I had a meeting with a person yesterday who can legitimately consider himself a celebrity. He has an eponymous business, has written a book and currently hosts an international television show. Our conversation centered around solidifying his online presence. There's a website, a Twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other number of other sites who may comment and contribute to his online personality - and not all always in a positive way. Once achieved, a level of celebrity can also bring a level of discontent in a certain number of online wankers. I did a post about meeting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and immediately received a raft of comments from people laying claim to some sort of 'founding' with Wikipedia as well. People who don't like Jimmy Wales. True? Not my job to validate or invalidate those claims - but it's everyone's job, anyone with any online presence at all, to make sure you manage that presence in as positive a way as possible.
And you don't think you're a celebrity? I don't either, but in the last few weeks this blog has become the #1 Technorati rated blog in Vietnam and I have been called out and treated as someone who has done something in otherwise normal social situations. Just on the street last week a guy yelled out at me, "Yo! Wild Wild East!". At another basically normal business meeting on another day the MD brought in a staff member and said, "She's a fan of your blog". Geez, a blogging celebrity? But the thing is - it's entirely possible, and in my case, oddly true. Do you think a lot of people sit around in their house at night and think, "The next big business idea is the Wild Wild East Dailies?" But I did.
My friend, Hugh MacLeod, a certified blogging celebrity, notes in chapter 35 of his book, 'Ignore Everybody' - "Savor obscurity while it lasts". Because once you hit the Internet, that clock starts ticking on what Andy Warhol termed, "Your 15 minutes of fame".
The most interesting thing about my recent celebrity meeting, and all the previous meetings I've had with such folks, is that that they all need to define what part of the person goes into the "Brand" of Oprah, Elvis, Tony Bennett, Dennis Quaid, Meg Ryan, Jimmy Wales and even Hugh - (and yes, I have met them all in more than a handshake capacity) to figure out which part needs to practice the art, clean the toilet, mow the lawn, have a romance, a family and as normal a life as makes them feel comfortable. My Monday celebrity simply wants to be able to do the work that made him famous and not have to dick with Twitter too much. God knows it hasn't helped Brittney or Lindsey Lohan too much.
And once you sort that out, you're on your way to being a celebrity as well. Like me! But I still have to pay for beers in bars.
My sincere apologies to all. I'm way late on this one. Even back in July, Tony Troung from Golden Digital had asked me to be on the organizing committee for this conference, and what can I say? Things got lost. The other day I checked into LinkedIn, which I do every few days, and there were 35 requests for 'contacts' from all sorts of people. Tony was one of them. From July. So I'm blaming LinkedIn. Seems fair. Personally, I think all my contact requests had been 'leaked' to WikiLeaks and then just released this week when WikiLeaks got busted and pissed off and released my stuff just to show what kind of damage they could do if things got really hairy! I hear they've got film of Justin Beiber and Osama Bin Laden doing heroin in a cave somewhere. So, Word Up! The Vietnam Digital Marketing and Technology Conference is up on Thursday. See their website for full details. I like this one because it's partially hosted by a Vietnamese advertising agency and it's just really nice to see a Vietnamese company taking the lead for a change, instead of carpetbaggers from other countries. Cheers all. See you there. "I'll be covering it for Technorati. Of course they won't have Jimmy Wales(see photo), so I'll just have to hang with Aryeh Sternberg from Group M instead.
Welcome to the Internet. Welcome to Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter. Welcome to Mixx and Digg and Propeller and MySpace, Bebo, Reddit, YouTube and 1000 others? And you're a personality on every one - did you know that? Do you know that?
Every time you register for a site, you need a nickname or a screen name. Most sites give you an option for a picture, or a lot of pictures - and over time, for as many social networking sites as you might sign up for, you begin to aggregate an image or a series of images. The question over time then becomes, "But, is that a saleable image?" or in many cases "Is that an image I'd want my boss to see?" - or my mother?.
