Zach Goldfarb wrote a great post over at the Washington Post and popped me an email to see if I had any comment on it. I did! The article was posted on Friday last and is called TechPost: Washington’s Twin Tech Towns. My comment starts right below the following video:
I attended the Spank party for Robert Scoble and Gary Vaynerchuk because I wanted to hang out with Robert and Gary.
I really must remind the reader that this is what the gathering was, a small get-together that mushroomed into a big event.
Unlike the Pulver Breakfasts or PodCamps, this gathering started as the ultimate cult-of-personality fest — even I popped there to meet THE Robert Scoble — and to meet folks I have known online, on Twitter, on Facebook, and in the blogosphere, for almost ten years!
Then it became an amazing schmooze-fest! I not only got to meet the Scobleizer and Mr. Wine Library TV but I met a dozen people I had only known virtually online!
I am very pleased to see things like this happen spontaneously in DC. It was fun, playful, generous, and I got to connect to people I had met a couple weeks prior at Geoff Livingston’s BlogPotomac such as the amazing and enthusiastic Shana Glickfield.
I must rush to mention that there were very few PR and marketing folks. There was the lovely Rachelle Lacroix from Fleishman-Hillard and a couple others — this was a group of people who were hard core geeks and nerds and programmers and developers and all the most choice horse meat in the world of entrepreneurs and programmers.
I may have read the crowd wrong, but we were all there for an audience with A-list blogger Robert Scoble and A-list video blogger, Gary Vaynerchuk.
I am still giddy that Gary Vaynerchuk recognized me from across the room and that Robert Scoble bragged to his friends that we had finally met after knowing each other online for close to 8 years.
I hope there are more of these!
Chris Abraham, Abraham Harrison
http://www.abrahamharrison.com
Comments (2)
Great post, Chris! I agree that we have a cult of celebrity within the tech community, including papparazzi. But every once in a while I get a reality check when I tell someone outside of our community that I met [insert cewebirty name here] and they’re like “Who?”
We live in a bubble! It is like spending your life in a particular church or temple — you end up spending all of your time with religious people. So, after a time, you are “preaching to the choir” and completely forget that most people are NOT religious and don’t even know most of the Theologians and Academics. And, when you’re in a community for long enough, you can get burned out on it — however, most people are not burned out at all.
We are all complaining about social media burnout but most of the people we know outside of the bubble (like everyone around me on the machines at the gym) have ever blogged, Twittered, downloaded a podcast, watched a video blog, or even followed a blog. They don’t even know what Revision3 is!
Anyway, we have to learn how to get out of our bubble and learn how to expand out market, expand out business, and bridge to the folks who have never moved past the MySpace versus Facebook debate or cruising YouTube.
I know that we like to roll our eyes but we really need to be better evangelists, don’t we, especially when we’re pitching our friends and especially when we’re writing proposals and pitched for prospective business!
Finally, they folks outside the bubble are not stupid, they’re just not interested — how do we pique their interests — what we’re doing is really cool, how do we share that?