Fueling Entrepreneurship Through Interactivity

Can you have an engaging conversation with the back of someone’s head? How about the backs of 50 heads? How do you arrange groups of people in a physical environment for maximum interactivity, connection, and effectiveness in content capture and iteration? Whether you are an entrepreneur, incubator, community leader, or innovation advocate of another denomination, we all have a desire to initiate change, and to be active participants in the cultivation of new ideas rather than passive recipients of information.

In this event, we will be performing a group experiment in the arrangement of people in space to uncover the hidden ways that those arrangements affect our communication. With that as a starting point, we will then move on to the related areas of, How to groups of people effectively communicate in general? (whether they are a company, community, movement, etc). And how can groups of people be effectively organized to accomplish their goals as a group?

Come be a part of inventing the “feng shui” behind communities of powerful communicators.

This free event will be capped to 50 participants.

Attendance is FREE (while seats are available)!

Refreshments will be provided by Raw Food Chef, Jillian Love!(http://www.jillianlove.com/Home.html)

Optional: Bring a lamp or light source to use in collaboratively constructing our environment.

This event will take place at:  

The Dragon’s Den (Cogswell College)
1175 Bordeaux Dr
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Our conversation will be led by these key conversation instigators…

Gary Entwistle of the Next Institute

Gary Entwistle, MBA 

Gary Entwistle is a skilled training and development practitioner with firsthand knowledge of management and supervision.  During the past thirty years, he has provided leadership coaching and development to thousands of managers. He is a Senior Learning Advisor for The Next Institute and Executive-In-Residence for the Banff Leadership Institute, Alberta, Canada.

Gary recently had the opportunity to practice what he preaches. A client asked him to implement his recommendations to turn the failing business around. He worked as General Manager to restore the business to profitability; to develop policies, procedures, and practices; and to strengthen management at all levels.

Don Grayson of GHG and Associates

Don Grayson, PhD

A licensed psychologist, Don has maintained an organizational psychology consulting practice since 1981. From 1981 – 1987 he was a Senior Consultant and a top performer for RHR International, Inc, the largest organization of consulting psychologists. Since 1987 he has maintained his own independent consulting practice.

He was a contributing author in “Coaching for Leadership – How the World’s Greatest Coaches Help Leaders Learn”. The chapter was cited in Coaching and Mentoring: How to Develop Top Talent and Achieve Stronger Performance in the Harvard Business Essentials, Harvard Business School Press. Grayson is a principle consultant at GHG and Associates.

Bret Sweet, Assistant Professor, Entrepreneurship

Bret Sweet, Assistant Professor, Entrepreneurship

Mr. Sweet is Cogswell’s first Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship, following his work in launching the College’s Entrepreneurship program in 2010. He continues to develop Cogswell’s entrepreneurship curriculum and teaches a variety of entrepreneurship courses. He is certified by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), and has taught business building strategies to thousands of Bay Area low-income youths and their families. From 2003-2007, Mr. Sweet was the lead entrepreneurship instructor at BUILD, which provides entrepreneurship education to high school students in low-income areas boasts an excellent college acceptance rate for its seniors. His activities have garnered him a host of accolades, including the NFTE’s prestigious Teacher of the Year Award in 2004 and a speaking engagement at the 2012 NAACP National Convention. Mr. Sweet’s background is as an entrepreneurial musician, music promoter and restaurateur. He received a B.A. in Television and Radio Production from San Francisco State University and an MBA from the University of San Francisco.

Dr. Deborah Snyder, Chief Academic Officer & Provost

Dr. Deborah Snyder, Chief Academic Officer & Provost

“Dr. Snyder has a long history of higher education experience and was a pioneer in the adoption of online platforms in learning. Previously, Snyder served as senior vice provost for academic programs at Strayer University in Washington, D.C. and is author of The New Traditionals and e-Marketing Basics. The New Traditionals examined adult learners – those 25 and over – who comprise the majority of enrollees in higher education. She has been published in numerous education and marketing journals and has presented at several high-profile conferences.

Utilizing Game Technology to Improve Products and Services

Join Margarita Quihuis, Stephanie Spong, Chris Bennett, Albert Chen, and Andrew Mayer for a discussion on how the use of game mechanics can help companies solve problems and create a deeper connection with customers. 

presented by SVII and Sheppard Mullin

How can mobile and social technologies combined with game mechanics create and improve products and services in the real world?

At this event, we will explore game mechanics and how they can be used to improve digital products, going beyond pure entertainment, to solve real world problems. This new trend is gaining in popularity and brands are reworking their digital resources. Solutions have appeared in a rich assortment of industries, including health, education, finance. Game mechanics can be used to facilitate communication, leverage common interests, create change, and locate missing persons. Some refer to this trend as serious games. Bottom-line: the use of game mechanics allow companies to solve problems, forge a stronger connection with their customers, and create a better user experience.

