Social Media Lessons From Dan Lyons And Friends

Last night I attended the Boston Social Media Club event in Newton on "Social Media Lessons for Big Businesses" at the Newton Marriott. The house was packed, over 150 people attended, lots of great networking opportunities, and then the main event, a panel discussion between Steve Restivo, Wal-Mart’s Director of Corporate affairs for the northeast, Dan Lyons, senior editor at Forbes, and Forrester’s Josh Bernoff.

Dan Lyons had written a Forbes article in 2005, "Attack of the blogs," where he gave "the impression that bloggers are only interested in attacking corporations." The article was widely criticized including a post from me. More currently, Dan is also the author of the Fake Steve Jobs blog, a satirical blog about Steve Jobs adventures in Silicon Valley. The blog is funny, topical and leaves you with wonder and me envy with how Dan can write really well fast.

Dan reminded me a lot of another reporter who is colleague of mine in the Society for New Communications Research at the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Abate, he also writes the MiniMediaGuy Blog. Dan has Tom’s same open style of speaking about subjects, a lack of phoniness, you know what he is thinking, which is something that makes both Dan and Tom instantly likeable.

Dan Lyons immediately explained that if he had to do the Forbes article on the attack of the blogs over again he would have taken a different approach. He also described how at the time of the article in 2005 he was more and more interested in reading blogs, and was becoming interested in starting one. After the repercussions of the article he thought it really would be a good idea to actually start blogging, especially as some of his vocal blogging critics had suggested he was hypocritical to critique blogs without having written one. So he started about 20 different blogs, some of them about what he normally writes about at Forbes, another about his family, others he based on the British satirical magazine Private Eye, including the Fake Steve Jobs blog. None of the blogs really worked except for the Steve Jobs blog. As he wrote the blog, he started to include more topical news, writing posts where Fake Steve Jobs would write his thoughts on news events of the day. This style of article proved to be extremely popular with readers, and was something that Dan thought really helped him to take the blog to the next level in a motivation for writing and also engaging his audience. Steve Jobs has also become something of a lighting rod since the rise in popularity of the ipod and now the iphone, so the blog connected with a lot of people. Dan Lyons explained that keeping the identity of the blog secret was not a very well kept secret; at least 50 people knew that he was the writer before his identity was widely revealed in a New York Times article. One comment that got a really big laugh from the audience was when Dan suggested that Valley Wag's sources must really suck because so many people knew who was writing the blog and they were trying so hard to find out who was writing the blog. The crowd was really with Dan by this point; he had been so open in discussing every aspect of his experiences with writing for Forbes and the Steve Jobs blog. Susan Getgood asked how the revelation of his identity affected the content on the blog once his identity had been revealed. Initially because he was on vacation, he was down to only one post a day, so he received a lot of criticism from readers that he was not using his same style of writing now that everyone knew his identity. But once he wrote a post about Steve Ballmer from Microsoft having lunch with Fake Steve Jobs the audience settled down and commented he was back to normal. Dan thought he even picked up readers from having his identity revealed.

Dan also told us that earlier he was advised by a colleague to shut down the fake Steve Jobs blog, because if his employer ever found out if he was writing the blog he would lose his job. So he stopped writing the blog. A few days later he received an email from Tim Forbes at Forbes telling him he loves the blog, and if he'd be interested in working at Forbes as a columnist. Intrigued he did not reveal his identity immediately but asked how much would he be willing to pay? That email and another from a venture company convinced Dan Lyons that maybe he should continue writing the Fake Steve Jobs blog.

Forbes has contracted with Dan Lyons to continue to write the blog for one year. They are not influencing the content on the blog Dan is free to continue writing. So much so, that Dan said he has more fun writing the blog than his assignments at Forbes. Dan Lyons was the big draw of the evening; he received the most questions, and got most of the laughs, more tomorrow on Josh and Steve.