Juliette Powell became Miss Canada in 1989, she explained to us recently, largely because people told her she couldn’t do it—that, being half-black, she wasn’t really Canadian enough to win the honor. “It’s not that I was particularly interested in doing it,” Powell recalled as we chatted in a conference room at the offices of The Apartment, the Soho-based creative agency that was hosting the party celebrating the release of her social networking handbook, 33 Million People in the Room (FT Press). “But when you’re growing up, and somebody says no, then you want to do it to prove the point.” She entered and won a regional contest, then went on to win the national honors—”probably because I had not expectation of actually winning”—after which, an incident where she was misquoted in the press got her thinking about pursuing her own career in media. A career as a host on various Canadian cable networks followed, and most recently she’s founded The Gathering Think Tank, which hosts multidisciplinary conferences in the spirit of TED on a smaller, more intimate scale. (That’s no coincidence; Powell has worked with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman.)
In this clip from our conversation, Powell discusses how she learned one of the central principles that shapes 33 Million People in the Room: the value of opening yourself to connections with people who share your passions.
During our conversation, Powell also talked about President Barack Obama and the way he “gets” social networking’s power—and a personal example of how what Seth Godin would call her “tribe” rallied around her to create her book party from scratch.