Notorious R.O.B.

At the recent REBarCamp Orange County, I found myself staring at the board listing the sessions and enjoying the wonder of discovery.  The discovery was that apparently, I was supposed to be leading a session with Stacey Harmon on “Social Media and Branding”.  As they say, anything and everything could happen at a BarCamp.  That joy of discovery was followed by the joy of improvisation, as I learned that Stacey had to stay behind to finish up a session on using Twitter, and I had been planning on being Vanna to Stacey’s Pat Sajak.

So I got up and did a bunch of verbal tapdancing.  For those in attendance, I promise to refund your registration fees.  [ED: Rob, BarCamp is free, you idjit.  Yeah, well, it's the thought that counts.]  To my surprise, the session ended up being one of the better ones for me, in part due to the awesome people who didn’t seem to mind that I was speaking completely off the cuff, and in part due to the warm rays of the incredible southern Californian sun.

I wanted to expand on some of the concepts we discussed, however, because we didn’t really get into how social media and brand interact.  It also appears that we need to discuss things further because prevailing misconceptions on how social media fits in to an overall marketing scheme.

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