Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And it is featured guest time on the show and our guest is Shel Israel, author of the just released Twitterville, the book focused on the business uses of Twitter. And our own social media specialist, Erica O'Grady was out on the left coast, in the Bay area, last week where she sat down and talked with Shel.

Erica: This is Erica O'Grady and I'm on the road today. I'm out in San Carlos, California where I'm visiting with Shel Israel who's the author of Twitterville, which is one of the latest books on Twitter, so Shel, welcome to the show.

Shel: Thank you, Erica. It's nice to be here.

Erica: You know I wanted to start with your background. I wanted to talk a little bit about what you did before you became an author. How did you get your start?

Shel: I was a journalist when I came out of college. I'm educated from Northeastern University and Boston University as a newspaper reporter, which are several words that are becoming extinct. After a few years of that I got tired of the vow of poverty I'd discovered I'd taken, and I became a PR guy. For 17 years I owned my own PR agency. I specialized in start-ups. I launched a lot of companies you've probably heard of and even more companies you probably haven't heard of.

Erica: So what are some of the companies that we might've heard of?

Shel: Many of the companies I name are now either big companies or the products I launched with big companies. My first start-up was something called Sun Microsystems and they're about to be called Oracle, but they were pretty well known for a few years. On the software side, forgive me, but I gave the world Power Point and the shame has lingered for many years. Then there's File Maker, Sound Blaster. I can remember going around to New York and having business editors saying, "Why on earth would anybody want sound in the workplace? There are some things, Dr. Frankenstein that shouldn't be invented." When we went online I worked with a bunch of companies that tried very hard to be social media before there was social media. One of them was Virtual Vineyards where we created a daily HTML program column called the Cork Dork where our resident master sommelier answered questions from people and it was highly interactive and it was a lot of work, so that's a quick wrap-up.

Erica: Wow. That's fantastic, so you were really heavily entrenched in the start-up world.

Shel: Yeah. My heart was with start-ups for a very long time. My PR agency was different than I think any PR agency that ever came. We focused only on first launch. We got start-ups on the playing field. We focused on telling a good story to editors who were interested in that kind of story, and once that was over and clients started asking for deliverables and measurement and all that we said, "Well you've outgrown us", and we went to the next cool start-up.

Erica: What do you think has changed in PR industry from then and now in terms of launching a start-up?

Shel: Actually I think I was a social media guy when I was a PR guy. I just didn't know it yet. And thanks to technology I could come out in a PR guy's expensive clothing. When I was in PR as today there was a small percentage of people who were really dedicated professionals who saw the traditional press probably as the primary customers and the clients who were paying us were the manufacturers or something that we repacked into news. Then as now a majority of people in the PR industry were more interested in what we call smiling and dialing. They had a pitch and they knew if they could dial the phone, they used to have dials way back then. Actually I wanted to launch the wheel, but that was a little before my time. That's why you don't know who the developer is, but PR has always been filled with people that think it's hype and pitch and it never has been. It's been about finding news in new things and giving it to people who will find that either useful or interesting. What has changed are the tools.

The tools have gone from one directional to two directional, and if you look at the PR industry and you look at social media you find some very cool people who are PR practitioners, Shel Holtz, Steve Rubell. It's a long list and I'll have to apologize if I miss it once I start, Chris Hewer, Brian Solace, Cammy Chat from Houston, and these are people who understand that now they can be part of the conversation rather than a flunkie with a press kit two feet behind the ear of the spokesperson. These people are also professional communicators and they understand that communications is not broadcast. It's two-way. It's bi-directional. The new opportunity and the only real fundamental difference, which hasn't been realized by most of the people that employ or contract PR people is that there is at least equal if not greater value in the professional communicator bringing communications in rather than just pointing it out, learning from customers, hearing ideas, illuminating focus groups by coming into the room and saying, "Well, I've been speaking to people who are really passionate about what you do, and while you're saying this, this is what your customers and potential customers are saying."

Erica: It's interesting ‘cause this is a fantastic segue into your new book, Twitterville.

Shel: I love it when we segue into my new book, Twitterville.

Erica: Well you know Twitterville is actually your second book. The first book you wrote was co-authored with Robert Scovall and was called Naked Conversations and that did fairly well. It was really kind of the official handbook on blogging and how to blog well not just for your personal brand but for your company's brand. So tell us a little bit about Twitterville. What's the premise of Twitterville?

