Crossroads Dispatches

Little Vodka Infused Customer CoCreation Vignette

"Bloghers! We loved meeting you all last weekend in San Jose. You’re all such clever/inspiring/lovely/saucy people... We of ThisNext were floored!

Speaking of floored and saucy, let’s talk about VODKA. Here are the winners of the Modern Spirits Vodka drawing. We noticed that each superspecial vodka bottle is hand numbered. Wow, talk about small batch!"

So starts Alyson Wilson's breezy woosy email. I knew I liked Alyson, ThisNext.com community director, when she had a 'dark and bitter' (chocolate of course) category on her ThisNext list. And it was cinched when I saw she loved Charles Chocolates so much that owner Chuck Siegal was part of the closed beta listing his own favs.

ThisNext is a new entrant into the social commerce space (in closed beta until August 21st, but I got a demo). Based on my chat with Alyson my intuition tells me this is a curious Web 2.0 company to watch: They have wads of women working there, for starters. But this ain't a post about ThisNext. Nowthat's later.

This is about Modern Spirits' story direct from their website. Lessons on heeding the women's market, your lover as muse (yeah, I saw Cyrano de Bergerac last night), using your own life as great raw material, and writing romantic intimate stories abound:

Can true love start a business? You be the judge.

Melkon Khosrovian has long enjoyed Sunday meals with family, sipping vodka with spicy grilled meats and Mediterranean salads.

Melkon's wife, Litty Mathew, a foodie with a classical French cooking education, hated the taste and burn of straight liquor.

So he concocted little vodka infusions with fruits, spices and even tea that she could sip at family meals. She not only drank them, she enjoyed them.

Soon the couple's friends who also disliked the taste of hard liquor—including a few burly cousins who will remain unnamed—clamored for their own signature flavors.

Melkon infused celery and fennel seed for one, lavender and honey for another and an inspired chocolate-orange vodka after a party faux pas where he spilled a box of chocolates.

Soon after, Modern Spirits was born. An act of love, don't you think?

Bonus: Talk about customer co-creation and innovation: "Vodka Hits New Haute. It may cost millions to become a vintner, but for $15,000, you can produce your own superpremium vodka. Southern California-based Modern Spirits, which recently launched its own line of Haute flavored vodkas (more about them in a moment), invites those with a passion to create their own unique flavored vodka to belly up to the distillery. There, they can create their one-of-a-kind flavored spirit. The company leads clients through a five-step process to produce their custom creation, starting with a flavor profile that identifies their passions, personalities and palates." - The Nibble

Bonus Deux: ThisNext.com's PR and marketing diva raved about "Experience the Message: How Experiential Marketing is Changing the Brand World" (and if David Wolfe likes it, I'll like it.)

Wordplay: Cyrano de Bergerac's final word in the film: Panache. Stanford Summer Theater festival actor Fabrice led a post-screening discussion and I quote since his French is far and away better than mine: "Panache is personal flair, your own plume, your signature." I'd add your unique swagger. Etymology: Fig. sense of "display, swagger" first recorded 1898 (in translation of "Cyrano de Bergerac"), from French.

Passport to Understanding: Seeing Through Muwa's Eyes

 

Muwa, top right, took these photos. I noticed she was more interested in being on the other side of the camera: The creator.

At the last session at NewCommForum with Robert and Shel, a woman in the audience comments: "I thought I was up on this [blogging]. I'm starting to see this underlying sense of empowerment. That people want to have a voice. Customers are empowered."

Yeah, and engagement is more fun than passivity.

Best decision I ever made was to take a simple point-and-shoot digital camera that I could hand over to locals. I gave it to the most curious 'kid' in a crowd. It made me a lot of friends along the two-month journey to Thailand and Sri Lanka when language was a seeming barrier.

Muwa's first day shots were formal, posed. The subjects were stiff. I think they're all accustomed to posing for photographs for foreigners - the strangers that swooped in after the tsunami and gave international exposure to the plight of the indigenous Thai sea gypsy community. 

Wherever you go the world over, "cheese" smiles are contrived.

