Day 2 closing remarks by SocialChorus CRO Brian McDowell

Hey, good afternoon, everyone. Really a pleasure to get to close the session. But I will say, as we learned from Lucas and Sahar today, with our chronotypes, no matter what chronotype you are, whether you’re morning, whether you’re evening, whether you’re biphasic, this is not your peak time. I have got the slot when everyone is asleep.

So I’m not going to try to recap all two days. It’s been amazing speakers, great customer stories. And I have to admit that no matter what, you probably missed some of it. You were busy in your job, probably had something unanticipated come up. And therefore, there were sessions that you wanted to go to that you didn’t get to go to, or you had to pick one breakout, which meant you missed two or three other amazing breakouts. Don’t worry. All of that is coming to you on-demand. You’ll have a chance to catch up on all of that. And I have a whole weekend planned, I know, to catch up on everything that I missed.

What I want to do instead is actually connect back to something that Malcolm Gladwell talked about at the very beginning, the very first session that we had yesterday. And I want to do a little bit of what he did. I want to go on a tangent for a moment. So what I have here are a couple of folders with all of the manuals that I have collected over the years for all the products that I own. So I have, for example, here, the heaters that we put out on the back deck so we could entertain folks for social distancing. And looking in here, I found a real gem. This is the bike, the manual for the bike that my wife gave me as a wedding gift. We got married 32 years ago. I have all of these manuals, and it’s a generational thing. My kid, and by the way, admitted, if we were all together, I’d say, raise a hand. Do you have a box, a filing cabinet somewhere with manuals like this?

But I realize it’s a generational thing. My kids, who are in their 20s, have gone off to start their own lives. They have their own microwaves and toasters and waffle irons and bikes that they’ve acquired. They don’t have boxes of manuals. In fact, they get rid of them the moment they open the box and point out how unenvironmental it is to even print and ship those things. Because they know they can find out online in an instant, whatever they need to know. The last time something broke before I’d even left the room, my daughter had already searched up the answer and not in the manual. She found it on a thread on Reddit with a link to a YouTube video that told her exactly what we needed to know to fix the problem.

And so what struck me, Malcolm talked about this change that’s happening as we see our workforce populated with this new generation. One that interacts, one that communicates, one that makes decisions in a different way. One that goes from closed to open dialogue, one that goes from a centralized group to a decentralized model. One that goes from something that’s hierarchical, passed down from the top to the network. What I realized is the same thing that’s happening with social moires, with communication models, with decisions is also happening in our technology. And if it hasn’t already taken over your consumer life, it should, and it will. And it is even more so going to take over our business life because we don’t want to get content from a central repository handed down to us. We want it to come from the folks that are doing the same jobs as us, the folks that have the most relevant content. We want to get access to it quickly.

And so, if we build a model that is centralized and hierarchical, this next generation in the workforce, which either is already the majority or about to be the majority, will not adopt it. They don’t want it. They want something that’s quick, that’s relevant, that matches their style on the platforms that they already use. And so what SocialChorus has done is we have built out the decks, the digital employee experience. We have worked to make it match that model. To make it possible for folks to get the information they need quickly and easily, to source it from a variety of things. And to be able to help you as the communicator, you as the business leader, you as the IT team, still be able to see what’s going on, still be able to manage it, but have it in a model that reflects the way people are interacting.

So I hope I’ve connected a little bit from the beginning with Malcolm yesterday to the end today and kind of provided some thought about how we can use technology to enable all of the most important human things that we have to do. In closing up, I just want to wrap up with two thank yous. First of all, I want to thank you, thank all of the folks that contributed to this. The customers that told their stories, the thought leaders in our network, we applaud your hard work. We thank you for all that you’ve done. And thank you for letting us share in a little bit of that. We really, really appreciate it.

And finally, I want to thank all of you that have taken time out of your busy day to pay attention to the sessions, to ask great questions, to interact with us. We really, really appreciate your support, your partnership, your friendship, and we can hardly wait till we get to do this in person next year and hopefully even before that. But in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out, connect with us on LinkedIn, via email, find us. Anyone you’re connected to with SocialChorus, if we can answer questions, if we can help, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We would love to maintain the conversation.

So let me just wrap up by saying thank you. Rachel, you did an amazing job. Thank you to all of the amazing speakers, and I wish you just a great afternoon and a great rest of the month. Thank you so much.