Here's a test for everyone: A while back, I did a post about a new service called Rapportive. Rapportive is a service that collects public data about "you" and then displays it to "me" - on my Gmail sidebar. Go to Rapportive.com and register. Then see how social networks report on you, and what they report. You will definitely be surprised - and maybe not in a pleasant way.
That's an effect of Personal Branding. Or a part of it anyway.
And there are many parts. Is your Screen Name the same on every site you're a member of? Is your photo the same? And is it a good photo? And on Facebook, is there a picture of you in your underwear dancing on a table somewhere? You may not want that. With personal branding, you control the images that people see, and you control the words they read as well - especially on LinkedIn. I can't tell you how many bios I see that simply list everywhere a person has worked and spend little or no time with what they actually accomplished in that position - and that I believe is a selling opportunity missed. Personal branding is being able to manage and direct ones image to be not only positive, but potentially profitable in the long run. And that's a lot more work than people think these days.
For instance: I work my Personal Branding on two fronts. There is the Product Branding I do to promote my book, Wild Wild East - and this blog is part of that. And there is my Personal Branding, in which I am the writer of that book. So, on Facebook, you see my handle as WildWildEast, because that reinforces a personal product - But on LinkedIn, I promote my own name only with little mention of Wild Wild East, except for the link to this blog. The Product Branding supports me, and my Personal Branding supports my professional work as a writer, with only a slight nod to the book. If your an accountant but also publish a knitting blog, that might be something interesting about you personally in terms of a LinkedIn link, but it's doubtful that your knitting blog will get you much accounting work. The important thing is to divide what is personal from what is professional and do that clearly - and then make good branding decisions based on the market you're reaching through the site.
And don't think your boss, can't find your Facebook page. He can.
Part I in a II part Series: For Part II click here.
Please take a few minutes with this video. (Pause the podcast in the sidebar first) This is Kseniya Simonova a Ukrainian artist who works in a sand painting technique using a large light box and a pre-recorded soundtrack - but what's interesting, or what I found interesting here, is not the technique particularly but how she is able to stimulate emotion and visual learning throughout the eight minute film. Look how the audience reacts to her work as she paints. Their vocalizations. Understand how you went into the piece and how you forgot your logic and your bearings about two minutes in - because you didn't know what was going to happen next. That's what happens with visual communication through media. It engages our suspension of disbelief. It takes fantasy and makes it part of our reality for the time being. Because reactions to visual stimuli are part of our natural intelligence, not something we've learned so much as something we've acquired - More nature vs. nuture in a visual sense. Alphabets and organized aural communication are learned and nurtured later - but nobody needs to tell us what the meaning of 'scary bear' is or how to cry or scream at the sight of it. That's natural, at any age - as is your reaction to Keseniya's hand painted story. That's our visual learning gene kicking in. So when are the social networking sites we all use going to start taking advantage of this innate human sense we have and are actually yearning to use, the same as we use everyday in real life? And why are they largely ignoring it in what they all trumpet as their "attention to user experience"? Have they forgotten that our eyes can be used for so much more than reading - and that it's a whole lot more than me just having a Star Wars skin as the background to my homepage? Or are they just at a stage where it's a natural progression to go there next. The latter is where I think we are now. .
That's Hugh MacLeod from his book, Ignore Everybody. Last year Hugh managed to hit both the Amazon and Wall Street Journal Top Ten Lists for business books with a book of what? Well, cartoons for at least 1/2 of it, and smart ideas about creativity for the second half. And do you think anyone in New York was looking for a business book with cartoons in it before Hugh? Well, of course not, but he hit a nerve that had probably been long under-tapped in that his book managed to combine both words and pictures in a way that spawned new ideas - and a valuable following of readers and social participants as well.
