Three Audiences, Three Different Cultures

You might think that the trick to good speaking is speaking well. Being confident. Having interesting content. And all that. Now that I've given a bunch of speeches (four in the past two days), I'm learning that the real skill a speaker needs is listening. Can you take a question during a talk and turn that into something useful? Can you do it from noted that great brands won't get blogging. It's too bad, too, there are so many passionate people inside Amazon who are just waiting to share their passion about online shopping and books. I took them so I could remember them. To me the people who work at Amazon are Amazon (yes, I can still hear Jeff Bezo's laugh in my head - I remembered that he hung out with everyone else at O'Reilly's FooCamp all night long - that drive to find a better idea is why they have such a great company). One thing I learned, though, at Amazon is the deep love of their customers. That resonated with me a lot. Appreciate the people who pay your paychecks and reward them with killer stuff and listen to them when they talk with you. I love that culture. I guess that's why I'm different than a "consumer." I wanna know what's on the minds of the people creating products and services, and, I'd love to have conversations with them about their products and learn some stories so that I can better evangelize their work. Ben Hollis asked "what about Apple?" during our talk at Amazon today (and, I missed, that nice tech blog by the way), from small businesses (if you ever need a DJ to host a wedding in Seattle, Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web Technorati: Scobleizer blog. He works as Scobleizer