Yet something started to change.

Muwa began experimenting the second day I came over. In the cafe as the volunteers and I got bored with posing, she started to capture shots whether or not we stayed still. I didn't even notice she was still snapping photos of us.

Then she started to use the television set's reflective screen to create special effects: in one haunting photo (above, click to full res) our real-life cafe scene seamlessly blends in with a Bollywood-inspired virtual world.

Later she discovers that it's okay to turn the camera 90 degrees. And then she asks for my permission to take the camera into Tung Wa village proper.

Into areas I wouldn't necessarily have access to.

Villagers on siestas, joyously naked youngsters asleep and astride bikes, artful still-lifes illustrating her and her friend's fascination with motorbike and bicycle, pregnant moms giggling, kids shampooing their younger siblings...

As Muwa eased behind the lenses, and because she was already part of the community and culture even the posed shots took on a natural grace.

I only wish I'd thought of handing my camera to the three black-cloaked women sitting astride on a bench along the old fort wall in Galle, Sri Lanka watching the sun dip down into the waves.

Behind them a meadow fell away among cacti and palms and thirteen snowy egrets. Alas, the Muslim world is the one subculture I didn't get to deeply hang out in on my two-month journey.

In Thai, the word jai or chai means heart-mind (fused for Thais and Buddhists) and kao jai means deep understanding. There are times you enter the jai of another culture through the eyes of an insider - their selection, their framing, their angle, their interpretation, their poetry, their music, their essence. Thank you Muwa.

Bonus: The producers of Voices of Iraq distributed over 150 DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERAS across the entire country to enable everyday people - mothers, children, teachers, sheiks and even insurgents - to document their lives and their hopes amidst the upheaval of a nation being born.

In CHAIN CAMERA, director Kirby Dick relinquishes the video camera to let the students of this multicultural East Hollywood high school tell their own stories. Taking a new approach to the documentary genre, Dick decided to hand out video cameras in August of 1999 to ten teenagers in order for them to document their own lives for a week, at which point the cameras were passed on to ten more students, and so on.

p.s. These are only a fraction of the shots. You can see how this applies to what keynoter Rebecca Blood termed at NewCommForum "The Age of Participatory Culture", or the ProAm revolution; ethnography and 'deep hanging out'; artisan journalism; consumer-generated media; and learning about the world period.

tags social media consumer generated content citizen journalism blogging ethnography storytelling tsunami NewCommForum

 

In a Saturated Blogosphere, How Does Marketing Reach Out to People?

In a saturated blogosphere (most have few hits) how does marketing by blogs reach out to people? [Question #5 in So How Does It Feel to Be a Global Microbrand?]

My answer: No one reads THE "blogosphere" - that just the umbrella term that encompasses every single blog - we actually read this blog or that blog.

You start by realizing this is a social media. It's not a broadcast bulletin.

You start with connecting to affinity communities with common interests. Maybe parenting sites and blogs, offline clubs, parenting press, etc. for Stonyfield Yogurt's baby blog. Talk and link and communicate consistently with those communities.

Any old large audience most likely won't do - you want the right audience.

Figure out your unique "White Hot Center" (see pages 6-13 in What Clients Love, by Harry Beckwith; summary that doesn't do it justice here).

It's funny that Nike is lauded as a company that was built on identifying their white hot center early in running and basketball. Things change. They launched this basketball blog.

But is their own design team the WHC? I'd rather see a community-authored blog with community-rich features where basketfall fans can talk with each other and with rising athletes. Throw in the design team's riffs if you want, but that's secondary.

Social engagement is the next big thing for the entire marketplace. In this age of consumer resistance, people are avoiding brands while seeking one another. Brands must shift away from the single-minded focus on engaging consumers and instead become adept at enabling people to engage with each other. - "Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market", MediaPost, February 2006

Bonus: Chris Coulter actually does add value here, see comment 41: He disagrees with the blanket statement: Guy said…“If you take two companies with equally good products, and one knows how to suck up to bloggers and the other one doesn’t, I believe that the former will win.”

