I just got back from the Ubiquity Marketing UnSummit, which was created by Jason Stoddard’s new company Stagira. Putting together an all day event, with multiple speakers, and an out of town keynote speaker is a daunting task. A full day sounds like a lot, but the variety of viewpoints represented by the speakers could have easily taken two days. There were experts in social media marketing, branding, PR, and word of mouth. These people didn’t represent the traditional viewpoint of all these areas, but were individually pushing the envelope with their respective clients and companies.

I particularly thrive on case studies. It’s interesting to hear about the challenging task, the goals, and what were the tactics taken to achieve the results that were reported. The speakers have plenty of marketing scar tissue, and lessons learned from a huge variety of brands.

The highlight of the event was some 1:1 time with Chris Brogan, author of Trust Agents [order on Amazon]. The heart of his message was underlined by one particular story that he shared with us. Chris is very active in PodCamp, and is a popular blogger. So you can imagine that he has built up lots of online connections over the past 10 years (I believe the number he used was 10,000). Over those years he has been a connector, and found ways to help other people in his social circle be successful. He really hasn’t asked his network for anything. But social capital gets stale, and it’s worth nothing if you don’t ever use it. So when his book was coming out, he reached out to his network and asked them to buy a copy of his book in the first week (or a box of books, if so inclined). It worked, and the book made the New York Times Bestseller List.

The two most common statistics cited by the speakers included two principles. First, the “give to get” ratio is 3:1 (Brogan says 10:1. Which means you have to add value to 3 people in your network for every 1 piece of value that comes back. Secondly was Dunbar’s Number, which states that humans have a cognitive limit of 150 social relationships that they can maintain. The reason that people are talking about Dunbar’s Number so much these days, is that technology (specifically social media websites) are enabling people to breakthrough that 150 limit and have relationships with a larger number of people than 150.

I’m not so sure if that’s really possible or not. We can certainly Twitter and update our 500 Facebook friends, but that’s a very one-way road, and not a real social relationship. Besides, Dunbar was a scientist (specifically an anthropologist) and his theoretical limit was based upon the traits of the neocortex. So until our brains get bigger (or just the neocortex gets bigger), that 150 sounds like a pretty good maximum for real social relationships.

I would expect that this is just the beginning of the conversation on the philosophy of the new markets with Stagira. Given the talented people that Jason has been able to bring into the conversation so far (whurley, Chris Brogan, Mason Arnold, Paul Janowitz, Tim Hayden, Josh Dilworth, etc), Jason Stoddard has taken an incredibly inclusive approach to engaging our leading edge in discussion.