Lessons from Blog World Expo

Image by b_d_solis via Flickr

It’s been a crazy weekend, which is evidenced by the fact that I’m in Vegas, and back at my hotel before 10:30.  I’ve spent the past three days at Blog World Expo, meeting bloggers, talking about creating and promoting content and generally putting faces to the usernames I see flying past my on Twitter every day.

In all honesty, I’ve never come away from a conference thinking that I learned much.  The only value for me, most of the time, is in meeting new people and the conversations that are had in the hallways.  I did pick up some valuable tidbits during a few of the podcasting sessions, which I admit, I know very little about, but overall the lessons I learned came from outside of the conference programming.

Twitter is an incredibly powerful communications tool.  I’ve known for a long time that it’s useful and fun to use, but this weekend for me, it showed its power as a standalone medium.  With a conference full of people on Twitter we used it to self-organize into parties, to meet each other and to introduce others.  This utility came from widespread use in a small area, which is what makes me think that for Twitter to come out of the blogosphere and truly become mainstream in the same way that text messaging currently is, is not out of the question.

We’re all 1% famous.  It was an odd feeling to introduce myself to so many people not knowing if they would not have a clue who I am, or be tangentially aware of me.  In some cases I was very surprised at who knew me, and others were surprised that I knew them.

There’s a lot of hype in the echo chamber. Yeah – as much as there was some great content, there was also a lot of hype, and a lot of facile advice about how businesses should be implementing these things.  I strongly believe that most businesses can benefit in some way from blogging, but social media will never get past where it is if the counsel we’re giving is out of touch with real business strategy.  Many in the blogosphere have a tendency to put themselves above corporate strategists, assuming that they’re just out of touch.  The reality is that we don’t matter nearly as much as we think we do, and until we can move past “join the conversation”- style cheerleading, social media will simply be unable to make a real mark on business.

That said, I met a lot of great people this weekend, and a lot of people far smarter than I with a lot of great things to say.  I was also introduced to a lot of great services, like Zemanta, which I’m using here.  I hope that I’ll be able to make it for next year, and I especially hope that I’ll get more chances to keep in touch with and meet more people like I did this weekend.