This event will take place at the offices of Sheppard Mullin:

379 Lytton Avenue

Palo Alto, CA 94301

time: 7pm

 

Tickets on sale now: $20

Margarita Quihuis, social expert

Margarita Quihuis (Moderator). Quihuis’ career has focused on innovation, technology incubation, access to capital and entrepreneurship. Her accomplishments include directorship of Astia (formerly known as the Women’s Technology Cluster), a technology incubator focused on women entrepreneurs where her portfolio companies raised $67 million in venture funding, venture capitalist, Reuters Fellow at Stanford, and Director of RI Labs for Ricoh Innovations. She is a member of the research team at Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab and directs the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab where she conducts research in Innovation, mass collaboration, persuasive technology & the potential of social networks to change society for the better. Recently she joined Social Design – a new marketing consulting firm dedicated to bridging the worlds of online engagement and offline movements. With offices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Washington DC, we’re enabling businesses, government agencies, and NGOs to grow by deliberately empowering the people they serve.

Stephanie Spong, venture capitalist and gamer

Stephanie Spong is a gamer, geek and venture capitalist with over twenty years of professional experience in financial, operating and consulting roles and a passion for the game sector. From her experience at Goldman Sachs, Citibank, McKinsey and Monitor, she brings seasoned business judgment and financial skills, and as Managing Director of Razorfish’s Los Angeles office, she gained valuable operating experience and immersion in the digital media space.  Most recently, at EPIC Ventures she established a strong reputation as an early-stage technology investor, serving as the President of the New Mexico Venture Capital Association (2007 – 2010) and board member of the Invest Southwest Capital Conference and the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association.  During 2010, she chaired the Phoenix-based early stage Invest Southwest Capital Conference as well as the Venture Capital in the Rockies Fall Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Chris Bennett, game designewr

Chris Bennett is an award-winning Game Designer who combines creative ideas with social networking to reach millions of players with his credited games. With over 17 years of experience in the entertainment software industry, he has been instrumental in expanding hit brands like Diner Dash, which is one of the top-selling casual games of all time with over 1 billion downloads. Chris has talked about games and game design for broadcast coverage in media including NBC TV, NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is called on by organizations such as Stanford and USAID for his game design expertise.

 

Albert Chen, game design professor

Albert Chen is Assistant Professor in the Game Design and Development program at Cogswell College in Sunnyvale, CA.  He has led students in the development of serious games using game engines for the Boeing Company, Neurosky and Ericsson.  As Associate Director for Cogswell’s Engineering Simulation and Animation Laboratory (ESAL), he led a team that was awarded the Boeing Performance Excellence Award in 2008. Prior to joining Cogswell in 2007, Mr. Chen was a professional game developer for over twelve years and worked for EA, LucasArts, Factor 5 and the 3DO Company.  He has a BA in International Relations from UC Davis and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Cogswell College.

Andrew Mayer, game designer

Andrew Mayer has spent the last two decades involved with every facet of digital entertainment, and has brought his unique insights and skills to such companies as Sony, Time Warner, PlayFirst, EA/Bioware, Zynga, 2K Games, and many more. He provided the original concept and design for the wildly successful “Petz,” which has fueled a boom in digital life forms that has remained a world-wide phenomenon since its creation in the mid-90s. Since then he has integrated interactive entertainment into many major brands including Batman, Scooby-Doo, Diner Dash, Tonka Toys, Reader Rabbit, The Ellen Show, and many more. Over the last decade he has been intensely focused on new platforms and the growing mainstream audience, including casual, social, and mobile devices.

On March 20th, the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute (SVII) had a gathering on the topic of “Achieving Intimacy AND Reach Through Social Media,” hosted by the Palo Alto office of Sheppard Mullin Law Associates, where we talked about social media marketing.

It was a vigilant meeting:

That was a joke.  But we were definitely treated to some fine fare by our generous hosts at Shepperd Mullin:

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The goal was to see if social media allows you to have intimacy and reach at the same time. Traditional marketing and advertising has had great mass-market reach through things like TV, radio, and newspapers, but it hasn’t had the personal connection, therefore losing a lot of the impact. This is the reason that advertising has always been a fairly inefficient medium. With the advent and ubiquity of social media, however, the possibility is out there that advertising can be much more efficient and effective through the use of personalization. While the consensus was that yes, such intimacy (and effectiveness) is possible, there was still some debate over what that actually means or whether that was even a good thing.

There was debate over whether personalized advertising can actually be considered as intimacy. One of the definitions proposed by an audience participant was that a relationship is intimate when people don’t feel the need to emotionally hide themselves. That’s a good discrete definition of intimacy (which can be hard to achieve in social media).  However, on a more gradual scale, you could say that a relationship gets more intimate as it gets less formal and more familiar, which is certainly something that can be achieved through today’s social media. The 2012 Obama presidential campaign is famous for having very informal and “chatty” email titles. This is something that they did after testing showed that the more informal emails that looked more like emails from friends than campaign emails had a much higher response rate in terms of donations per email received. The natural follow-up question is whether or not you actually want to become more familiar with your customers and the people you buy from. From a business perspective, the answer is almost always yes, because people who feel more comfortable with you or your company are more likely to buy from you.

