blog

I send a lot of emails. I post a lot of messages on my blog or on Facebook.

One thing I have noticed over the years: there is an invisible rule that seems to reign on the online world, regardless of the medium: the more care you put in a message, the more chance there is it generates an answer (email) or interaction (social networks).

Take email. When you send a newsletter, if you get 50% of people opening your message (as we do at Lift) you can be pretty satisfied. The industry standard is more around 20%. That is what you get for sending messages that have not been specifically written for the recipient. They feel that, and have no pressure to answer whatsoever as it has been sent to thousands of people.

In a typical one to one communication, answer rate is probably closer to 95% as long as you write to people you know, and who are at the same “level” than you.

Now for my editorial job at Lift, I get to invite pretty busy people as we try to convince them to join us for the conference. We don’t always succeed in having them, but at least I get around 80% of answers to my messages, positive or negative. I get this answering rate by carefully crafting my messages to make the recipient feel I value him or her, as I invest a lot of my time in reaching out. If I send a quick message, it is likely I will not get an answer. If I take time to research the person I am contacting, find out what their recent projects are, add a few personal sentences about the city they live in, the chances for a response get much higher.

My point here is that it seems that electronic communication is not totally deprived of context. When you talk to someone, your body language gives hints of how you feel, and influences the answers you get. In electronic form, these implicit messages can also be conveyed. I care about the discussion we’re having, I’m willing to invest time in reaching out to you. That matters.

I noticed the same happens on my blog and on Facebook. On the blog, articles where I simply pass a link (as I often do to set them aside for my personal archive) receive little feedback, while longer and more personal articles generate more comments. On Facebook, I have an even more tangible proof. For a long time, the Lift page was managed manually. I would replicate each article carefully, adding a custom message different from the title of the news I was pushing to the community. As soon as we installed an automatic app (RSS graffiti) to republish articles automatically, the number of interactions almost halved. It was the same content, but our followers felt we were not putting as much energy in the process of pushing the information to them. They felt less engaged, maybe less cared for, and the number of interactions dropped.

That’s why social technologies will never be magical. They promise us more personalized interactions with followers, as we know who they are. Truth is, mass updates will always have a different feeling from a message written specifically for a recipient. Nobody can escape the time consuming task of writing personal messages. And if you have 10′000 fans, that will take a while.

Lift11 is starting at 2pm this Wednesday. You will be able to follow the conference through three main channels:

Live video stream
Organized with the help of LiveStream. Find the stream here and send us your questions and comments, we will add them to the questions we relay on stage.

Twitter
Two ways to follow the conference: follow the official Lift account for updates from the team, and the #lift11 hashtag for all that is said during the conference.

Blog
We're pretty old school, so we also have a blog. Follow it (RSS here) to get the latest news from the conference. We have scheduled a post that will go live at the beginning of each event so that should keep you informed through the conference on who is speaking now.

Last but not least, you can join the Lift page on Facebook to get updates directly in your stream.

Here comes the list of media who have registered for Lift10 to this point. Journalists and bloggers can apply for a free pass here.

Television & Radio:

National:
Radio Télévision Suisse, World Radio Switzerland

International:
BBC, Canal+ (France), France Inter, Danish Broadcasting Company, Euronews, Resonance104.4 (UK), France Culture,
Deutschlandradio Kultur.

Newspapers and Magazines:

National:
L'Hebdo, Tribune de Genève, Le Temps, Bilan, ICT Journal, Reflex, Edelweiss, Le Matin Dimanche, 20 minutes, La Liberté, Le Courrier, Market, Agefi, Bon à savoir, cominmag

International:
Wired (UK/USA),The Guardian (UK), Design (Korea), The Yomiuri Shimbun (Japan), The Nation (Kenya), Makedonia (Greece)

Online news and Blogs:

TechCrunch Europe, FastCompany, InternetActu (France), Le Monde.fr, SwissinfoBreitband (Germany), GDI Impuls, Ludigo, 01.net, L'atelier BNP Paribas, Amusement, GenevaLunch, GeneveActive, Climb to the Stars, Blogowski (Serbia), Creative Crowds (Netherlands), Motoricerca (Italy), Swisster, Berlinblase (Germany), Blogpiloten (Germany), LausanneBondyBlog (Switzerland).

Last year's edition Lift09 hosted one hundred journalists and bloggers, and 170 articles and interviews were produced during and after the conference with close to 4000 mentions on social media.

^{The TSR cameras during a short break at Lift09.}

^{The BBC's Bill Thompson writing his article about Lift whilst baby Scoble gets a meal.}

Lift09 - Aggregated blog stream with commentary.

Korean media are starting to cover Lift Asia, and I was the happy guest of Talk2man on monday morning (two hours after I landed from a 15 hours trip, I'm still awake it's not too bad ;). Check the video below.

Today we had coverage on 매일경제 (don't ask me to translate ;) and I hear the Korean blogosphere is buzzing with stories about Lift!

PS: and thanks to gut4u who blogged me and a hamburger tonight ;)

Web 2.0 meets Marxist (Foucaultian?) economic theory in the latest video from Austrian subversive art collective http://www.monochrom.at/english/

Sorry it is not possible to embed content, so you´ll have to leave the site
http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/02/15/monochroms-marxist-s.html

Go see for yourself. The are pretty good. And smart. And on-topic.
Enjoy!

This is something I’ve wanted to do for some time now, and I’m happy to kick it off at LIFT: provide a crash-course in blogging for non-bloggers.

I know many people attending LIFT are already seasoned bloggers like myself. Most people reading this post probably are. I wanted to offer something to those who are not so immersed in the web as us.

So, basically, this is a three-hour workshop to open a blog (from scratch, I plan to use Wordpress.com), twiddle the basic settings, learn how to publish, and talk about blogging. I’m always amazed that though the media now sing “blog, blog, blog” in every publication, many people haven’t really had a chance to get near one and see how technically easy publication is.

So, if you know anybody who is going to LIFT and isn’t (yet) a blogger… send them to my workshop ;-)

Quoting from the workshop description, here’s the stuff it’ll cover:

First, on the “blogging technique” side:

• opening your blog
• discovering the various options and settings offered by the blogging tool
• how to publish a post or a page
• linking to blog posts or websites
• organizing one’s content with tags and categories
• managing comments
• choosing a design for your blog and managing sidebar content

Second, on the “blogging culture” side, we might talk about:

• blogs vs. “normal websites”
• different uses of blogs (personal, corporate…)
• dealing with openness and conversation in a public space (negative comments…)
• blogging etiquette and ethics
• reading other people and how to promote one’s blog
• other “Web 2.0” tools to use in relation with your blog

A few word about me!
Visite the following websites: http://www.pierrekilchenmann.ch
See ya at Lift08