Oprah famous over in the next ten years. That is why, I think, Oprah was brilliant enough to get off of television because she figured that out. The person coming up behind her can grow exponentially but at this point in her career Oprah can only grow incrementally. She’s already got the audience online so it was time for her to leave at her peak. If she moves online and starts controlling her future she can carry that audience forward and become Oprah Internet famous. That is one thing I’m watching. It’s like when we went book famous to radio famous to television famous to movie star famous.

Sort of Internet will kill the video star?

Liz: Yes! (laughs)

I completely agree with your supposition that those online will become more famous. The issue facing those who have become Internet famous is that they seem to forget that there is a privacy cost involved. I think a lot of people have been blindsided by that.

Liz:  I had a conversation with John Swanson about that. I said, “You know Oprah always had sponsors and people between her and the audience. No one ever assumed that you could just email Oprah and she would email you back.” Swanson said, “The problem with social media is you’re building two relationships; one with your audience as a brand and one as your audience as a person. Some people forget they are making relationships with real people. As they get more Internet famous they forget that those real people expect the relationships to continue as before.”

At the end of the day it’s all about maturity.   You get put on a pedestal and it feels really good and you want to be the golden child but what you don’t realize is that everybody else in the world is defining you as this golden child. And you don’t know how that definition is made up, what the lines are, so sooner or later you step outside that definition and they kick the pedestal out from under you. While you’re on that pedestal you start treating people as if they are not people anymore because you’re in the limelight and they’re not and somehow are less important.

But maturity tells you that the world doesn’t revolve around you. So don’t feel sorry for yourself when a hundred thousand people try and mob you. Feel grateful, because, well, you asked for it. The minute you have maturity you have perspective.  But there’s conflict if I want to play with the other kids and you want to be the rock star because you’re not mature enough to figure out it’s not about you in the first place.

Do you think companies have forgotten the offline people because they’re so stressed about dealing with the noise people can make online?  Like SouthWest Airlines, for instance, has forgotten about normal customer service just because they are so micro focused on treating Kevin Smith and making sure that he’s okay.

Liz:  Yeah, they are too focused on the people who can make noise online.

Terry:   Customers are customers however they choose to communicate with us. If they want to choose posting something online obliviously businesses have to be there to communicate back. I think that paradigm shift has already developed. On the other hand, you have to know the value of customers is the same no matter what sort of forum they communicate with you on. I believe that wholly.

I think Liz is right that these tools just become a medium like television, radio, any communications device. Social media will eventually get absorbed and I guess when you think about it it’s just a part of everyday life. I think these curves of technology adoption are faster than they have been in the past.  There was a YouTube video that somebody put out about the growth of social media, I can’t remember who it was but it was a two or three minute video that really encapsulated about how long it took for television to get fully absorbed and radio.

Liz:  Erik Qualman’s video.

Terry:  Yeah,   but the fun part is what’s next.

Liz:  I think for the kids who are graduating right now the job he’ll be doing when he’s thirty doesn’t even exist yet.

Terry:  We’ve seen a lot of evolution and it makes me excited for changes to come.