Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Jason Falls Social Media Explorer Conference. We have known each other for about a year now and he is a very inspirational guy because of his wide purview of social media. In fact, he has been much of the inspiration for my "4 pillars" model because he helped me think more broadly about the marketplace as a whole. My quest is to continue to learn everyday, everywhere I am. With a goal of always being collaborative, it is relationships with people like Jason Falls that help widen my ability to serve my customers and the social media market.
I have been to many conferences in my time working in social media (and in my past lives in innovation and chemistry), but the content shared at Jason's conference was head and shoulders above what I have seen. It wasn't merely about a simple use case focused on an organization. This conference was packed with people pushing the boundaries of where social needs to be. It was the cutting edge of the cutting edge because this group is passionate about the social media market and where it needs to be. I am proud to have met many of these folks and I look forward to continuing collaboration.
@andreacook best summarized the conference with her 8 points and takeaways from the 2 day event. Rather than simply go into detail. I feel she captured its essence perfectly. If nothing else, I would say you should consider talking to folks like these to make your programs better, smarter and more cutting edge.
8 takeaways from Portland Explore Link Here
The point of this blog post is quite simple. I find that the further and wider I look, the more people I find who know so many vast and wonderful things that make our own thoughts even better. As we all work to help make social media not only mainstream but integrated it takes a village to get there. While I feel my own thoughts are helping people better understand how the concept of pulling data from social before you push your message is a critical component to a successful social media program are important, they are merely an island in an ocean. This is the great irony of social media. All of our own thoughts we push out are just a drop of water in an endless sea (who can resist a good Kansas quote). But oceans are vast and as we sail along them long enough we find other islands with different cultures and ideas. My experience last week in Portland was definitely being around people who are part of a tribe that is working to coalesce the important ideas that can change the corporate landscape.
I guess this is what I would call an ode to the humility of "pundit-cy". The more I learn about social media, the more I learn what a challenge it is to be heard across the noise. I mean...it is what I preach. We must pull to push better if we want to be heard. As in a world where data is a commodity of sorts and methods by which someone gets heard are every moving like quicksand, we have nothing but the partnerships we have across what is growing from a social media solar system into a social media galaxy until it becomes the size of a social media universe. And in a space that vast, any pundit is merely the meekest whisper in the largest cacophony that ever existed.
Gang...thanks for a mind opening experience and for the collaboration now and in the future....
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