So do I. Courting the A-List bloggers only makes sense if and only if that is your WHC. Right now, as Coulter points out that is limited to particular set of products and services.

Bonus: In Copyblogger's Viral Copy report (good read, go download), Brian says:

Back when it broke, posting the Numa Numa dance on your law firm blog would have brought in traffic, but I'm not sure it would have translated into a spike in retainer agreements. (p. 5)

Amen. But then on page 7, Brian says: "You want to write things that truly connect with people, and that also result in a direct, specific and quantifiable action - a link, a Delicious tag, a vote on Digg."

But depending on your WHC, a Del.icio.us tag or vote on Digg may be perfect for your law firm or it could signal a shift to your client base that you're now edgier, tech-savvy, and you're more interested in the next Google as a client than the next Harrod's. (No they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but trying to be all things to all people doesn't work either.)

From biz book summary: WHC = "This is the key area where influencers who will endorse your product to followers are located. [Which may include but aren't limited to:] These are the editors whose reviews dictate the trends of the industry. [In other words, who are the folks that sway others and where do they hang out? Can you offer a compelling enough experience so they will hang out on your affinity group blog too?]

Nike found the white-hot center of running and later on, in basketball. [Everyday players look up to rising athletes especially ones that came from similar backgrounds as they. Nike recognized potential when they saw it.] They chose Michael Jordan, who wasn't even first choice in that year's pro draft of college players. Nike's earliest contact with Tiger Woods was when he was playing golf as a freshman in high school."

Khao Lak: The Andaman Coast Back in Business

Photos of incinerators paint an even less complete and accurate a picture of Khao Lak today as recent media attention on the rape and murder of a Welsh tourist January 2nd displays a lawless island. Yes, there are only fourteen tourist police on the 200 square kilometer island on the east coast island of Ko Samui. But that doesn't mean that I'd stay away because of widespread security fears.

The truth is usually more complex. And it's not fixed in time.

(And it's all stuff you don't read in the tourist brochures.)

If there is ONE thing that blogs can do is to provide a perspective of what is happening from people in the field in real-time. In evolving countries and regions like Thailand's Andaman Coast even one-month-ago information is out-dated. A flurry of construction took place in December here in Khao Lak in preparation for the Princess' visit on the tsunami anniversary - and it shows.

A new friend last night was convinced because of his September visit to Phi Phi that the beaches are still being cleaned up. I was just there a week ago and asked him to describe exactly which beach had debris. That's not there anymore, I say from first-hand knowledge.

Brian Benz of Sofware Soapbox writes in his post, Tsunami Revisited

Via Scoble, stories on those who went back to Thailand one year after the Tsunami. Remember, as I've said before, only half of the beach and resort part of the country was hit by the Tsunami, there are many untouched areas like Koh Samui that need visitors and support...

My comment:

Koh Samui [on Thailand's other coast] is doing just fine. Khao Lak is base to world-class diving and has fine beaches. I've travelled to many places around the world and consider Phi Phi to be one of the most spectacular beaches with its towering lush limestone cliffs. Having just spent nine days on Phi Phi and now been on Khao Lak for four (and plan on another week), I speak from first-hand fresh experience.

They are both absolutely ready and open and eager for business. The second killer wave, as many have told me, is economic. What good is a new rebuilt house or business if it's repossessed - in one year's time?

These areas do not export goods - they are economically dependent on inbound travel. Sorry to get on my soapbox, but I see the effects here in terms of human faces - Pa the restaurant owner, Nong the bar owner, and Nui the divemaster. Steering people away from the Andaman coast isn't helping their situation one iota.

p.s. The photo is of the girls at Sri Guest House in Nang Thong Beach where I'm staying in Khao Lak.

p.p.s. I'll be working a few days extra on training folks to monitor blogs, forums and media mentions in order to clear up misperceptions and evangelize the area. Perhaps, if there is interest see about starting a Khao Lak blog too.

Thaikea: From Leftover Coffins To DIY Furniture Making

Although this is my third visit to Thailand, it is my first time in Khao Lak.