You see, Hugh's book isn't just a book, it's more just the tip of an iceberg of a philosophy and a business that includes active participation in his blog and his web community of "Crazy Deranged Fools"- many of whom buy art and wine and other things that are part of Hugh's total product mix. I've known Hugh for twenty years nowand I can tell you, he has never been able to work in just words or pictures alone - he has always required both. And I think a great many of us are the same way. It's just that the Internet, or at least the social networks have not found the value in addressing us that way yet. Now we want our crayons back. We want to be able to communicate in the way that is most natural to us. We want our communication and indeed our networking to be well, easier, more comforting.
This whole train of thought for this post started for me weeks ago and it has occupied a number of A4 sheets of discarded printer paper of which I use to keep errant notes for blog posts although many of the ideas have been drawn from my life in communications and percolating for years. This iteration began by seeing Mark Pincas on The Charlie Rose Show, followed by Director, Tim Burton discussing a retrospective of his artwork at MoMA in New York. Mark Pincas is the founder of Xynga games and for those who don't know, that is the company responsible for the Mafia Wars and FarmVille games, most popularly seen and played on Facebook. But that was not what interested me, nor the supposed 15 billion dollar market in virtual games of which he said 1-2% of the players actually pay for. What interested me, is that these are primarily 'visual' concepts, as is online Poker - and I couldn't think of very much that was visually driven about the primary social networks I have been involved in. I'll get back to this idea a bit later because I think I know why.
So I needed to take a look again and see what these networks were missing. (For those who will wonder why I haven't included Second Life in this comparison consider this: When the US, Japan, most of Europe and China open embassies on SL, I'll consider them part of the same market. Until then, their level of suspension of disbelief is just a boatload higher than most people are willing to go for a real social network. You wanna hire my Avatar? I didn't think so. But apparently you can sleep with it. More of a pure game, albeit a social game but way far out of reality's scope here both in concept and excecution.)On the left side of this page, you'll see screenshots of my Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Friendster accounts. And on the right side, you'll see the leadpage shots of the website from probably the most awarded advertising agency in Germany, Jung von Matt. Notice any difference? I thought you might.
Starting with Facebook, it has always perplexed me why the thing needs to look so boring. Blue, like Windows classic blue. Icky. Sure, you can run around the program and get special 'skins' from third party suppliers, but as I understand, they either have a short shelf-life, as Facebook keeps changing their codes, or only work for your computer screen whilst everyone else sees the same boring blue screen they have always seen - so your skin change is not communication at all, just some king's new clothing for you while everyone else gets to see you naked - as usual. And all the other third-party apps? Most of them run as stand alone things and don't integrate into your workflow in the system. Oh, they'll send you a ton of crap later but visually they don't play nice with your homepage and require you to gotto 'apps' and activate them. Clumsy, I think. Much like the way they handle groups. Why don't I get a cool little audio/visual ding-dong when someone adds something to my group (the ones I moderate)? Could be insightful.
Moving along to LinkedIn and Xing (I categorize these together becausethey are both 'business' networking sites), we get - well, surprise - more blue or teal and green in Xing's case, just a slight rotation of the colour wheel. Now here we mean business and it's pretty obvious from both sites lack of personal colour choice that we shant be messing with business by painting it like a Grateful Dead album cover or god forbid Daft Punk or some sort of other electronica rot like that. No siree. In fact, a quick Google for LinkedIn skins or Xing skins gives you well, nothxing. And neither site offers anything in the way of helping yourself - so forget it. If you don't want to work for IBM, go away. Big Blue rules here as well.
But how much sense does that make when the agency on the right handles work for Mercedes, Nikon and Deutsche Post? Is the post office cooler than a business social networking site? Maybe. But it needs to be remembered that business takes many forms and many shapes and colours as well. Just think about all the logos and companies you already know about and how different they all are. Companies all have their own language of visual communication - and even Jung von Matt knows that. The work they do for their clients doesn't look at all like the leadpages on their website. That's just their way of representing themselves in this particular instance. And that's how it should be. Visual communication, as opposed to verbal or written communication, is like the thousands of characters in the Chinese alphabet compared to the 26 characters in the Roman alphabet or 24 in Korean. It's a world of pictures out there to the Asians and those quicker to realize and capitalize on that will be further in their user community's minds than the next guy. With Twitter, Xing and Friendster on the rise, Facebook is looking like the next guy, and already blocked in China.
