David Weinberger / Speaker home page

V I S I O N

Co-author of the international bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto - #6 on BusinessWeek's bestseller list

Fellow at Harvard's prestigious Berkman Center

Tom Peters says of his latest book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, "This is a book to savor"

Published in Harvard Business Review, NY Times, Smithsonian, InfoWeek, Wired...

H U M O R

"David Weinberger's articulate passion, intelligence and wit riveted an SRO crowd of about 1,300" - eBusiness

"You ... encouraged our attendees to think, laugh and act ...." - Ernst & Young

"...passionate, engaging, and entertaining..." - Support.com


National Public Radio commentator (All Things Considered)

A "marketing guru" - The Wall Street Journal

Columnist for KMWorld, Worthwhile Magazine, and Italy's largest financial paper .

Extraordinary Speaker Testimonials

"..a guest speaker dream come true."
"an absolute hit as the keynote speaker"
"...With the crowd in his palm, and hanging on every word..."
"...the attendees were thrilled."
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"Wow - what an extraordinary performance from a shy, retiring, introverted philosopher! ... It was high-energy, thought-provoking and very funny." - IBM WebSphere

 

Consultant and entrepreneur.

Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean presidential campaign

Ph.D. in philosophy - but don't let that scare you :)

 

"He's smart, funny, witty, very entertaining and also very genuine." - Netpreneurs

"David was the most entertaining speaker I have ever had the pleasure to listen to (and laugh and laugh)..." - Clickthings

     

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Latest Book: Everything Is Miscellaneous

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Book: Cluetrain Manifesto

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TOPICS

These are some popular presentations. I am happy to work with you to customize a presentation.

Everything is Miscellaneous
The Power of the New Digital Disorder

For thousands of years, we've organized our ideas the same way we've organized our laundry, separating them into neat piles. In the digital age, this unnecessary limitation keeps companies from getting maximum value from their knowledge, and frustrates customers.

In this talk we look at the four new principles of organization and how businesses are learning that they do best if they include every piece of information they can find and allow their customers to organize the information the way that works for them.

The audience learns

How to get more value from organizational knowledge

Why customers are rejecting traditional authorities - including businesses and the media - and who they are learning to trust

The 4 new principles for organizing ideas and information

Web 2.0: The Myth and the Meaning 

The term "Web 2.0" entered our vocabulary so quickly because we were eager to find a way to acknowledge the Web's rapid evolution. But it's important to separate the myth from the reality, and then -- even more crucially -- we should recognize what the truth about Web 2.0 means for business and culture.

  • From hugely successful Web-based collaborative projects we learn that sometimes centralized control gets in the way of rapid growth. 

  • From online businesses that "mash up" information from many sources we learn that sometimes a company's information asset has the most value when the company lets it go. 

  • From social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace we learn that not only is the line between the public and the private changing, but their very nature is changing. 

  • From the popularity of social tagging we learn that customers are now in control not just of the content of product information, but the way that information is organized and accessed. 

  • From the amazing growth of blogging, we learn that sound of marketing - and politics - will never be the same. 

In this presentation, David Weinberger goes far beyond the usual chatter about Web 2.0, and exposes its deepest meaning for our business and our lives.

The audience learns

What Web 2.0 is, and how to separate it from the hype

The business importance of the latest Web trends

The new expectations of their customers and employees

Why "user generated content" is less important than "user generated organization"

The advantages of loosening control over data

What Blogging is Not

Business and the media have insisted on misunderstanding weblogs so seriously that they can't see what's valuable in them and how they are changing their basic relationship with customers and audiences. Despite what you may have heard, blogs are not like columns written by irresponsible people. The most important bloggers are not the handful with hundreds of thousands of readers but the tens of millions with only a few readers. And they're important not because businesses can do one-to-one marketing to them - it won't work and it will make your company look foolish - but because weblogs are a new type of social group.

If your business can get past the misunderstands this talk lays out, you have a way of building a new relationship with your customers that will see you through hard times - blogging is great for crisis management - and reward you in good times.

 

The audience learns

The five most common misperceptions about blogs - and how they get in the way of your business
How blogging can help increase customer loyalty, innovation, employee retention and work for crisis management

Why blogging can be powerful medicine when taken internally

The two mistakes every business makes when it starts to blog

The War against Customers
What marketing can - and must - learn from the new connectedness

For a hundred years, marketing has been waging war against customers. It's time for a cease-fire.

The fundamental fact of marketing is that you're trying to get an unwilling customer to do something they don't want to do. That's why customers want to flee when they sense they're being marketed to. But suppose waging war against our customers — "targeting" them via "strategies" "tactics" -- isn't such a good idea? And suppose customers simply won't stand for it any more?

The answer isn't to personalize and do 1:1 marketing. That's like switching from aerial bombardment to sending out hit squads. No, we need to change the basic model of marketing that pits companies against their customers.

The problem goes back to the basics. Traditional marketing views itself as a type of broadcast: a single voice gets to send a message to a mass of people. This made sense when the mass media were one-way. Back then, a company could control its market by selectively releasing information about its products. In fact, markets themselves are defined by this broadcast model, for a market these days is a demographic segment that is likely to respond favorably to a particular message lobbed at it.

But this old way of working has serious disadvantages: customers don't trust messages and generally don't want to listen to them. Now they don't have to. A staggering percentage of the US market has another medium open to it: the Internet. Although the Internet connects masses of people — over 500,000,000 worldwide so far — it is profoundly not a mass medium. It is all about groups of people with passions in common talking to one another in their own voice.

That makes the Internet the anti-broadcast medium: it's not mass, it's not one-way, and it's not controlled by companies that can pay to send out a message. The Internet is, in fact, a conversation among your customers who are discovering that they are a far better source of information about products and services than the companies ever could be.

This is the most fundamental shift in marketing since the creation of mass media. And it affects all marketing, on or off the Web.

The audience learns

How the old techniques actually alienate customers who have learned a new set of expectations thanks to their participation in the wired, connected world

The keys to engaging in the new customer conversations the market expects and demands

To anticipate the most important change in customer dynamics and in marketing since the invention of mass media 80 years ago



 

Some recent speeches...

Google
Microsoft
Yahoo
Gartner
Shop.org
Danish IT Forum
Information Architecture Asociation
Library of Congress
Online Information
Nokia

IBM Recovery Services
Tony Robbins Forum
Bear Creek
IBM WebSphere
Hyperion
US Bank
Support.com
Nat'l Breast Cancer
   Awareness Council
Ass'n Revolution
PopTech
Experian
Hospitality Tech.
Sappi
Art Technology Group
Radisson Global
Sun
Procter & Gamble
Compucom
Mercator
Internet Content Management
InternetWorld
Netpreneur's
Novasoft
Optika
Staffware
DIA
InternetWorld India
Xplor Global
AIIM
Xplor Leadership
KMWorld
KM Summit
USI
Instinctive Tech
Delphi KM
MER
PC Docs
Seybold Seminars
Open Text
more...

Video Samples

There's a page of recent videos, including some complete talks (see the talk at Google or the keynote at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam, both on Everything is Miscellaneous), some interviews, and some audio interviews suitable for downloading.

Here is a 4 minute demo reel, in various formats: 

- Windows Media player

- Real Media player

- Mpeg


 

Contact Information

Bob Katz works with speakers bureaus to represent David:

bob.k@rcn.com
(781) 652-8160

You can reach David directly - he always likes to hear from you, and loves talking with prospective clients - at:

self@evident.com
business: 617 738 8323
cell: 617 852 6902
94 Westbourne Terrace
Brookline, MA