David Weinberger

Called a "marketing guru" by the Wall Street Journal, Dr. David Weinberger has turned his remarkable range of experience and knowledge to the most important question facing every business today: How is technology changing the way employees, partners and customers are putting themselves together, and how is that changing the basics of business... and beyond?

Weinberger has been a philosophy professor, a comedy writer for Woody Allen's comic strip, a humor columnist, a dot-com entrepreneur before most people knew what a home page was, and a strategic marketing consultant to household-name multinationals and the most innovative startups. Following a number of years of teaching at Stockton State College, Weinberger joined Interleaf, an innovative start-up with new ideas on how to create and structure documents, as the 'junior marketing guy'. After eight years, he left Interleaf as the VP of Strategic Marketing. In late 1995, he joined Open Text because he saw an opportunity to help shape the way intranets are used. As part of the senior management team, Weinberger helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software.

In 2000, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was published, of which he is a co-author. It became a national best-seller, cutting through the hype, and telling readers what the Web was really about. His next book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, was published to rave reviews, hailing it as the first book to put the Internet in its deepest context. His latest book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which has been called "an instant classic", explains how the new rules for organizing ideas and information are transforming business and culture.

Weinberger has been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He's written for the "Fortune 500" of business and tech journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Guardian, and Wired. He is a columnist for Knowledge Management World and il sole 24 ore, and writes an influential business technology newsletter and a well-known daily weblog, Joho the Blog.

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Weinberger was Senior Internet Advisor to the Howard Dean campaign, consulting on Internet policy. He was a policy adviser to the John Edwards campaign in 2008. Weinberger holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto and is currently a Fellow at the prestigious Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

As one of the most entertaining and acclaimed presenters around, Weinberger helps business, employees, partners and customers understand how technology is changing the basics of our businesses and our worlds.

• 1. Past Topic Titles:

  David likes working with clients to customize his presentations, but here are a couple of samples:

• 2. 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

• 3. The Information Revolution that Wasn't and the One that Will Be: How the New Dimensions of Information are Transforming Business...and Life

  Remember how in the '80s and then the '90s we were all going to drown in information? The information tidal wave crashed all around us...but we barely got wet. But don't relax too soon. The real change is already upon us.
  
  We managed to survive the information tsunami by coming up with surprisingly good information management tools - who would have predicted Google would be so great? - and, frankly, by ignoring much of the information that we've gathered.
  
  It turns out that the quantity of the information hasn't changed our businesses or our lives so much. But changes are on the way that will bring about deeper and more profound changes in the most fundamental dimensions of life and work:
  
  Place: Thanks to wireless networks, mobile devices that know where they are, and clever tools that figure out what spots documents are talking about, information about places will be available at those places. For the first time, the earth itself will no longer be speechless.
  
  Groups: As weblogs - online journals - become commonplace to the young generation, the line between private and public is being erased...including the line between company and customer.
  
  The Past: As digital photography becomes pervasive, and as sharing files among friends becomes the norm, personal memories will become communal.
  
  Truth: In order to manage vast quantities of information, we are having to deal explicitly with information about information - tags, labels, categories - which can lead businesses to ignore the real roots of their value: the messy, personal relationships that are the source of all innovation and loyalty.
  
  In this talk, Dr. Weinberger looks at these trends and others, painting a picture of the future that challenges business to change or be left behind.
  
  The audience learns:
  
  New technology trends and how they affect business
  
  How to take advantage of the new capabilities that are coming to customers and businesses

• Other Sample Titles:

  The Knowledge Management Oxymoron
  
  Messiness as a Virtue: Information Management in the Age of the Web

• “Please pass along our thanks to David Weinberger for joining us during the Meeting Industry Luncheon at McCormick Place.”
  Meeting Professionals
• “Every librarian in America needs to hear what David Weinberger has to say.
His presentation at Michigan Library Consortium's annual membership meeting was invigorating, thought-provoking, and refreshingly honest – and sometimes even a little scary – but always right on target. He sparked a high level of discussion among our member librarians who are still buzzing (and blogging!) about his program. I highly recommend David as an exceptional presenter for library conferences.”
  Michigan Library Association
• “The talk was exactly what we wanted; thought-provoking and hilarious. It is not easy to get our audience laughing as they have some pretty serious responsibilities, but you did it. I think many of them took your message away with them...”
  Inside ID
• “Your keynote was riveting and inspirational, injecting a much needed dose of energy and food for thought on the third day of a very hard working conference! Your participation in the afternoon open space was greatly appreciated by the delegates.”
  International Conference on Knowledge Management (Singapore)
• “You were among the most passionate, prepared, and articulate speakers we have ever had; appropriately funny, sarcastic, and right on target. As a reinforcement, we just received an email that reads in part: I must say that having David Weinberger at the KM conference may turn out to be the most important choice made this past year...”
  TTI/Vanguard KM Conference

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