My first Social Media Breakfast

[jducoeur]

[Happy birthday to cvirtue!]

One of the things that's cool (if slightly insane) about bootstrapping my own company is wearing *all* the hats. (With the notable exception of CIO, which is being handled by Aaron.) Today I was out playing CEO in my first networking outing, at this month's Social Media Breakfast.

The SMB is a rapidly growing phenomenon that was sort of accidentally created by Bryan Person a few months ago. He explained to me today that he'd simply had a free morning, and had Twittered that he was looking to go out to breakfast and talk with folks about all this Social Media stuff. A bunch of people showed up, had fun, it turned into a kinda-sorta monthly thing, and now it's gradually spreading worldwide. (This will sound eerily familiar to those of us familiar with SCA history.)

Breakfast was at the S&S in Inman Square; I got there ridiculously early, having taken msmemory's recommended (and extremely effective) back route into Somerville. (For future reference, at 6:40 it only takes 40 minutes to get in via Route 3.) That was fine, since it gave me some time to relax and collect my thoughts before 8am, when I launched into three hours of high-intensity networking.

I'd kind of expected the thing to be full of fellow geeks, but that was *far* from true -- indeed, the most useful aspect of the visit was to remind me of how much life there is outside LiveJournal. This crowd was young (probably 3/4 younger than me, many *much* younger), hip to all kinds of cutting-edge technology (less an LJ-centric crowd, much more into Twitter), and *remarkably* diverse. For example, look at the business cards I wound up collecting:

• A geeky accountant who is changing careers, and trying to understand the state of the world outside the big corporation she's working for;


• An open source/media/protocols evangelist who tries to help big companies make use of the open tech that's coming online;


• A designer who is trying to set himself up as the premiere design blogger in Boston (and maybe someday make some money doing so);


• A high-school senior with a deep passion for podcasting, who skipped classes to come to this;


• A big-company conference manager, focused on educational systems for adults;


• A hardcore vlogger, up on the latest tools for using video to communicate with the rest of the world.

And that's not counting the dozens of people who I didn't get cards from, especially the college students. These ranged from the passionate BU student who is about to graduate and is trying to find ways to use new media to make the world a better place (I gave her shava23's name -- Shava, if you get a contact out of the blue, that's where it came from), to the gaggle of eight girls who are all interning at a PR firm and came as a group. All told, it was a big group -- about 80 people, which is probably partly attributable to the presence of big-name blogger Jeff Pulver.

There were actually a lot less business cards exchanged than I was expecting, and a lot more Twitter handles. (I need to get my head into Twitter -- like it or not, it matters to the geekerati, and I need to understand it better.) But I managed to give out a dozen or so of my cards, and was complemented a couple of times on the design. (Which amused me enormously, having whipped them up yesterday based on a stock MS template, without the real logo yet.) Several people remarked with amazement that I managed to get a domain name that didn't totally suck.

The most interesting person I wound up networking with turned out to be none other than Kee Hinckley -- Nazgul, to those of you old enough to remember pro-angmar, the late, great, original BBS of the Boston area. Naz has also wound up going entrepreneurial in this space: he's putting together a system to unify and manage your identity across these manifold networks. I gather that this is even earlier-stage than CommYou, but we agreed that there are some very interesting possible synergies between the companies, so we're going to talk more.

Anyway, I went into Full Demo Mode, for those of you who have seen me do that. (For those who haven't: I become intensely but politely garrulous, shaking everybody's hand, hearing what they are interested in and giving a constantly-varying spiel.) Fortunately, between SCA demos and years of LARPing, I have some skill at dealing with a situation where I am surrounded with a crowd of strangers and have A Mission -- in this case, to get to know who everybody was, and talk up CommYou to anybody who seemed like they might actually care. Actually, it was *remarkably* similar to a demo, or the early stages of a LARP, all about lots of little brief conversations, getting to understand the lay of the land socially, and share information. Once again, I find myself feeling like the universe has steered me into having exactly the skill set I need in order to be able to pull this off.

The amusement of the day was Jeff Pulver's "Personal Social-Networking Toolkits", as described in this video. This is one of those ideas so goofy it's brilliant. Everyone, on entrance, is handed their "toolkit". This consists of a personal communicator (a Bic pen), an identity and feed system (a "Hello, My Name is" badge, whereon you write your name and a slogan), and a tag cloud (another badge). You were given little stickers with which to "tag" each other on your tag clouds, as well as a pad of Post-It notes so you can leave notes on each other's "Walls". (Their shirts.) Frankly, the tagging thing is a genius of an icebreaker -- my greatest compliment of the day was when someone tagged me with "Interesting". While Jeff presumably won't be hosting the next one (he flits all over the world doing all kinds of get-togethers; the SMB is mainly Bryan's baby), I'm going to encourage Bryan to keep the tag-cloud idea. The only problem with the toolkits is that the Post-Its tend to fall off of shirts -- however, this can be solved in the next revision.

Overall, the thing was a blast, and I expect I'll keep going to them. I love my friends dearly, but it is a bit of an echo chamber here: we're all very LJ-centric, and can easily miss the larger movements in the rapidly-evolving social space. I need to get out more, and this is a fun way of doing so...

Comments

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

I love Twitter as a tool and as a concept, and the only thing that has kept me from getting an account is the lack of people in my circle to Twitter to. However, I do read a lot of the feeds of my internet friends.

You should do some Googling about how Twitter shaped this year's SXSW conference - its an interesting tale of how a tool was used to customize the con experience for a lot of the attendees.

[jducoeur]

I heard a fair amount about that at the time. Of course, you need to keep in mind that SXSW *made* Twitter to a substantial degree -- that was where, last year, they first talked the tool up to the attendees, and got people using it. Making an instant-communications tool newly available to a conference full of communications geeks was pretty brilliant.

I'm honestly unsure of how effectively I will wind up using Twitter: given that I don't update my Facebook feed as often as I'd like, that suggests not so much. But we'll see -- it's an intriguing (if primitive) device, and has a fair amount of potential...

Twitter usage

[metageek.livejournal.com]

I've been using Twitter just to keep my boss updated on what I'm working on. I'm probably an outlier, since it seems like most people put stuff up publicly.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

"I become intensely but politely garrulous, shaking everybody's hand, hearing what they are interested in and giving a constantly-varying spiel."

"Naismith"

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

{{snicker}}

[jducoeur]

I'll take that as a compliment...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes! But it's also true. ;)

[alethea-eastrid.livejournal.com]

Ok. I'm now trying very hard to laugh quietly enough that no one comes in to my office to ask about it....

Bwahahahah....

[laurion]

Hmm. I should pay attention to said get together. Much of my job currently is about getting a grok on the social media. It's playing an increasingly important role in the lives of students, and by extension, the life of academia. I'm not on twitter yet, but with the wave of people moving there, especially today, I think I'll go sign up. Dollars to donuts it'll be this username. For an interesting take on Twitter though, read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i25/25a01501.htm

[cellio]

I'd kind of expected the thing to be full of fellow geeks, but that was *far* from true

For most geeks I know, 8AM is too early to get up but a little too late to stay up. :-)

It sounds like an interesting gathering.

[siderea]

A high-school senior with a deep passion for podcasting, who skipped classes to come to this

Actually, we may (or may not -- discussion is on-going) be looking for a podcasting intern here in Cambridge. Would you mind dropping him a note asking if he's employed for the summer yet and whether he'd like to be contacted by a firm in the area? I'd love a URL to learn more about his work.

[jducoeur]

Sher -- I'll send him an email, and drop you his URL privately. (Not really appropriate for me to say publically that he skipped school.)