Next up Twitter. Need I say more than 140 characters? By restricting our BS, Twitter has allowed us to create 140 character novels, post pictures and even have clever little skins and widgets that personalize and communicate along with all the terse verse we can compose. But we get to do it with a wee bit of style in keeping with their wee bit of philosophy. Fair enough.
And finally, Friendster. Never heard of Friendster? Well 100 million other people have and a lot of those people are Chinese. Compared to 90 million on Twitter, 55 million on LinkedIn and a growing but not quite there yet 8 million or so on Xing, Friendster is on the cutting edge of visual communication in social networking, but that really is not saying so much. The site was relaunched recently with intensified visual themes to more widely appeal to an Asian audience. They feature a ton of custom skins and decorations for your own pages - and like MySpace, everyone gets to see them. I've spoken before of how living in Asia can make the web a third world country when moving back to the west because the sheer activity, not to mention rocket ship bandwidth and speed in Korea and other fast ramping Asian markets, but so much because of the history and tradition of visual communication.
Remember, Chinese characters are pictures - not letters that mean sounds or syllables like other modern alphabets and whilst Korean 'Hangul' is a mathematical and phonetic construction, Korean newspapers still feature Chinese characters interspersed with their more modern (circa 1500s) alphabet because Koreans still know what a limited amount of Chinese characters mean and relate to them intrinsically. And since the Chinese invented paper and the Koreans preceded Gutenberg with movable type by 78 years in 1377 with Jikji(Which was originally individually cast Chinese Characters) these people know a thing or two about the written word in pictures - and getting it out. Think also of the Japanese fascination with Pokemon and it's later storm through a western kid's vernacular and you'll get where I'm going. Pictures speak louder than words. And mostly to the audience to which the social networks will be making all their money off of for the next ten or twenty years - unless holographic or 3D networking wipes it all out in 2 or 3 years from now ... Continued in the next post orclick here for Part II.
Readers to my earlier post entitled "Low Tech Germany! Who Knew?" will be aware that my initial experience with the Xing network was reasonably less than positive. Joining in early December I found the sign-up to be a rather taxing experience and then once I got it up and running it just sort of sat there. Good news abounds since then though as Xing was just beginning to release a number of upgrades to bring it fully out of what I had described as Web 1.0 and into full Web 2.0 performance. But more than that, I was intrigued that Xing was up for any length of time with as much success as they had had considering the clumsy interface I encountered, so I decided to do a bit of homework. What follows, begins with a Macro overview of both services and then works into a Micro look into daily functions and overall usability from a user standpoint - with a pretty good understanding of where Xing is headed, at least, technically. And then back to Macro for the finish. So let's get started. For our Macro view I'm going to use a lot of data from Wikipedia, which yes, I know, I know, could be dodgy but it's some of the most current I've found at this time.
