Robert Scoble and Shel Israel at the podium at WOMBAT 2 in San Francisco

Live blogging this. I'll pull out a few nuggets from their keynote at Day 2 of WOMMA's WOMBAT 2 (Word of Mouth Basic Training).

Shel's up first.

Shel admits that he started writing Naked Conversations as a reporter -- as a topic to cover - but along the way he fell under the spell of blogging as a force for good.

Robert's loony idea to "blog the book," says Shel, was a touch of brilliance. The people in the blogosphere became the third co-author of the book, fact checking, disagreeing, adding new stories, etc.

What do my customers want? asks Shel rhetorically. You can't put that on a spreadsheet. But you can find out through a blog.

Now Scoble. 

He's a WOM (word-of-mouth) case study himself.  Eight days ago he told 15 people he was quitting his job at Microsoft to join a podcasting startup.

Within 12 hours he was getting calls from the Wall Street Journal and Reuters and AP for confirmation. The story has been written up in 130 newspapers.

He's rambling but whatever. His style on stage is no different than his style in his blog -- no pretensions, casual, upbeat. Actually I take that back. I think he might be a better writer. More cogent on his blog.

(Robert, that's not a criticism. You're always amazing.)

How do you start a corporate blog?

Says Robert, go first to the search engines and enter keywords you want to be found on. See what's there. Read those other blogs.

Then start blogging and you can link to the other blogs already talking about your topic. That demonstrates you're listening. Which is a key piece of being an effective blogger.

About his next gig...

Going to be VP of PodTech, a Silicon Valley startup. Was interviewed by John Furrier, who started the company. Thought he was a great guy (an awshucks type). Saw he had great connections. Just got venture funding.

Story leaked so fast he hasn't had time to sit down with John to talk about exactly what he'll do. Will include some videocasting.

"There's hunger for content for all of these devices."

The death of distance

One of Robert's favorite concepts. A kid from India called him up and interviewed him via the Internet to create an impromptu podcast.

Shel: his next book is about Global Neighborhoods.

The people with the greatest influence are those who are most generous to the community. He tells us about a 35-day trip to 11 countries he's taking -- leaving August 11th -- to see who has new ideas. (In the company of a Canadian venture capitalist - didn't catch his name.)

Pete Blackshaw asks...

Companies are stumbling a bit as they try to enter the blogosphere. How do you maintain that critical level of authenticity and credibility (if you're trying to market your products and services)?

See the WOMBAT blog (search on June 20 and June 21, 2006) for great coverage of the conference.

Technorati: womma womm word of mouth

Powered by Qumana

Comments

[Judy Gombita]

I remember reading about that tour: "The Rick Segal and Shel Israel 'Tour de Tech' is taking place August 11th - September 3rd."

FYI, here's the URL to Rick Segal's blog, The Post Money Value: Rick's Rants or A VC Loonie with a Toonie: http://ricksegal.typepad.com/pmv/

Great live blogging, Debbie. Please keep it up! Cheers,
Judy

[Robert Hruzek]

I love the "blog the book" comment! The concept of using the blogosphere for research/fact checking/etc. is simple, yet still results in one of those slap-the-forhead, "oh yeah!" moments.

In James Surowiecki's book, "The Wisdom of Crowds", he basically confirms the validity of such a technique.
The blogosphere could, under the right conditions, qualify as a superintelligent organism. Who wouldn't want to utilize the power and value of that?

Pretty exciting stuff!

[Jon Husband]

Hi, Debbie .. looked all over your site for email address, and www.debbieweil.com seems to be on the fritz re: contact.

Just fyi, I wanted to contact you just to let you know a new version of Qumana with a lot of minor bugs fixed, and some additional font and date/time stamp features, etc. will be released in about a week.

[Debbie Weil]

Thanks Jon. And yes my blog/site at www.debbieweil.com is down for another couple of hours. Frustrating... Hello, Dreamhosters.com! You're my new hosting service and I'm not happy about this!