Yo, FaceBook me homie!
In my Top Nine Things I’ve Learned at BlogWorld post, I wrote:
Many social media professionals talk as if social media is the future of media, then act exactly the opposite when camera crews show up.
I can’t forget the moment. Due to some deadlines, I excused myself from a session to get some work done while everyone else was attending a session or a keynote. I found myself at the cafe near the Convention Center, setup the mobile office, and started working. The TV on the wall was tuned to something I can’t recall, since i wasn’t paying attention to it.
Suddenly, a youngish gent walks in, instantly recognizable as a BlogWorld attendee: thick black plastic frame glasses, some witty geek-chic T-shirt (like, “I Twitter, therefore I am” or some such), jeans, and a backpack. He asks the cafe staff if he can change the channel to CNN — and they say yes. CNN comes on, and they’re doing a segment on BlogWorld. Ah ha! That’s why this guy was so interested.
Some nameless anchor who I couldn’t pick out at a lineup is interviewing a number of folks, including one of the founders of BlogWorld, and the talking heads are going on and on. And I found myself wondering… if a blogger had contacted the organizer of the Annual Conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors... would one of them have dropped everything in the middle of the conference to get on a videochat with him?
Would any attendee at ASNE’s Annual Conference have stopped whatever he was doing to rush to a laptop because he had heard that The Bloggess was going to post an interview with the editor of some newspaper?
Actions speak louder than words. And this, frankly, is why I fear that social media might be hype after all.
While I have at least a dozen longer posts I’m working on because of REBlogWorld and BlogWorld Expo, I thought I would do the popular “Top X Things I Learned from BlogWorld” deal as an advance peek. But I’m finding it hard to be… I don’t know the term… earnest about it. So if you want a real Top Ten list, I suggest heading over to Morgan Brown’s blog for his Top Ten Things I Learned at Blogworld. It’s a great post; this one here… not so much.
My post is the Top Nine Things I Learned at BlogWorld, because I’m definitely less than Morgan in this regard, and because the last person in the world I want to emulate right now is David Letterman.
So here they are:
- Real estate is way ahead of the curve of every other industry when it comes to social media, because it turns out that social people do better with social media.
- Journalists have no idea where journalism is headed, because they don’t really know what the institutional competence of media is. They’re not particularly interested in finding out.
- Social media needs a House of Medici, a patron who will demand nothing in return except creativity and art, because most of these guys produce incredibly cool shit that will make absolutely no money.
- BlogWorld is kinda like GenCon in terms of how friendly everyone is, except the attendees have fewer things in common.
- Many social media professionals talk as if social media is the future of media, then act exactly the opposite when camera crews show up.
- For a group preachin’ authenticity, there sure were a lot of people with all kinds of gimmicks, like dressing up as Vader, or puppets, or hugging strangers, or stage wigs. Pretty sure that half the people I met weren’t people at all, but IRL avatars.
- Niceness is absolutely the coin of the realm in blogworld. Whuffie is for real, at least until you have to buy a sandwich. Then it’s not.
- Very few people in social media know how to dance. I gather that nightclubs are not their native habitat. If you saw some dancing at one of the parties, chances are better than even that they were from the real estate world.
- It is extremely easy to spend $800 on dinner for six in Las Vegas, and still be hungry as you walk out of the restaurant.
Most of this list will find its way into one or more longer posts in the future. But there you have it. Apparently, I learn all the wrong lessons by looking at all the wrong places….
-rsh
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