So too for Tsunami Volunteer Center's media relations volunteer Jessica Moulday from Australia. Although just home from her first trip in Thailand a month before the Boxing Day tsunami, she watched in horror at the devastation of the land she'd just departed: "I don't think the urge would have been as strong if I hadn't been to Thailand myself."  She wrapped up her public relations major and a freelance media relations position with the Salvation Army and alighted here in July. Like many volunteers I've spoken with, she had to look up Khao Lak on a map.

Khao Lak, mainly a European destination previously as well as the launching pad to liveaboard dive trips to the Similan Islands, wasn't marketed in Australia. Even after the tsunami,  the Australian media world focused on Troy Broadbridge, an Australian Rules football player, who was on his honeymoon in Phuket, says Moulday, even though the majority of deaths and 78% of the property destruction in Thailand due to the Boxing Day tsunami occured in Khao Lak.

Tsunami Volunteer Center, founded by P' Nu Ring, director of parent Thai oundation The Mirror Foundation, sprung up after the tsunami as "needs-based organization" that dynamically adapts to the self-defined needs of the surrounding communities. Along with Phi Phi's HiPhiPhi, TVC quickly achieved a reputation online in volunteer forums like Lonely Planet's and through ubiquitous traveller's word-of-mouth network.

TVC has harnessed the enthusiasm of more than 4000 volunteers from 55 countries that descended Khao Lak since December 26, 2004 into an amazing set of projects that range from home construction to English instruction to handicraft microbusinesses. One of my favorite projects is this innovative one:

Following the disaster, a well-intentioned international supplier delivered a sizeable and unusable shipment of undersized coffins [often foreigners are taller than Asians] to Khao Lak. Resourceful volunteers repurposed the materials and crafted brightly painted, highly functional, lasting pieces of much needed furniture for villages and schools. By July of 2005, the operation moved into the Tap Tawaan village, allowing for full engagement of the volunteers from all corners of the world. In late October 2005, as the demand for furniture in that village slowed down, that project came to a close. A new furniture building and vocational training project was initiated in Bang Kayah. The project manager for the latest Thaikea endeaver is a tsunami survivor who has been involved in Thaikea projects since February...

Several pieces that were made for local schools were sent unpainted so the students could participate in this project. The project utilized the skills of experienced carpenters and the energy of volunteers that were new to building furniture...

In February, using starter packages consisting of donated tools, wood and easy design templates, volunteers held one-day Thaikea workshops to teach eager men and women how to build tables, cabinets, shelves, and chairs for the homes in their camps and villages and for local schools. Children were also involved in the Thaikea Workshops painting the furniture.

Volunteers on the camp teams assessed the needs of their own communities and responded accordingly. They created various designs and allowed residents to enthusiastically pick the designs they like the most. At several camps, residents fully embraced furniture building, and were inspired to created their own designs and styles.

This project enabled people of any age or gender to participate in the refurnishing of their homes and schools.

Brightening Up Lives Through Care, Participation and Artistry

When tsunami volunteer Niyarm Chivawattansukul, a carpenter from Narathiwat, approached Ban Tub Tawan to help in a housing project in February, his original plan was to make ordinary house to replace those destroyed by the disaster.

But after a few weeks at the tsunami-devastated community in tambon [smaller than a district] Bang Muang, his artistry was unlocked and he spent most of his time beautifying the houses...

Each of the 47 has an individual wood-carved balustrade, made from a range of motifs - lotus, sunflower, jasmine, parsley, rose and star.

"The patterns carry no specific meanings. I just think of images from my favourite cartoon books or mural paintings when carrying out the work," said the carpenter, who had never done any woodcarving prior to the tsunami...

His stay at the village has been longer than he originally planned. Initially, the carpenter planned to stay for three months. Now it's almost a year and he has no plan to leave any time soon - he just keeps on working...

It's not just unfinished work that keeps him from leaving. The carpenter said he has developed strong ties with people in the village.

