The Fantastic event

The whole event was at Wallace Space, a fantastic venue, and the people I spoke to at the conference were incredibly bright, interesting people. It was especially nice to finally meet hereinthehive (aka Dan), who I’ve been following for a while on twitter, and also miss geeky (aka Melinda), cbeta (aka Cristiano), afternoon (aka Ben) the rest of the participants of the photo scavenger hunt (where EVERY SINGLE ONE of them were enthusiastic and hilarious) and a whole bunch more.  It was fantastic to meet so many interesting people.  Overall, it was a fantastic day.

The interesting talks

The best talk I went to by far, was Terrence Eden’s talk about Porn in Social Media.  He managed to clearly balance the talk from the serious issues behind it (is porn abuse?) to the funny (the problems from shrinking down an image of a girl in a bikini with hearts on it to mobile makes the hearts look like nipples).  He is a very articulate guy, who engaged his audience very well.

My other favourite (which I only caught the end of, unfortunately) was a hilarious game of counting to 21 run by… [I can't seem to remember this guy's name...help me out kids in the comments] William Morland, aka @dolphonia *thanks @bash!, which had us barking like dogs and more ridiculous activities.

The slightly disappointing

The whole event was, I thought, meant to be the social media equivalent to a barcamp where everyone presents or volunteers.  When I got there, the first 15 people I spoke to said they weren’t presenting.  The sheet for volunteering to present started off VERY empty. A lot of people then said, “Oh, okay, I’ll present since no one else is” (including me, who thought just volunteering would be enough, but used a blog post I’ve been working on for the basis for a talk). Over the whole day, it was definitely less than half the people there presenting.  During the talks we had great discussions, but presenters seemed few and far between.

I had a bit of a debate about it post-scavenger hunt with a guy who said he wouldn’t have come if he was told he had to present.  He said he contributed to the talks and debates a lot.

My issue is, tickets for this event sold out VERY quickly, and a lot of people that wanted to go, couldn’t because they sold out so quickly.  And maybe a LOT of people that would have presented couldn’t come because they couldn’t get a ticket.

I really think that a lot of people think that they can get something for no effort in this world, which is fine, but this was “SOCIAL MEDIA CAMP” where the people going are the ones trying to get the rest of the world to contribute.

I feel very strongly that there’s something wrong with the social media industry if those who are supposedly building it don’t even bother to make an effort, to step up and to do something new and scary, how can they expect the rest of the world to join in?

So stop talking about doing things people and actually do something.  Put a bit of action into all this talk and actually stop just going to these events to be an observer and start engaging.  It’s going to give you valuable skills and experience and enrich the rest of us.  Isn’t that the whole point of social media at the end of the day?