- Type: Public, (AG) - Founded: Hamburg, Germany (2003) - Headquarters Hamburg, Germany - Members: 8.3 million (Source: Xing) - Key people Dr. Stefan Gross-Selbeck, CEO, Ingo Chu, CFO, Burkhard Bluhm (Executive Board), Lars Hinrichs ...(Founder) - Revenue: € 25.09 million(QI-QIII 2008)$36.15 million USD (Source: Wikipedia) - Website: Click under "Xing Me" in the sidebar - Alexa rank: 268(Source: Alexa) - Type of site: Professional network service - Registration Required - Available in: Chinese, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, ..Japanese,..Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
- Type Private.Funded by Greylock, Sequoia Capital,[5]Bessemer Venture Partners, the ..European Founders Fund and Bain Capital Ventures. - Founded: Mountain View, California (2002)Launched 2003 - Headquarters: Mountain View, California - Members: 53 million (Source: Wikipedia) - Key people: Jeff Weiner, CEO previously a Yahooexecutive. Founder Reid Hoffman, ..Chairman of the Board. Dipchand Nishar, Vice President of Products. - Revenue: € 11.77 million(QI-QIII 2008)$17 million USD (Source: Wikipedia) - Website: Click on "LinkedIn" in the sidebar - Alexa rank: 42 (Source; Alexa) - Type of site: Professional network service - Registration Required - Available in: English, Spanish, French and German
So let's go through the big points: #1)Xing is a public company and LinkedIn is private. Basically, this makes Xing a whole lot more interested in generating income now as opposed to later with stockholders and quarterly interests to satiate. #2) Both sites were launched in 2003, so that makes them essentially the same age - in virtual terms. #3)Here's where things seem to go strongly in LinkedIn's favor - Members: Xing clocks in with a self reported number of members of 8.3 million members whilst LinkedIn sports over 50 million - 5 times that of Xing. #4) But let's not jump to profit conclusions by looking at member numbers. If LinkedIn has 53 million people and took in revenue of €11.7 million that (in a rough, not financially very accurate calculation)would be around 8 and a half cents € for the entire year or for the Americans out there, less than 12 cents for the whole year. Xing by contrast with just 8.3 million members brought in €25.09 million adding up to around 30 cents € for each member or 43 cents American per member - but wait, "All the members didn't pay, right?", you say. And that's exactly right. It's estimated that fewer than 10% of Xing members pay for a premium membership, but the point is, that they do pay, 6€ per month or so but that's coming from well less than a million members and it makes the site, very, very profitable.(Income from partner agreements and recruiter accounts on either site is not publicly available so can't be broken out here.)#5) On Alexa rank, LinkedIn pretty much clobbers Xing but with the financials already discussed, I don't think anybody at Xing is going to be breaking a sweat. We'll go through some more financials later and you'll see that Xing is certainly not afraid to spend a bit of that for growth. With a steady paycheck coming in, who wouldn't, considering the growth available in the market? The Alexa charts here indicate web activity for both sites - one for a few months and the the other for two years. LinkedIn is, on the left, the big wavy blue line and , on the right, the jagged red line - Xing is the rather tepid line at the bottom of both charts. I'll come back to these charts later but suffice to say, if I had a chart for financials, it would look somewhat like these two - that is if you reversed the Xing and LinkedIn captions. Xing is basically kicking LinkedIn's butt on the money front. #6) Our last big point here is in languages served. LinkedIn clocks in with 4 and Xing with 16? Yep, you read that correctly. Now I've been able to work through Xing pretty well in English but I will say that since it's German based, and well over 1/2 its members are from Germany that not everything works perfectly in English - for instance when you need help or want to sign up for another service - the forms are in German. How Xing manages the sixteen and counting little networks it currently houses inside their one, still not very big network, will certainly be something to watch - and they have an office in China. I'll get to that later as well. Could they breach China's Great Fire Wall?
So that's the Macro. In a nutshell LinkedIn is a helluva lot bigger in terms of members than Xing, but Xing is infinitely more profitable than LinkedIn. In this business scenario, who would you like more to be? Methinks a little bit of both of these guys would like to be the other. But I'm going to focus more on Xing today because I'm in Germany and it's my current fascination. So with LinkedIn pretty much kicking butt on membership how do you go about competing? Yes, both services charge for a premium membership (and I'm currently getting my Xing premium for free because I signed up enough new members) but LinkedIn is just way over priced for their premium services and I have a network large enough(Over 300) that I don't seem to need much of what they offer. Xing on the other hand, already has a loyal subscriber base, so how can you grow that? Enter OpenSocial.
