Lifestreaming with Steve Rubel at BlogWorldExpo

Some "life-streamed" notes from Steve Rubel, SVP at Edelman. from the BlogWorld Expo. He's talking about the evolution of the "inbox" e.g. e-mail, sms, IM, Twitter, FourSquare. [Note: you get a sense that this session is of high value given the fact that Louis Gray, David Armano, Shell Holtz, David Thomas and Jason Falls to name a few "big brains" are in the room taking copious notes.]

• Steve's off to a good start telling us to "avoid the shiny object syndrome" and focus on the big trends (vs. the individual tools).
• Businesses need to think about how they can engage in real time
• All sites in next 5 years need social capabilities or will become irrelevant
• Web sites in general will become less relevant.
• People are starting to practice "selective ignorance." Screening out more and more news.
• People are also becoming media agnostic. Just want the news that they want and many times will hear it from friends.
• 111 is the average number of domains an average person in the U.S. visits in a month
• On average, 2,500 web pages visited/month
• We are becoming addicted to short-form content (this helped Twitter - centralized and short form)
• Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) found the people read 20% of web pages
• People need to hear things 3-5 times before they can actually digest them

Interesting because Steve has blogged for a long time and used to do 3-5 posts/day (every day for 3 1/2 years). Once Twitter came out, that evolved to 3-5 times/week. Then with FriendFeed, that continued to evolve. He got to the point where he felt like his blog was irrelevant. And then Posterous came along. The beauty is that everything is "e-mailable" and could put it content in a centralized place but could also get cross-posted in the respective places (like Twitter or Flickr) if he wants. [Note: I signed up for Posterous a few months ago but haven't done a whole lot other than use it for inbound.]

Cool tip. Steve uses a tool called Simply Tweet and anything that he writes that is over 140 characters gets posted on Posterous with a link cross-posted on Twitter.

Big question? What does this mean for brands and how do they cope with all the streams. Steve's three recommendations are:

• You have to be ubiquitous
• Steve uses Posterous to do this
• Create "hub and spoke" strategy: build "embassies" everywhere blog, Facebook, Twitter
• Ford has done a nice job of this. You can all their content in a centralized place OR you can get it out on the individual social networks
• Muliplicity and diversity
• Obama campaign uses different sites/formats to tell stories different ways at different times (Flickr, Youtube, blogs)
• Discoverability and visibility
• Traditional PR has been the process of creating "rain" and trying to get people "wet."
• Ironically, people have going to the beach to "get wet" (Google) for several years now
• Goal is to get people to "pull" your content vs. always pushing content
• Life stream is great because it's highly discoverable
• Creating "discoverable" content makes for great SEO juice

All in all, great content. It's rare that I learn a whole lot at events like these (mainly because Twitter is such a great fountain of information) but this was a great session that now has me thinking. Thanks Steve!

post script: a few reasons why Steve loves Posterous:

• content is all exportable (this is huge)
• customer service is phenomenal
• allow him to overlay it with his own domain - http://steverubel.com
• because he e-mails everything in from gmail, he has a backup for everything on gmail.