i had my social media echo chamber designed by mc escher

Some nice person gave me a pass to Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World 2008. I missed the morning sessions which apparently saw senior execs from Friendster, Bebo, MySpace and Google tell the throng (200 people?) just how important their site is.

I did go to the afternoon session with Andrew Mitchell (Urbis), Chris Knowles (Heinz), Jeremy Mitchell (Telstra) and Wayne Hughes (Virtual Medical Centre). Andrew, Chris & Jeremy were all good - but I've seen their presentations before (may be I should go to less conferences). Wayne's topic was interesting but I was a bit mystified as to why he was in that stream and he had a fair whack of sales material in his presentation.

Captain Coincidence being who he is, Hugh McLeod has been posting this series of cartoons. There'll probably be more soon.


My take is that there is no real role for social media experts. There are people out there who will either sell you existing software or build it for you - and that's fine. There are also people out there who can advise you on marketing, collaboration, information & knowledge management, advertising, etc - and they may use blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, RSS, etc in doing so. Many of them are very good.