Let's get a little more Micro. OpenSocial is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace and a number of other social networks. It was released November 1, 2007. For all us non-geeks what does that mean? It means all those little apps that let you see a block of Facebook updates, or your friend's Tweets or latest blog posts - all in real-time. It enhances the user experience. And this was what Xing was missing when I checked in just a month ago. I had become reasonably addicted to all this seemingly senseless activity but when I first checked into Xing it didn't have any of that, and I missed it. To quote Xing's founder, Lars Hinrichs, "it is ostensibly more important for people to know what their contacts are doing than to follow the latest news events from around the world.” LinkedIn started to integrate OpenSocial APIs in 2008 so what did Xing do? They bought a site that already had them.
And now to teeny tiny micro. All that hard work done, and it does seem that Goldberg was a real motivator, but I didn't see a bit of it when I signed up for Xing in early December of 09. Tons of work done in the back room and little of it visible out front, where it basically counts - a bit like dropping the ball right before crossing the goal line. For instance, the function for finding my Xing contacts based on my Gmail account never worked properly - and when I went through listing all my other social network accounts, there was no mention of their new Twitter interface or how to put it on my homepage. (Also no way to put my LinkedIn account, and I think this is a huge mistake. Rather than regard LinkedIn as competition Xing should realize that heavy users will have both accounts and at least canibalize their bigger brother for those of us who want them both. There's 45 more million qualified customers to hit. Easily.) Only later, after seriously digging into the site, and really searching features out, did I find out how to use them. Xing's homepage needs to do a lot better job of pointing out new features and encouraging usage every time I sign in.Things should be a whole lot easier than I found because I'm on everything from Digg to Mixx to Twitter, Facebook, Linked in and a few more and Xing's been the hardest of all for me to negotiate as a new user.
When Nintendo was my client at Leo Burnett, I learned a very important thing from their programmers. In that business it is said that when a new game comes out, way beyond the graphics or the storyline, that a kid needs to feel a real level of success inside of 15 minutes with it, or you have lost him forever. I can't imagine that most business people have much more patience than a twelve year old boy. Something to keep in mind, certainly.And how to do that? Well since I'm in that business, I don't think I want to give all my best consulting away for free so I'll just give a hint: 65% of the population are visual learners. Currently, I don't think there's a single social networking site (save for possibly MySpace) that makes good, productive use of this fact. I think there's a real opportunity here.
And now finally, way back to Macro. Having painfully negotiated Xing and gotten over 40 contacts, a number of groups and all my bells and whistles working, there's one thing that Xing does better than LinkedIn or Facebook ever have - and that's making real contacts. The deluge of party invites I get, and the actual events, even the shitty ones, are more than I've ever seen from my plethora of networks. Here's a network that actually works. That needs to be communicated much better. And that's where we get to the real bottom line. Scroll back up to those two graphs and look at the one that's a two year graph, and see how Xing, with the line way at the bottom, takes a tiny spike up at the beginning of 2009 (presumably due to the multi-million Euro purchase of networks in Spain and Turkey) and LinkedIn just goes through the roof. That's called buzz. And Xing could use a whole lot better buzz than I found when I arrived in Germany, their home country, and now my home country. Once they do that they'll get their bottom line buzzXing as well.
Post Script: I posted this late morning yesterday, Tuesday, and by mid afternoon had a note from staff at Xing and by evening a Twitter follower from LinkedIn. Maybe this blog's Google page rank moving from a 3 to a 4 over the weekend is having some effect. Think so? Nah...
For more on digital marketing and social networking see:
I had gone through the day wandering between a headache and a toothache, a chicken and egg scenario possibly, but on further investigation the toothache has been more of a molar sensitivity that's come over the last couple of months and the headache I'm sure, was brought on with just a few glasses of truly wretched wine the night before procured at my local Tengleman's at a now understood why special Aktion! price. In Germany, the word Aktion! is used all over stores to denote 'on sale' items. Germans like Aktion! I could have used a little less Aktion! yesterday. But I nursed the alternating pains all day long in preparation for my first real networking foray into the Munich business community, a night sponsored by Xing, the social networking community I had not so favourably reviewed in my previous post.
