Not even halfway through the month-long attempt at blogging
every day, and I’ve missed a day. Oh well.
Last night I went to my first SMCPhilly meeting. “SMC” stands for Social Media Club. I’m sure there is one in your city, too. Or a city near you. Whatever. Just go on Twitter and search for the hash tag SMC + [your city name here] and you’ll find out more about it. Oh, don’t you use Twitter? That’s ok, search on Facebook. No? You think that’s lame?
Yeah, right. :-)
So I went to my first SMC meeting and it was interesting. It was hosted at the offices of Red Tettemer, a very hip advertising agency in Philadelphia, and to be quite honest, seeing the inside of those offices was a strong motivator (very cool offices, with the side-effect of making me feel decidedly UN-hip and rather old). The other was that my best friend Cecily Kellogg was speaking and she had already RSVP’d for me and might have kicked my ass if I didn’t show up. After a presentation by a RealPlayer representative introducing their new player specifically for portable media, Cecily, Annie Heckenberger, and Whitney Hoffman were going to speak about the new FTC Regulations that apparently caused some bloggers and social media junkies to get into an uproar (I pretty much missed all that). I’m not going to talk about their presentation, though, save to say it was excellent and they are all three very smart, funny women.
I decided to take the train into the city because Cecily and
Charlie (her husband) had to be in town for something else earlier and we
couldn’t drive in together. I hadn’t taken the train in a long, long time, and
was kind of stupidly excited about it despite the cold, rainy night. I walked
down to our local station in plenty of time, arriving about 15 minutes early
for the 6:03 train. As I walked up the stairs, I heard the end of an
announcement about delays, so I asked a man who arrived right before me if he
heard what it said. What started out as a “14 minute” delay turned into just a
“delay,” so the man and I began talking, like people do. Never exchanged names,
never gave very many details, save where we were coming from and where we were
going. I embarrassingly tried to explain where I was headed as I received the
blank stare at the mention of “Twitter” and “blogging,” but he did understand
“networking” and the need for it.
After wondering when I should give up on the whole thing, they started announcing that the train was about 20 minutes late and right after that the train arrived. I’d be a little late to the meeting, but not too late, and Cecily confirmed they stood around chatting for a while first. As the man disappeared to his seat and I chose mine, I mused about these brief interactions, the kind where you know you may never see the person again and thought about the similarities to what drew me to the Internet in the first place: some anonymity; some sense of control; and at the same time a strange sense of freedom.
When Cecily, Annie, and Whitney were to begin their talk, I moved to the floor up front to take some photos. I looked around the room at everyone with their mobile devices out and fired up…some with laptops, even. There was no apologies for Twittering the presentation—in fact, it is expected. Do I prefer to email rather than talk on the phone? Most definitely! I will use texting on my mobile phone before calling someone almost every time. And yet it seemed quite ironic that we were gathering together in all our awkward glory to sit in a room while staring at our screens (in my case, the LCD screen on the back of my camera as I do not have mobile access on my phone) (and that is only because I cannot justify paying for it). I laughed as I saw that “social media” is how we interact—through our devices.
I’m not passing any judgment on any of this. As I said, I prefer to interact through media devices. I will admit that there really isn’t a replacement for the intense connection that can happen between people in person when they are really getting one another, and this does not at all have to mean anything nefarious…I’ve had incredible breakthrough kind of moments with one or two friends talking about new ideas or past baggage…all sorts of things. Those moments are priceless.