"Maybe I am I looking for a nice local woman," [the 46-year-old widower] said. - "Outside Volunteer Carves New Career in Housing," Bangkok Post, December 26, 2005 (old URL: http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/26Dec2005_news67.php)

Bonus: A well-written insightful Council on International Educational Exchange student-written report on post-tsunami issues, including the "land grab" and housing issues I keep hearing about again and again. (Found by Googling "Four Regions Slum Network").

"The experiences outlined in these pages come from students who participated in a community-based education program. Much of the learning is done outside of the classroom; villagers are the teachers." URL: http://council-isp.org/uploads/common_ground.pdf

p.s. There are countless complaints about the hastily built Army housing (as well as many multinational NGO's housing projects) all over the coast: "Those the government built did not pay heed to our our feelings [desires and needs] and our way of life", says Panya Ananthakul, head of Tok Pu community in another Bangkok Post article.  But the Four Regions Slum Network (I cannot find a website), where the artistic Mr Niyarm (above) volunteers, is a rare exception that works along with local communities. I've seen this organization lauded more than once.

"With support from NGOs like the Southern Community Planning Network and the Four Regions Slum Network, the residents of both communities [Tung Wa and Tub Tawan are both referred to as model communities in terms of post-tsunami housing] were encouraged to participate in the building of their own houses, from the designing to the process of construction." - "Shoddy housing doesn't make a home," Bangkok Post, December 26, 2005

Tsunami Anniversary: Landed in Bangkok

Quick status post. Landed in Bangkok at nearly 1 a.m. last night and was graciously hosted by Canadian Graeme Bristol whom has lived in Thailand for eight years as the chairman of architecture program at a local university. He's also in charge of the Centre for Architecture and Human Rights.

We talked until the wee hours of the morning as he has tsunami relief stories galore. He is part of a UN delegation and he and his students are working with coastal communities like Trung Wa, a traditional Moken sea gypsy village (about three kilometers north of ravaged Khao Lak) to help them in planning their rebuilding efforts.

Dialogue about their goals and community engagement for the plan for seventy homes, a market and a Moken cultural center to celebrate the collective heritage of the sea gypsies is an essential part of the community rebuilding process.

Traditionally dialogue and facilitating community participation isn't what architects, engineers, and planners do best. Or do at all. Top-down is more the planning style. He's trying to change that starting with his students.

You probably have heard about the Mokens already. Up and down the Andaman coast they are the ones who were attentive to the signs. Few Moken died; yet their villages were leveled.

A Bangkok movie star and amateur photographer named Aun was here [on another Moken community on an island, not Trung Wa] on Dec. 26, 2004, taking pictures of Moken village life, when someone noticed the sea receding into the distance.

Aun's pictures showed the Moken on the beach crying. Did she have any idea why they were crying? "I feel like they know what bad will happen," says Aun.

Her pictures also show the Moken fleeing towards higher ground long before the first wave struck. Aun pointed out how high the water first came. And that was just the first wave. The worst was yet to come, and the Moken knew because of signs from the sea...

Off Thailand’s coast, divers noticed dozens of dolphins swimming for deeper water. And on these islands, the cicadas, which are usually so loud, suddenly went silent.
Saleh Kalathalay, a skilled spear-fisherman who was on a different part of the island, also noticed the silence. He ran around warning everyone. Did they believe him?

"The young people called me a liar. I said, 'We’ve told the story of the wave since the old times,' but none of the kids believed me," says Kalathalay. - "Sea Gypsies See Signs in the Waves," CBS News, March 20, 2005

I should make it to Trung Wa on about the second week of this trip. Right now, later this evening I'm off to Krabi. In a near-repeat of my itinerary this time last year I'm off to the coastal islands except I'm skipping the lovely island of Koh Lanta. Tommorow morning via ferry I'll be headed to my favorite island, Koh Jum.

p.s. Remind myself I need to get some sleep sometime too.

Travelpod Folks Helped Me Distill Essence

Travelpod is an online community for independent travellers and they offer free travel blogs as well as other features like obtaining travel insurance. (Here's my companion Travelpod blog for TsunamiAnniversary.com - with more of a traveling pilgrim's theme.)

As my sole sponsor to date, Travelpod, asked me great questions in preparation of their press release. I also loved the way they didn't want me to emblazon myself with Travelpod logos or change anything at all at their behest. They simply believed in the vision and wanted to support it. Period. That simple. And for their support, I'm deeply grateful.

I wanted to share this fantastic example of honing questions to boil down your project, product or whatever you are telling the world to its essence. Then you have something to work with to chisel it down into a one-pager. Lifted from Brett at Travelpod's email message:

Set the stage

• I am... (describe yourself with emphasis on the travel component and the writing component of "you"... but no "why" material)
• I was... (specific words that place you in the tsunami region, touch on the physical impact on you, and return you to your home-base)
• I changed/learned... (words that describe how the experience affected you spiritually)
• I resolved... (words that describe your larger vision of a better world)
• I plan to... (words about the anniversary tour as an example of what you are doing to implement your larger vision)
• I hope... (words that describe the concrete results you are hoping to produce)

My answers are distilled here.

p.s. Thanks to Stowe Boyd of Corante for making the introduction. Corante has been generous contributor to TsunamiAnniversary.com as well. (Disclosure: I write for the Corante Marketing Hub...but the donations and introductions ultimately stem from our friendship.)

Tsunami Anniversary Trek: T-Minus 7 Days

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
- Henry Wadworth Longfellow, Holidays

So begins one of the chapters of Petra Nemcova's memoir, Love Always Petra: A Story of Courage and the Discovery of Life's Hidden Gifts. Supermodel Petra was vacationing with her boyfriend Simon Atlee on Khao Lak, Thailand when the tsunami hit.

I love the fourth line of this very same Wadsworth poem too.

"When the full river of feeling overflows;—"

We can't feel for statistics: 50,000 this, 370,000 that is meaningful to robots, but it doesn't register for humans.

"Somehow, people just seem to accept that Africans are starving or getting killed. It's no big deal," commented Dr. Kees Rietvald, a veteran humanitarian health worker. "But when you have blond Swedish children or a Czech fashion model swept away by some tidal wave, that's a totally different matter." - "When the World Forgets Who Comes to Help," National Geographic, December 2005

That's one embittered takeaway. But I think it's a matter of story...how many personal individual stories of Africans do you know?...and direct participation.

We need real human faces. A story needs a protaganist we can identify with.

When Kiva announced their site would link up microloaners like you and I to specific Ugandans (not vague mass of humanity) needing a little seed money for their goat or cellphone, all the entrepreneurs were matched up one to one with willing loaners the first day. There's Africans with names there, like Were Kinindi living in actual place names like Tororo.

It just turns out Petra's story is remarkable. This is a wonderful interview with Petra Nemcova ("Petra's Story", Vanity Fair, May 2005) I read back when it first came out in print. Petra grew up in a small mining town in the Czech Republic where winter shoes were scarce. She says: "We had enough for food, but not for special things like fruit. This taught me how to appreciate things." Three snippets:

[On her rescue from the palm tree - her pelvis was broken in four places and she could not walk:] "All of them were risking their lives—they could be swept away; something could fall on them. But everyone forget themselves for others. It was so amazing to see all these people doing incredible things. It was so beautiful."

"Tragedy gives us the opportunity to put meaning into our lives," she says. "It changes our values, gives us the opportunity to think where we want to go. I lost the person closest to me [her boyfriend vanished and his body was found 69 days later], but I got a second chance to live. I feel like I'm living for both of us now. I feel not just a responsibility to do it as he would have, but also to help other people.

[My favorite passage I've already referenced but you get it again:] As we talk, Nemcova has been fingering her necklace, a chain of carved ivory and black wooden beads with a silver pendant encasing a small Buddha. "I was in the hospital lying next to a Thai man, and he gave me this necklace," she says. "It was probably the last thing he had, which he gave to a stranger. He said, 'It will protect you.' I never saw him again."

p.s. I need a digital camera and MP3 recorder. Anyone have connections to the vendors of these (discount, sponsorship)? Cold calling isn't working.

Tapping the Field of Conversation

Almost missed an historical event. Fifty years ago today a movement began...

"On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to the 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation."   (via today's New Morning TV Daybook email)

Darnell Williams, president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts interviewed for the Boston Globe, says: "Rosa Parks made a statement with her quiet stature and demeanor and sparked a revolution."

Fifty years ago a movement began...at least that's how the story goes. We'd like to think that everything happens in one defining event. Out of the blue. With one iconic figure. It makes for good PR anyway.

The civil rights movement wasn't hatched overnight any more than The Purpose Driven Life was an overnight sensation (Rick Warren built up Saddleback Church and his Purpose Driven Church seminars for two decades; those same seminar attendees were the initial evangelists for his next book). I'd read a lot about Rosa Parks and know December 1st was long coming.

No, everything doesn't shift in an instant, but perhaps everything is contained in one.

The other day I read a magnificent (and that's understated) essay entitled "Beauty Parlors, Barbershops, and Boardrooms" in the Winter 2005 Strategy+Business. (Download pdf). I haven't been able to forget it since. This tiny peek doesn't do the article justice:

Many people think of the civil rights movement as a wave of change sparked by a few charismatic leaders...

All of those things certainly happened, but they don’t add up to anything close to the whole story. The movement was neither accidental nor spontaneous. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was already a deliberate effort under way, starting with quiet meetings in homes, barbershops, beauty parlors, and churches throughout the South, to create a dialogue about the changes that were needed...

Something uncanny happens when a large number of people begin to speak about something new in a language that all of them understand. The conversations develop into something larger than the sum of their parts, and this affects people, in the same way that a magnetic field affects the position of iron filings within it. It got to the point where Dr. King and other preachers would start talking and the audience would finish with them, in unison, though they hadn’t heard that particular sermon before. (Later, Dr. King would be accused of plagiarism, but he was simply tapping the same field of conversation as the other speakers.) I remember being in the crowd listening to sermons and feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’ve learned that others have felt something similar at momentous transitions, from the end of Communism in Eastern Europe to the fall of apartheid in South Africa to the pivotal moment in particularly effective organizational transformations. It feels as if the energy in the arena has been turned up, as if there is something crackling through the people who are present...

But [Dr. King] was the most visible aspect of the field, which had grown so strong that it was impossible to ignore anywhere in the U.S. It was like a living example of the old Hindu saying: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

As Dr. King became more visible, other preachers heard his messages and repeated them in their own ways. Television carried the signal further, amplifying it into the kind of noosphere, or large-scale network of intention, that Teilhard de Chardin has written about.

Sometimes I can almost touch the buzzing energy of a movement afoot, and there are certainly conversational fields being stimulated and amplified online. One swirls around the culture of participation meme. And I see other conversational fields that are disparate and scattered offline that could be coalesced and further sparked by expanding the field through online social media.

(How does this relate to businsess?) VC Steve Brotman reviews entrepreneur Bo Peabody's book, Lucky or Smart?. The gist, he says: Lucky business things happen to entrepreneurs more often than average who start "fundamentally innovative, morally compelling and philosophically positive companies".

Innovative and compelling means tapping into and aligning with the conversational fields that are already emerging within you and surrounding you. What are your customer's movements?

Or finding a parade and getting in front of it, as Tim O'Reilly puts it - that's the man that coined and promoted the notions of open source software and Web 2.0. (But he didn't invent them; he got behind the wave of ideas surfacing and gave them a boost.)

Or as PR guru Larry Weber says (the keynote I'm most looking forward to at Syndicate): "Build an online community of cancer survivors who spend hours together because it comforts them. No ads, just awareness that a brand makes it possible."

Yada yada, you get the idea...anything more and you'll have to pay my consulting rates ;-)

p.s. But of course the movement I'm most personally interested in is the movement of the self to meet its Self. And can we quicken awakening through conversational fields and open source wisdom? Or is that an illusional question? "Mind is a mighty ocean, a sea which knows no bounds. Words are but scarlet lotus to cure the lesser ills," reminds Ch'an master Huang Po.