Being new to Xing I had taken care the night before to have sent out 'hellos' to my measly 26 friends on the new service to let them know I would be attending the Christmas Party that night in hopes that I would meet a few real people and take myself out of the digital social network that has been my respite since winter set in a few weeks ago. Munich is now a snowy wonderland and that's only nice if you have a sled or cross country skis - otherwise it just makes you want to stay inside, stay warm and fret over the number of Twitter followers you've lost.
For those not familiar with Xing, Xing, founded in Hamburg and the largest social network in Europe, is the primary competitor to LinkedIn with 5-7 million subscribers vs. LinkedIn's 20 million or so but where Xing seems to shine particularly is in that they take great care to cultivate local networks and stage events that get the networking out of the computer and into a real context. This is particularly valuable to me having moved to a new country and needing real friends as opposed to just virtual ones and old college pals.
Sure, I have over 350 'friends' on Facebook and a similar number of 'contacts' on LinkedIn, but how often do I ever see any of those people? Almost never. Meeting just one of my 26 new Xing contacts would be better than not meeting anyone at all.The Christmas party was promoted to me by a few folks on Xing and came at a quite reasonable €10 price with afree drink and pizza. Why not?
I filled out the handy order form at home the night before and paid by PayPal. Confirmation happened in less than a minute and I printed out my e-ticket right there at the desk. Positively painless - quite unlike my tooth and my head would be the next day.
Ready to rock. Of to the party at P1, whatever P1 would turn out to be. P1 is located at Prinzregentenstrasse 1, which when you walk down the street, you won't find. What you will find is a huge building that is the Haus der Kunst museum, currently housing an Ai WeiWei exhibit and decorated in a hanging mural made of Chinese backpacks that spell out something in Chinese that sure looks nice but we have no idea what it means. It means it's an art museum, I suppose. Ai WeiWei is most well known for his inspiration for the main Olympic stadium in Beijing nicknamed 'the Birdsnest' and this collection seems to be piles of wood based on a similar thinking. So I enter the museum to figure out where I am. I am told that I am indeed at Prinzregentenstrasse 1 but need to go around back and down underneath the place. Which I do.The picture here is not P1 or the museum. It's just a picture of a nice building that typifies much of Munich.
Black velvet ropes and big bouncers decorate the opening and point around yet another corner to the special entrance for this event. My e-ticket is scanned and I am welcomed. No sloppy stamps on my hand, no hospital bracelets.
Once inside I realize that this place is huge. 380 people had confirmed attendance on the Xing invitation page and there seemed to be even more than that. Room #1 sported 2 bars, with the main room, 2 storeys high, housing a DJ and no less than 6 bars, all working. The third and fourth rooms turned out to be more intimate and the last one condusive to smoking. All nice, but thematically boring. Big, but I've been to more interesting clubs in Saigon and Seoul.
Nothing interesting here. Back to the main hall. 6 giant video screens show the Xing logo and no video whatsoever. The expansive lighting system hung far above our heads with the obligatory Gothic chandelier at one end seems to have the capability of launching missiles but it is not used - just the dead thud thud of house versions of some of the worst of what the eighties had to offer. Huh, the eighties? Yup complete with Sade segues to remixes of Eye of the Tiger and Footloose. I'm not shitting you. Sade was real, I do remember, but the rest of it was so horribly dated or forgettable that I think I needed to forget it just to get back to that headache that had a better beat than whatever they were playing.
Time for pizza.The pizza by Hugo's of Munich was nice but a bit thin with just a slathering of tomato sauce, cheese and a little prosciutto and arugula on top. I killed four pieces, easy.
