36 Ideas I Got from BRITE '09 (Day 1)

A big "thank you!" to all our speakers, staff, and community for making BRITE '09 such a success and such a rich conversation over the last two days.

At the end of our first day, I provided a speed-reading run through of 30-odd ideas that stood out from the handwritten notes I'd jotted throughout the day's presentations.  Several people asked afterward if I would post them online, and so, in order, here they are…

1.    Four T's: Trust, Transparency, Truth, and Transformation
2.    Follow the model of Mint: offer valuable advice to your customers on what services they need, irrespective of which ones are offered by your own company
3.    Always ask online: What are your goals?
4.    Build brands without brand advertising
5.    The one way you can shape word of mouth: craft a compelling story
6.    99% of people observe and 1% engage, but it's hard to show the value of the observers
7.    The two goals of social networking: get laid, or get business
8.    PR and customer service are now inextricably linked
9.    We are in a period of media reforestation
10.    Every company should be a media company now; you can be a content creator, or an aggregator for the mass of niches
11.    Overheard by NYTimes "If the news is important, it will find me." – How will your news find your customer?
12.    Your brand = your product + your Google juice
13.    Your product has become your advertisement; your customer has become your ad agency
14.    "There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” quoting Raymond Williams in "Culture and Society"
15.    Your product is never "finished," it should be a process; involve your customers.
16.    Simplify and get out of the way – then let your customers take over. (quoting Craig Newmark)
17.    "the people formerly known as customers"
18.    a better term for "crowdsourcing" – "community production"
19.    Innovation is no longer about "built to last," it is innovation as a fluid, organic, dynamic process
20.    It requires cultural change to shift from "we must perfect the product before we release it" to Silicon Alley's "perpetual beta for customer input"
21.    As you conceive of your community, put your customers at the center of it, not your company
22.    Online communities draw vital strength from living together offline as well
23.    Remember the 1/9/90 Rule for your community: 1% highly active contributors, 9% occasional contributors, 90% consumers
24.    Technology is necessary, but not sufficient, to build a platform
25.    The technology is not that hard to build; but a platform requires technology + content + users + activity
26.    The value we have taught companies to create is inauthentic, brittle, and unsustainable.
27.    We are not in a recession, or a depression, we are in a compression:  the metacrisis is that industries are failing the test of thick value vs. thin value
28.    Strategic behavior (maximize my benefit, and ignore yours) has led us to the zombieconomy.
29.    How do we reconceive value creation – in terms of behavioral innovation?
30.    Five paths to behavioral innovation: stewardship, trusteeship, guardianship, leadership, partnership.
31.    Win by offering a loss advantage: the same product or service, but inflicting less loss upon the community and environment.
32.    "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw)
33.    Pursue the business or project that is closest to your heart – that's what innovators like Boxee have done.
34.    Whatever business you are in today is going to be disrupted by somebody.
35.    The #1 reason why entrepreneurs built their company: to make a difference (not to make money)
36.    The heart of the thick economy is the open API – allowing others to build on your platform.

The above are all paraphrases (except for the GBShaw and RWilliams quotes).  The ideas were shared by:  Jeff Fleischman & Darryl Gehly (1, 2); Max Kalehoff (3); Sanjay Sood (5); Lisa Hsia (6); Avner Ronen (7); Steve Rubel (8, 9, 10, 11); Jeff Jarvis (12, 13, 14, 15, 16); Jeff Howe (17, 18); Mark Yolton (19, 20, 21, 22, 23); Adam Nash (24, 25); Umair Haque (26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31); Aaron Cohen & Yaron Samid (32, 33, 34, 35, 36).

These are just MY take-aways that I jotted down from day 1.  You can read everyone else's on Twitter:
http://tinyurl.com/ab2tom  It looks like the most cited meme among the crowd was the number 7 above.

On Day 2 (today), we broke out into parallel sessions, so I let the audience provide the recap at the end.  We'll hopefully include that in our (eventual) video footage.

Thanks again!