INBOUND Bold Talks: Christopher Penn "Awaken Your Superhero: Social Media Beyond Business"

Thank you very much. All right. In the words of Dave Kosak, lore designer for World of Warcraft, the primordial soup that creates heroes does not taste of rainbows. It's a lumpy gumbo of pain and suffering. We live in a monstrously unfair world, and it's going to stay that way because that's the way the world is and that's what creates heroes. Today. We're not talking about marketing. If you're here for that, the door is there. Today, we are talking about awakening your superhero with the tools that you have. Justice is balance, of course. So let's talk about criminals and villains and heroes for a bit. They're actually the same thing in a lot of ways. If you watch television crime dramas, they talk a lot about how a hero has to have an anti hero. If you saw the movie Unbreakable, very similar idea. No villains, no heroes. The television crime dramas tell us that we have three things to prove that someone has committed a crime. Means, motive, and opportunity. Did you have the ability to commit the crime? Did you have a reason to commit the crime? And did you have the opportunity to do it? Well, the truth is, that's not just true for criminals. That's true for heroes, too. Let's examine these areas. We'll play a little game here. Let's say name the superheroes. Call them out if you know them. Anyone here a comic book nerd besides me? You can admit it's okay. Good. Can read minds anywhere in the world. Professor X, Professor Xavier can alter reality just by projecting his will. Green Lantern, terrible movie. Good superhero. Flawless photographic memory and ability to learn instantly. Jean Grey, endless array of tools and gadgets. We read about these superheroes. We grew up with them. Comic books, movies, movies about the movies, remakes of the movies about movies. Because Hollywood can't come up with anything original. But the world around us has changed. The world that created these heroes has changed today. You don't need to be Professor Xavier to read minds anywhere in the world. You have these powers. Facebook and Twitter and the social network of your choice. You don't need to be the Green Lantern and have a ring and be allergic to a color to change reality. You can blog. There are countless examples of blogs that have changed the world, that have changed the world we live in, that have brought down governments or built them up. You don't need to be a flawless photographic memory expert. You have the sum total of human knowledge in digital form, publicly available anyway. The NSA has their own in your pocket. Think about that for a Second, all the publicly available digital knowledge is in your pocket. You are walking around with a library that the Library of Alexandria would have paled by comparison. An endless array of tools and gadgets. Of course, you have these phones and they're impacting not just the digital world, but the physical world, too. This is a fun little app called Stud Finder. It's not what you think. It uses the iPhone's magnets to detect when you run over a wall, whether there's nails in it. So you can find studs in your house. These phones, these devices, are impacting the reality around us, the physicality around us. Fifty years ago, what this thing can do would have been in a comic book. This one here says, fantastic. The world at my doorstep. The world's in your pocket now. Our technology gives us superhero powers. We have the means to be a superhero. We'll skip past motive for a moment and talk about opportunity. Are there opportunities to be a superhero? Well, yes. We live in a monstrously unfair world. And here's a couple of examples. This is a package of software that was created by Kenyan developers in 2007 as a result of unfair elections. And they wanted to report where there was misbehavior, where there were polling irregularities. We could have used it in America not too long ago, but they open sourced it. They said, rather than just collecting data about SMS and Twitter and things like that about the elections, let's throw it out there to the world and see what happens. And they did. It's called ushahidi, which means witness or testimony in Swahili. This has been repurposed so many times for so many different uses. The city of Washington D.C. downloaded it and deployed it to tell you where plowing had not been done during a major snowstorm. This example here is Haiti after the earthquake. Volunteers set this up and were collecting tweets and text messages to let people know where dangers were after the earthquake and where you could find the basic necessities. You can download this software and install it on your website today and just have it sort of laying in the background in a folder. And if there's a disaster in your city, if there's a problem, you can turn it on, step up, lead and build your community and save your community just with this package of open source software. This is a movement called Be More Heroic. Crowd sourced, crowdfunded crowd, everything to stop bullying. Ten years ago, this would have been impossible. It would have been a mandate from the Department of Education, but it's too slow. So this movement came together to say, let's teach kids that the antidote to bullying, the antidote to evil, is to be more heroic. It's a fantastic campaign. Check it out if you can. A couple of personal examples. In 2007, a friend in our podcasting community had a tragedy befall his