Just got back from Golden Gate University’s Speaker Series Event featuring Robert Scoble, author of the book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (he wasn’t naked at the talk).
 

If I was a hardcore blogger, I would have been writing this during the event. Twittering it. Texting via my PDA. Whatever. Call me "old skool", but I wanted to actually listen and absorb what Robert Scoble had to say, instead of trying to process and regurgitate the points he was making ad hoc.

Robert is very low key, funny, and insightful. I always like a speaker who can throw in a mild cuss word and not raise the collective hackles of the audience. He spoke to us in "layman’s terms", but never dumbed it down. He took lots of questions throughout the conversation, and wasn’t married to his PowerPoint deck (which was loaded with Hugh MacLeod’s great comic graphics). He even signed books for attendees.

Here are my take-aways from the talk, and this is all paraphrased from memory, as I didn’t take notes (the few real quotes I remember will be in quotation marks).

If you aren’t blogging, you will be left behind, and fast.
Blogging
will get you linked to, therefore blogging will pump up your Google search results status. If you aren’t on the first page of Google search results, people won’t
find you.

Read smarter – use a feed reader.
Scoble said he reads/scans over 30 THOUSAND blog posts a month via his Google Reader. He is subscribed to over 650 separate blogs (I thought I had a lot of
subscriptions to read, but I have a piddly thirty). There is no way
Robert could read 10k blog postings a day by visiting 650 individual
blogs. There are other feed readers out there beside Google Reader, so
just find one you like, and start your day off with some new knowledge,
information, and honest conversation on topics you choose.

The best defense is a good offense.
A woman asked: How do I stay invisible on the Internet? I don’t want bad press out there about me. Scoble said: "Get over it." Stuff will be said, both good and bad. Blog about it. Post videos. Link to folks who say good stuff about you. Respond directly to the bad press and you can perform some damage control. You may find out ways to be better, do more, turn those naysayers into evangelists.

The thought is kismet with Clive Thompson’s article in Wired called The See-Through CEO, where he states: "Google is not a search engine. It’s a reputation management
system. By enhancing transparency, companies can manage their images as
never before." He goes on to say, "Once people are interested in you, they’re interested in helping you out – by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners."

I am looking forward to reading Naked Conversations, and getting even more insight from the Scobleizer.