Shel: A couple of minor corrections. I would narrow the window of where the book was down to business blogging. We tried very hard to limit it to why businesses should embrace blogging, which was the only power tool in the social media warehouse. There is a third book. It's an e-book and was published by Dow Jones called The Conversational Corporation and it's free, but I just like to keep it in my résumé because I thought it was pretty good, but Twitterville is my new squeeze. It's my new baby and I think she's beautiful. When the book began it was going to be a natural sequel to Naked Conversations, why businesses should tweet, but things were moving very fast and the story kept getting ahead of me and my fear is the story might get old before everybody that I want to have buy the book gets out there, but it's really about showing how social media tools working together allowing us to behave more and more online like we do in everyday life, and the tool that does that more than any other tool is Twitter.

Businesses are going through a painful transformational period right now. They're going from getting messages out through tools that are really not evil as a lot of people in social media try to say. They just become very ineffective. If anybody out there really loves watching advertisements on television between those little excerpts that are called programs, they're getting lonely and they're also probably getting older. The world has changed and gotten a lot smaller because Twitter and other tools is allowing us to reorganize, to break through the barriers of geography to find other people all over the world who share what we're interested in. How does this apply to business? Just about every way. It goes well beyond the confines of marketing. It certainly covers support as stories in the book talk about, so to me Twitterville is really a book about a simple little tool that fulfills the subtitle of Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point, which is little things make a big difference, and that's what's going on in the world right now.

Russ: Okay, we will be back with more of Erica O'Grady's interview with Shel Israel, author of Twitterville, after this. You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com.

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Russ: This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And now back to more with Erica O'Grady's interview with Shel Israel, author of Twitterville.

Erica: So what would be your top two favorite stories from Twitterville, business focused, about how business have had amazing results?

Shel: You know I get in trouble with two favorite stories. There are so many stories that I think are amazing and transformative. If I had a secret favorite it would be a company called United Linen of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It started during tougher times than we know now. There was a door-to-door salesman in the 30's. Business wasn't going so bad, so he and his wife started taking in the laundry and this became United Linen, which is in – if you're in northeastern Oklahoma you might know this. If you're in New York City you may not know that it is the largest restaurant uniform and linen laundry service in the whole area. They tweet and they did it originally not quite sure why they were doing it, but they thought it was cool so they put their little league ball team scores up, but the local tech service didn't handle Twitter, so it didn't go far. Then they started braiding it in with other social media tools. They posted on You Tube nine very stark videos on the proper way to set a mood by folding dinner napkins in a restaurant.

They got restaurateurs all over the world aware of this through Twitter and then it got really interesting when a surprise storm hit northeast Oklahoma and the phone lines were down and they used Twitter to tell all their customers what the new schedule was and which restaurants were not gonna have fresh linens in time for dinner. So I thought that was a pretty kick butt story and another story I really like is Sedexa, which is not known as a particularly leading edge company in terms of technology or social media, you might know their product if you've ever had the joy of eating in a cafeteria at a hospital, a military installation or a North American university. Ari Ball who I just met at our launch party is the head of executive recruiting, and unlike most industries she's in big hire mode right now and so is Aramark, their number one competitor. She's using Twitter and other social media tools together to executive recruit. She told me a couple of stories of pretty remarkable quick hires of people working for restaurants who – the restaurants are going out of business and suddenly they're interested in a new career in the restaurant food service business, and she nabbed pretty good chefs that way. I apologize to all the other stories in the book about business that I just didn't tell.

Erica: If you were giving advice to any start-up, or any entrepreneur looking to start a company, what would you tell them about how to utilize tools like social media?

Shel: Social media allows you to sit in one place and just bop around. You can be just one guy with an idea and reach a global audience. You can do that virtually for free and you can start a business that way. A couple of hours ago I was talking with Yannis Crumbs who you probably haven't heard of until I said he's the guy who took the iPhone photo of the U.S. Air flight 1549 landing on the Hudson River. He just started a company called Trip Wire. It hasn't come out yet, but the launch will be completely social media and it's an idea that couldn't exist if it wasn't for Twitter, and he wouldn't have the credentials to do what he's doing with a partner without having taken a photo that made him instantly famous on Twitter. What's interesting is that was never his plan. He's just on a boat trying to get to New Jersey and he became a citizen journalist by accident. There's guys like Laweek Lamure who started Seesmic, which he at that time was billing at video Twitter, and he used Twitter for 100 percent of his promotion.

