Notorious R.O.B.

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.

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