Walking back to the lounge area 3 girls with the look and feel of the Andrew Sisters were setting up on the stage and it seemed worth the time to have a smoke in back and wait for their start. Have I mentioned that I was bored shitless and not meeting anybody at all?What's that all about? Well I suppose it's all about age. And that's something I had not really accounted for in moving to Europe from Asia at this point in time. Sure, I'm fifty three, but for the past 15 years I've been living in countries where the average age is 26 in Vietnam and 34 in Korea. Geez. It's 45 plus here in Germany. That means it's full of me. Icky. This crowd was forty to fifty something with thirtysomethings in the minority and white as the interior of the bar we were in. A white club? Yep. For white people. Lots and lots of old white people. Oh, impeccably dressed and not a person of colour in the place. Seriously. I saw three or four Asians but aside from that it was like a page from that wretched book 'Things White People Like' - all bad. And I'm white.The Andrew Sisters got going and whilst their harmonies were perfect and charming, watching old white people thrill to the sounds of It Came Upon A Midnight Clear and Silent Night was not exactly what I had had in mind for the evening.
Back in the club room, men of my age, but in much worse shape than I, were starting to shed their coats and pull out their shirttails. I knew it was just a matter of time before they started using their ties as bandanas.
Time for a drink. Using my free drink ticket I was handed a Vodka tonic that I must say was heavy on the Vodka. I was going to need to be completely plastered for any of this to have been any fun. But that was not to happen. Thank gawd.I spent the rest of my time looking for anybody who looked remotely like the photos they had posted on the Xing website but to no avail. They all looked the same. And they danced horribly. By 10:30 the light show had still not materialized and I had arrived around eight.
Time to go. One thing I had not been prepared for in this move from East to West was the sheer wall that the lack of German language would present to me. You might think that a wall like that is much higher in Asia, but I assure you it is not. Even Ai WeiWei writes in English on the museum's blog. So it works like this: In Asia I look western so nobody expects me to speak Vietnamese, Chinese or Korean - although I do stumble through a bit of Korean when I need to. But here in Germany I could just as well be German, so they expect that I speak German. And I don't. This has made me oddly shy in public situations. I never felt like this in Asia because I knew, that they knew, that I did not speak the language. Here I don't have that advantage - so I am at a disadvantage from the get-go. Yes, many Germans speak English, but this is not Berlin, this is Bavaria. You rarely hear much English on the street.
Going home I was almost relieved to be heading towards a social network that I could communicate with - my computer. Something sad about that, isn't there?
As far as Xing and their conspicuous lack of visual fun on the site or at the club, they would do well to take a look at P1's website, it's a whole lot more fun than I found the club itself and Xing could use a little zing on their site.
Once home, and back at the computer I did a little research into the club and found that I had just spent an evening at Munich's premier nightclub - the place where famous personalities and football players go. Paris Hilton has been there. And Princess Stephanie of Monaco, reportedly turned away. Who knew? And the rap on the place is that it's impossibly expensive (€15 for a Coke) and impossible to get into - the bouncers shooing away anybody who doesn't look like they belong on the cover of a magazine or in a porn video.
Yes, I do look like David Bowie, but that doesn't hardly get you into a club these days. now does it? Any self-respecting bouncer at a really hot club in Asia would say 'Who's David Bowie' and he'd be dead right. It got me into Spago once, Wolfgang Puck's infamous West Hollywood eatery that was perched above Sunset. They weren't sure so they let me in anyway when I replied, 'David' to the maitre d' in an English accent. when asked my name. I sat next to Timothy Hutton and two phenomenally hot Brazilian models. I ate something good.
Guess those days are over. Now I get into really old Xing parties in Munich with an e-ticket. Sometimes technology just takes all the fun out of things. I need more Aktion! Less Xing.
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I had a meeting with a person yesterday who can legitimately consider himself a celebrity. He has an eponymous business, has written a book and currently hosts an international television show. Our conversation centered around solidifying his online presence. There's a website, a Twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other number of other sites who may comment and contribute to his online personality - and not all always in a positive way. Once achieved, a level of celebrity can also bring a level of discontent in a certain number of online wankers. I did a post about meeting Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and immediately received a raft of comments from people laying claim to some sort of 'founding' with Wikipedia as well. People who don't like Jimmy Wales. True? Not my job to validate or invalidate those claims - but it's everyone's job, anyone with any online presence at all, to make sure you manage that presence in as positive a way as possible.
