MIT physics professor is a web star, why isn’t your company?
Today, the New York Times featured the 71-year-old physics professor, Walter H. G. Lewin, who has emerged as an international internet sensation though MIT’s OpenCourseware, which offers videos and materials of lectures to the world, for free. The videos are syndicated, along with those of Berkeley, Stanford, and other prestigious universities on iTunes U, a new section of free videos on iTunes (theoretically they actually could start charging for these, but my hope is that they’ll always remain free).
If this 71-year-old physics professor, with his thick accent, glasses and crazy hair, and all his talk of propulsion and electrostatics can make him an international web star, why aren’t your CEO and the other charismatic people behind your company out in front, connecting to consumers as easily as they do each other on social networking sites like Facebook?
As I have said before, blogs aren’t the answer, they just add more noise to consumers’ lives. Most companies don’t have the discipline to maintain a blog that can effectively compete for consumers’ attention.
The next knee jerk reaction for many of us is to go where consumers are. The problem is that consumers use existing sites like Facebook and Myspace to interact with their friends and colleagues, not companies. On these sites, our companies’ participation is a distraction, not part of the core value proposition for their users. The community “culture” isn’t much of a cultural fit either, since users might go from commenting on how cute their friend looked in her New Year’s Eve dress to one about the environmental impacts of the materials our company might use, which we’d hope to be thoughtful and objective. Instead, we act surprised when comments range from “cool” to “sweet” or “this is stupid.”
Why does Lewin have a fan club who writes him “I walk with a new spring in my step and I look at life through physics-colored eyes” or “through your inspiring video lectures i have managed to see just how BEAUTIFUL Physics is, both astounding and simple,” from all over the world? I believe that the answer is that Lewin makes his content personal, and it’s driven by passion. Why else would he “fire a cannon loaded with a golf ball at a stuffed monkey wearing a bulletproof vest to demonstrate the trajectories of objects in free fall,” or “ride a fire-extinguisher-propelled tricycle across his classroom to show how a rocket lifts off?” The guy is bursting at the seams with passion, and you can bet that the minute he might try to sell something to his fan base, that authenticity that led to this powerful connection he created with his online audience would be lost forever, as it would in real life. Social web technology simply enables him to scale the personal interaction he creates within his classroom all over the world.
Remember the last company or division-wide meeting you had, with the executive who left you all feeling so pumped that when you returned to your desk, your job, and your life, your entire perspective had shifted? Imagine sharing that feeling with the world. Now you can.