Webstock 2011 Conference – Day 1

This post isn’t actually about day 1 it is about the first half of day 1 as I have since left the conference to catch a flight to Napier for http://0to60.com/#mce_temp_url# – more on that in the next few days.

So anyway, after 3 days of workshops today the conference proper started and the twitter hash tag (#webstock) started getting hammered!

Following a brief introduction by one of the organisers – a team that requires a huge vote of thanks – we kicked off with Frank Chimero (@fchimero)

Frank talked about Digital Campfires and more particularly story telling.

Story telling and humanizing the web are extremely important concepts and have formed a strong part of the strategic branding work carried out by Cadimage with Brian Richards over hte last couple of years.

Frank used the simple concept of cold and warm to help indicate the power of great story telling. Saying your ‘xxxx’ (insert: wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend etc) is 72.8% water is not particularly warm – though factually correct!

Another extremely powerful example was an advertising exec from New York who for weeks walked past a blind man on to work each day who held a sign that simply said “Blind” After a few weeks the advertising guy asked the blind guy if he could adjust his sign. The sign was updated to read “It is spring and I am blind” Not surprisingly at the end of the day the Blind man’s cup was full of spare change.

Other comments Frank made that really indicate the power of and reason behind story telling included:

Stories connect us

We get together to get better

Webstock is a campfire

We tell stories to understand and to be understood

Following Frank was Michael Koziarski (@nzkoz) who decided against pushing Ruby on Rails but instead concentrated on how to be successful and the concept of Skunk Works and outlined some pointers for managers and developers/designers. The interesting advice for developers/designers was essentially “Quit your Job”

The morning was wrapped up hearing from Facebooks’  David Recordon who talked about HTML5 at Facebook, and then Mark Pilgram’s HTML5 keynote.

Over the morning was great and the buzz at the breaks was incredible.