Blog World, the Future of Social Media and the Average Schmuck
I returned from the Blog World-New Media conference in Los Angeles last night (http://www.blogworld.com/ ) and it’s easy to say that it’s the best social media conference I’ve attended (third time for me). Four-thousand participants from over 100 countries filled the room with massive energy and creativity. You can’t go to Blog World without feeling that the world is on fire for everything social media has to offer.
Then you come home and confront the reality that the average person in your organization (mine excepted) doesn’t get social media and doesn’t understand the payoffs. You go from creativity overload to brick wall in 24 hours.
You go from sessions where people are getting millions of page views and are earning a six-figure living from their creative genius to your blog where you get a lot less than that on a good day.
My Suggestions for Blog World:
I have a suggestion for the producers of Blog World—don’t change a thing-just add another day of detox for the vast majority of us who are simply trying to establish a presence. There should be a day-long general session titled, “Yep, Your Charged—But Now it’s Time to Return to Reality” and “How to Survive Blog World” or something along those lines.
My Favorites:
How do you emotionally survive the fact that you can create your own virtual television studio and equip it with three cameras and microphones and run the board while you host the program for less than $3,000? It’s ridiculously affordable and capable of creating top-rate television. Eric Norrell from TELESTREAM (http://telestream.net) spent an hour plus explaining all to me.
How to you cope with Steve Garfield’s video presentations using $120.00 cameras and $35.00 microphones to produce top-ranked videos? A couple of years ago, you spent thousands of dollars to so the same thing. See http://stevegarfield.com/Site/Welcome.html.
I could go on endlessly about the presentations, vendors and content creators but this will have to suffice for the moment.
A Communications Revolution:
The world is going through a communications revolution where everything is getting cheaper, better and easier to do.
Have you seen the television commercial from Microsoft where the kid creates a PowerPoint about the benefits of getting a dog? Well, that’s going to pale in comparison when your kid creates a green-screened virtual television set with highlight video while Skyping in experts on animal and human behavior while placing all on YouTube plus dozens of additional video outlets.
The communications world is ours. Now we just have to convince everyone else and decompress from Disneyland for geeks (I’m not one).
One day the world is going to wake up to a new communications reality and wonder what happened. They will see the train arriving at the station. It will be driven by the inhabitants of new media.
Yes, Leo Laporte (http://twit.tv/) and others saw it coming a long time ago. Its close to happening.
Best, Len.
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Great post. Thanks for the mention. I love that commercial with the kid wanting a dog.
Hi Steve: The honor’s mine. Best, Len.
Good post, but you could have also menitoned the role of ads. If none of us click on the ads or patronize the vendors, there’s no money for the social networking sites. (I’m not saying this is GOOD. We should certainly buy what we want.) But what about the much-vaunted power of friends to influence other friends? Are social networking sites undermining their own sources of income by creating a new environment where recommendations are more important than ads? Then the vendors have to chase after key influencers, corrupt them, etc.By the way Derek Christensen also menitoned games as an incentive. And I think it’s a legitimate one.Like or Dislike: 0 0
Hi. Thanks for writing. I think the value of social influence far outstrips the value of ads on websites which is why Google and Bing are integrating all services into one social signal. At the moment, we don’t click on the ads because they lack relevance. That’s going to change soon if the search engines can get beyond privacy issues. Best, Len.