Another related question is whether or not this demolishes the barrier between professional life and personal life. Some people really do like knowing details about artists that have nothing to do with their art (in fact, it appears that the trend is going in that direction) and other people don’t. This is one of the many reasons that you need to listen to your audience/customers/constituencies.  Other factors to consider are your personality type and what kind of business you’re in. Our incumbent lawyer, Paul S. Cowie, acknowledged that in his business, the extraneous personal details are much more often left in the background, while artists and such generally have audiences that like to get to know the inner personalities of the people they are following.

Nevertheless, even such things as getting to know your audience require the increase in intimacy, leading to the inexorable conclusion that in order to be successful in social media–whether you want more intimacy or not–you still need more intimacy. Our audience also pointed out that different parts of the internet–a.k.a. different websites–have very different cultures, which is another kind of intimacy, one born out of shared experience and history. Then if someone doesn’t respect the local culture, à la Woody Harrelson on reddit, they just demonstrate why people trust people that they are familiar with more than strangers.

After some mingle-working, our formal event started with Kathryn Gorges, from Marketing Possibility, speaking about how social media marketing fits into the arc of history.

Back when people lived in villages and never traveled far from their original home, people evaluated whether they would do business with someone based on personal experience plus reputation. With the new-found prevalence of social media, this reliance on reputation and personal experience is coming back, because people know you through your online presence. Because of that, she said, more and more work activity will be going through personal channels instead of corporate channels. This is part of the so-called “long tail” of work activity–i.e. companies will hire people for discrete projects rather than as long-term employees.

Our next Speaker, attorney Paul Cowie, disagreed with this point.

He said that because of the way that the laws work in California, the employer-employee relationship will be the dominant one for a long time, because California laws are very strict about when someone who works for you can be considered a contractor instead of an employee, and California leads the way for a lot of other states.

The main thing Paul Cowie talked about, however, was the dangers inherent in social media both for people who are employees and for companies. There have been multiple times when people have claimed that they were absent from work because they were sick or disabled and then their social media activity showed that they were lying, which led to them being fired. When these cases were taken to court, the courts upheld the right of the employers to use social media evidence for dismissals like this.

On the other hand, social media also holds some pitfalls for employers as well. One company relied on an individual’s LinkedIn account for marketing. Then when the individual left, she and the company had a disagreement on who should control the LinkedIn account. Problems have also happened when employees tweeted on behalf of their company in a way that put the company in a bad light. For these reasons, Paul Cowie recommends that every company have a social media policy covering all of these contingencies.

Our next speaker was Mark Willaman of HRmarketer.com and SocialEars.com.

He got away from the philosophical conversation to some of the more practical aspects of social media marketing. Willaman posed the question, “How can one utilize a multitude of media services to extend reach AND intimacy?” While this idea is quite a tall order due to the anonymous nature of the internet, he presented the idea that different mediums complement different types of content and allow you to cover a larger sector of consumers with a greater presence of personality. In addition to combining media, Mr.Willaman follows a “10:1 Rule” that states “for every one post about yourself (or your own company), share or talk about someone else’s content 10 times.” In this way, your audience will feel like you are giving more than taking, which results in them liking you a lot better and you actually getting better results. The reach part comes from the fact that social media (especially if you use a lot of different channels) can reach a lot of people and can reach people who are far away geographically.

The final speaker of the night was Tom Treanor of Right Mix Marketing.

Treanor stressed some of the same things as Willaman, especially that you use different channels in different ways as the channel’s culture or affordance leads. He also gave some examples of creative ways people have used social media to market themselves, like a boxer from the UK who actually tracked down someone who bad-mouthed him on twitter and tweeting about it himself. This led to a huge spike in publicity for the boxer, Curtis Woodhouse, who for a short period was getting more mentions on twitter than president Obama. The happy part of this story is that there was no actual fighting involved, and the twitter “troll” came out and publicly apologized to Woodhouse.

Treanor’s two take away points were: (1) Companies that connect the virtual and real worlds will win. And (2) companies win when they give fans experiences that they love so much that they feel compelled to share them (i.e. your fans are doing your marketing). You can see Tom Treanor’s full slide presentation here.

Ultimately, the speakers and most of the audience agreed that intimacy and reach are possible using social media, but it’s not a get-rich-quick kind of thing. It takes hard work, but it’s worth it (and necessary).

Join us for our next vigilant meeting on Wed, April 17th at 7PM: Crowdfunding – Magic or Tragic (Location: Shepperd Mullin, Palo Alto).

Pre-Registration Tickets ($20)  – on SALE NOW!