He tweeted under his own name. He had somebody else start Seismic. They now have 2 million users. I guess without money you can't say customers, but it's a brand. It's been in the New York Times, Fortune, Forbes. It's been on TV all over the place. It has probably 2.25 million people using it. I haven't checked the numbers recently. His marketing cost so far remained at zero.

Russ: We will be back with more of Erica O'Grady's interview with Shel Israel, author of Twitterville after this, you're listening to The BusinessMakers Show, heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com

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Russ: You're listening to The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com. And continuing on with Erica O'Grady's interview with Shel Israel, author of Twitterville.

Erica: So from a strategic standpoint how would a company go about evaluating and hiring the right person to come in and familiarize them with social media, consult with them?

Shel: There are a lot of people touting themselves as social media expects who read a book and suddenly became instant experts. Social media is really quite simple and you need to know why you're doing it. You become what you measure as my friend Katie Payne says, so you need to evaluate what it is you wanna get out of it. If you want sales, take a look at somebody who did it such as Dell outlets where they've made $3 million through Twitterville, but the first thing you need to do is know why you're going to be using social media tools. If you're not quite sure, go speak to a young person. Ask ‘em how many newspapers they've read, how many things they've bought through advertising, and you'll see if you want to have a future you'll need to use social media, but the second thing is to realize the diversity of social media. You cannot possibly just do social media. That would be like just using a telephone or just using email.

Shel: Whatever you wanna do you need to understand before you start, then once you start you're gonna change direction a few times, but when you bring someone in, know why they're bringing them in, ‘cause if the answer is "Go do social media", you'll be disappointed. It's sort of like if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.

Erica: So at the end of the day you're saying it's really good to have a strategic plan in place.

Shel: Yes, with a footnote of remain flexible. One of the things I learned in Twitterville is I talked to over 100 businesses and the number of times I heard someone say, "We began by wanting to get the word out and then we discovered cool stuff to learn to say and bring it back in." So yeah, you have to know why you're doing it. You wanna get close with customers. You wanna improve support, but don't just say, "Hey, we're installing social media" and don't hire somebody to go do social media. Hire somebody to teach you what it is you want to know.

Erica: There's a lot of talk of course in your books about Twitter, but Twitter is just technology and technologies change, so what do you think about the relevance? Do you think in 5-10 years we're all gonna be using Twitter still?

Shel: The one thing I've learned over my many years is that the future will always surprise you. What is important about Twitter is what it is today and I'm certain that out there are a couple of probably young people who have probably no respect for old guys like the founders of Twitter who are now in their upper middle 30's and they'll come out with something better. Maybe it'll be visual. Maybe it'll get out of the computer all together. Maybe when you talk to somebody you'll see a holograph that's in real time showing you what they would be like if they were sitting across the table from you. whatever science fiction today becomes real tomorrow, Twitter is the best we've done so far. If you take a continuum you go all the way back to the guys in the cave that after they killed the mastodon told this story with grunts and gestures, then drew pictures in the dirt with a stick, and then the next day somebody else took the story and told it with blood and berries and little pictures on the wall.

You take that continuum and bring it across 200 millennia, however millennia there are, you come to Twitter on the far right of that continuum. There will be another dot. When that dot comes and what that dot does I haven't a clue, but I hope I'm around to get surprised. I'll write a book about it.

Erica: What would you like your professional legacy to be and what would you like your personal legacy to be?

Shel: You know I just had a 65th birthday and questions like this always sound like a tombstone epitaph, so I'm a little nervous with the question. I would like to be remembered as somebody who moved the body of knowledge forward in a way that improved life and business, and I can't really separate business from personal because I would take it either way. On a personal level I hope I will be remembered as having been good to my family and generous to people and credible.

Russ: Okay, and that wraps up Erica O'Grady's real cool interview with Shel Israel, the author of Twitterville. And he is the guy who has moved the body of knowledge forward in a way that has improved life in business for sure. This is The BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at thebusinessmakers.com