SES San Francisco 2010: Opening Keynote

A wonderful good morning from San Francisco – this is the first day at SES SF 2010 and State of Search will be covering live. We’re already having some delay but the opening keynote by Jeffrey Hayzlett is going to start any minute. Please also make sure you’ll be following @state_ofsearch on twitter for some real-time action.

I’ll be updating this post on a regular basis – hopefully taking away some interesting statements out of this keynote – so stay tuned. Well… at least I’ll try to – the wifi does not seem to be too stable right now…

All right – Mike Grehan is kickin’ it off – and he seems to be pretty happy to be back at San Francisco, after couple of years in San Jose. Over 80 sessions featuring more than 200 speakers – that’s a little bit, isn’t it? According to Grehan we’ll have a “kick-ass” keynote every day, let’s see if that’s the case

OK – here we go and what a start – first statement of Jeffrey Hayzlett: “If you expected a long and lame presentation you can kiss that shit goodbye” – the ice broke and he basically got everyone, great start. So basically Jeff will talk about the changes in marketing and about changes in his company Kodak. According to him they had to show a proof of live: Why is Kodak in the game? Why are they better than others? Remember: Passion is NOT a substitute for planning.

So from a leadership perspective, according to Jeff, you basically have to consider three things:

• Set conditions of satisfaction (COS): Set conditions in your organization, like how you want to satisfy the user, how you want to get them and even more important – what they can expect / what you want to deliver.
• Cause tension: “Take everybody from the center of the table and move them to the edge”- you have to push it to get the maximum out of it.
• Be who you are: “We love you but we’ll miss you” – if you have someone in your organization like a team or just a person, make sure one is not slowing down the other, if so be consequent and take action.

Jeff states that Kodak had to look in the mirror, figure out who they really are, what their core values are and get back to that core: Making emotional technology. It’s not just about films or printing; it’s about Kodak creating emotional technology and delivering visual moments to connect. To achieve this they basically had to shift from an “old” and trustworthy company moving to something “modern” but still caring about their core values and even more important, not selling many different things but just being recognized as the image company.

On a side note: Kodak was the first company to hire a Chief Listening Officer because they are tweeting in 12 different languages over 120 countries – and that team is monitoring all the communication because it’s SO important for the company. Wow, not bad! Hadn’t heard of that. So according to Jeff you really have to care about the four E’s: Engage, Educate, Excite, Evangelize. That’s what they also did finding a name for a new waterproof camera – instead of a deciding for a cryptic short name they tweeted out a contest, got couple of thousand replies and decided for one being submitted by a customer. In return they sponsored a trip to CES Vegas – awesome.

All right, that’s it for the keynote – for more statements from Jeff, also be sure to check out the recent interview here on State of Search.

Related posts:

1. SES San Francisco 2010: BJ Fogg’s Morning Keynote
2. On the web you are what you publish: opening keynote SES New York
3. SES San Francisco 2010: Quick-Summary
4. SES San Francisco 2010: Search – where to next?
5. SES San Francisco 2010: Developing great content