Seth Godin Talks Tribes and SN's at TED

This week is one of my favorite conferences: TED (Technology, Entertain, and Design)". I'm a frequent visitor to the site, and gleefully developed a spreadsheet with a rating system for my favorite videos and their links so I can spread the TED love to friends and family.

Some of the greatest minds we've referenced here at FM have been TEDsters including Larry Lessig who talked about our generation's creativity and the laws that are out of step with the mash-ups we love, social networking/media author of Here Comes Everybody Mr. Clay Shirky, and David Eggers who started 826 National (from the pilot 826 Valencia) a silly shop with tutoring, writing, and publishing organizations in the back that help students with homework and get kids excited about writing.

While TED has never had someone from our movement talk about the reasons we work so tirelessly to promote civic youth engagement, TED speakers spend most of their time looking toward the future and spreading ideas about things that impact our world. The three speakers I used as an example are just a few of the hundreds of videos available via podcast or at their website that talk about issues that impact youth.

This week Seth Godin was a speaker at TED's 2009 Conference in Long Beach, CA. Godin's book Tribes talks about the ways that people connect with each other in meaningful ways are through groups with a head leader and around an idea. Ironically enough I had a conference call this week about key elements necessary when forming new youth focused organizations. It was proposed by a caller that all the money in the world is meaningless if there is no leader who can advocate the organization to potential members.

Godin argues that it is about the "idea of finding and connecting like-minded people and leading them to a place they want to go."

"The internet means geography isn't so important, so if you can find the 1,000 or 5,000 or 50,000 people out there who want to make a certain kind of change and can connect them and show them a path, they want to follow you. And you can use that tribe, that group of people, to make change that matters." Godin says in an interview with Wired.

He goes on to say that while charisma is key not all leaders are born with it, but charisma comes with the leadership. When people become leaders they rise to the challenge like some kind of latent talent we all have built into our DNA that becomes active only when tapped. "What makes you a leader is that you are leading people who want to be lead, going somewhere they want to go."

"The leadership today is about 10 people bringing you 100 and 100 bringing you 1,000. When you have 1,000 true fans, as Kevin Kelly talks about, then they're the people who are going to turn it into a movement. Not you. Your job is to take care of and feed and nurture those 1,000 people, and those people need to go to their network of people who know them and trust them, who eat dinner with them, and bring them in. It's not for you to somehow beam your message to strangers and convert them, because you can't convert strangers anymore. Not one major new consumer brand built in the last five years was built on the back of advertising. Google and Facebook, etc. are built because one person brought another one by the hand, not because someone bought ads on the Super Bowl."

As we build the youth movement we're fighting on several fronts. Some of us are seeking specific legislation or to push the youth agenda, some are seeking power with positions in the new administration, some people got Obama elected and believe that the connectivity to the youth movement is over until the next election, and others are building movements by developing further leaders.

Leadership development for the youth movement is key, but for all movements its essential. Training programs like the ones we've talked about on FM before, develop young people to take on campaigns, organizations, and eventually movements. Investing in these kinds of opportunities for young people invests in the advancement of tribes that develop around political issues and civic engagement.

Similar to the TED talk: