David Weinberger

David Weinberger Speaking Topics

• AI and Ethics

  While AI raises important ethical issues that business must take seriously, in this one-of-a-kind workshop David has business managers probe beneath the tech to see how those issues arise from the very nature of machine learning, how to address them, and how AI is changing our ideas about what's fair and ethical.

  Takeaways: Understand why bias is machine learning's “original sin.” Learn how our engagement with AI is forcing us to confront issues in our current idea of fairness. In a series of vivid hypotheticals, work through the trade-offs implementing AI systems demand of us.

• 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