Well that wasn't quite what I expected...
Just finished my panel - now I can sit back and really enjoy the rest of the conference. Extremely nerve-wracking being up there in front of so many luminous minds - so many of the people I read and am influenced by on a daily basis.
When I sat down, I thought: "well, there's two flacks and a Microsoftie up here - I guess the other two guys should be pretty safe ;-)" (yes - I think in emoticons). Strangely it kind of went the other way. Beth Goza, who I'm sitting right next to, is just so charming and incandescently bright that she instantly had about 90% of the room on her side (or at least that's how it felt from up at the front). I feel like Carin Warner and I escaped pretty well too.
A few weeks back, I blogged this: "The other panelists look interesting. There's a wireless sorceress from the Borg, a fellow flack, and this Rick Bruner bloke, who sounds like someone I may spend a lot of time agreeing with."
Woo boy! Was I ever wrong about that one. I don't think Rick and I actually agreed on one word in the entire hour-long session. Tee hee…
I'm a little disappointed, though. I feel we may have let the audience down a bit, by not getting deep into any of the more painful interfaces between the marketing world and the blogosphere. But I take comfort from the fact that we’d probably have been preaching to the converted anyway.
There are very, very few people at this conference in need of a clue, IMHO. The room is full of people in a state of heated agreement about most of this stuff – so much so, perhaps, that some of what we think are our most pithy comments are starting to go across like well-worn platitudes. “Of course that’s the way it is – why would anyone think anything different?”
We may differ on the specifics, but most of us would agree (and shake our heads with amusement) that old-school marketing and comms mindsets are essentially endangered anyway, so who gives a stuff if they don’t, won’t, or can’t change. Natural selection at work.
All IMHO, as usual.