family. His 16 year old niece ran away from her mom, possibly went to Florida and disappeared. She had met a 38 year old boyfriend on the Internet on MySpace, which was still relevant at the time. He and his family went to the authorities. They said, she's missing, we need some help. The authorities said, well, you know, kids disappear all the time. If she's not back in a week, she's not coming back. Sorry, not much we can do. Oh, and she thinks she crossed state lines. So we're not even going to try because our jurisdiction ends at the state line. So my friend approached the podcasting community and said, this is unacceptable. I can't just give up. What can we do? So a few of us outbound marketers, sorry, went out, found this girl's MySpace profile and spammed every one of her friends. Have you seen her? Where is she? Have you had any hints? Found out she got a bus ticket somewhere. Where is she going? We think maybe one or two cities in Florida loaded up. The city of, I think it was Coral gables, Florida, on MySpace, spammed. All of them said, have you seen this girl? She's missing. What the authorities couldn't do in three weeks, we found her 48 hours, 72 hours later, the SWAT team came knocking on the door with the battering ram. That'll wake you up. And two weeks later, she was home with her family. This is the power that this stuff gives you the ability to do. It's not just about selling crap, it's about saving lives or changing lives for the better. I used to do a podcast called the Financial Aid Podcast, talking about the most boring podcast you could possibly imagine. And not only was it boring, But I did 937 episodes of it once a day, every day for five years. But it wasn't just some guy sitting at a desk talking to a microphone for fun. It actually had an impact. A year after I left the job where I was doing that, or more accurately, it left me, I got an email from, from a guy who said, hey, I just wanted to let you know that my daughter is graduating from Western Illinois University this May. She's graduating a year early and she's graduating debt free. As a guy who never went to college, a lot of hard work and A lot of credits she got out. So one person sitting at their desk, toying around with a microphone, trying out this whole podcast thing gave someone else the ability to go to college without graduating with $100,000 in debt. You have that power to create the same kind of content. Opportunity is waiting for you there out there right now. There are opportunities right now. How many people have Twitter open right now? Okay, good. Go up in the search window. I want you to search for one phrase. I just want the pain to stop. Search right now. I'll wait. I just want the pain to stop. Look around. This is your community. These are your people. This is your tribe. And there are people online right now saying to the world, I just want the pain to stop. You don't have to be a hero to a million people. You don't have to try and lift the Brooklyn Bridge. All you have to do is ask somebody, hey, are you okay? You're not alone. You can change the world. You can be a hero. You've just done it. You've identified opportunities. They are waiting in the palm of your hand. Heroes are born from darkness because we desperately need someone to light the way. You are holding that opportunity to light the way for someone. And like I said, it doesn't have to be a million people. If you are a parent, all you really would care about is if someone lit the way for your child, if they were lost and they couldn't get to you. Right? So you have the means. You have the opportunity. It's waiting in your hand. Let's talk about motivation. There are enemies to being heroic. One enemy is corruption. Taking these tools and using them for evil or even just mediocrity. Every time that we market some cheap crap for stupid people, we are corrupting these powers. Right? If you remember the Superman 3 movie, it was forgettable, except for the scene when Superman faced off against a corrupted version of himself. We use these tools for uses other than they're intended for. They are corrupted. We can restore them. It's an antidote. More dangerous is apathy. This is an incredibly dangerous enemy of being heroic. Oh, it's just Twitter. Oh, it's just Facebook. Oh, it's just phone. Oh, it's a phone. That was expensive, right? Imagine if Clark Kennedy decided, yeah, I don't really need to go save the world. I'll just stay here in the wheat fields and just farm. Right? I can push the tractor a little faster than anyone else. That's apathy. And that's so dangerous because it's what prevents us from believing in ourselves and from awakening our inner superhero to say, look, I can go save somebody. I can go help somebody. I can go do something of merit. Apathy is the enemy. The enemy is cynicism. This is probably the most insidious of all. This is the voice that says, I can't do that. This is the voice that says, I'm not a hero. I'm a marketing guy. I gotta go sell crap to stupid people. No, no, you're more than that if you wanna be. This is saying, I don't believe this stuff works. Even though the evidence is right there in front of you. You're holding it in your hand. The evidence is in front of you. Cynicism says, nah, doesn't really work. Beware of these three enemies as you approach the potential of your superhero powers. You have the means. You have the opportunity. Do you have the motivation. Are you ready to awaken your superhero? Thank you very much.