"The Dinosaurs are still roaming the planet, but now they can see the meteorite approaching" (with apologies to @brian_condon - scroll down for link to relevant Audioboo...)
It is always a bitter-sweet moment, isn’t it? The one when you realise that everyone else has finally got wind of your great big secret and no matter how loud you shout: “I told you so!” - they are just not listening.
Of course they are not; they are all too busy, playing with the wow new toy you kept telling them that they needed, way, way back in the day, back when they were all too busy, still scoffing.
Understandable. You used to be part of a pretty small, but immeasurably cool, gang who were in on something which was going to be really, really big; just maybe not quite yet. There is the camaraderie, the complicity; let’s face it, there is the darned smugness. Just you guys wait! You are going to see how right we were! You are going to have to eat your Twitter-dissing, social media scorning words.
Actually, there has been no time for apologies. Everyone is far too busy, checking in on foursquare, replying to their DMs, uploading their latest pics to Flickr. Those of us who were well in the vanguard will just have to sigh and be content with the knowledge that we did indeed predict the revolution and that everyone else is still playing catch-up, more or less.
There were hundreds of nodding heads and complicit smiles at the News Rewired conference in London on Friday when New York Times Social Media Editor Liz Heron underlined the fact that all of us brave and hardy evangelizers were finally in huge demand, from the very colleagues who had once jeered our Twitter addiction.
I glimpsed a lot of very old, or should I perhaps say, “experienced”, evangelists in the room. I was able to catch up with several friends and contacts whom I met at my own, very first social media conference in May 2009, back when I was the one staying up until the wee hours of the night before, stuffing the goodie bags.
They included the legendary Christian Payne (@Documentally – many happy returns!) Jon Gripton, then of Sky, now at the Beeb, and Laura Oliver, back then still a stalwart of journalism.co.uk, organisers of News Rewired, and since then, cleverly snapped up by a canny Guardian.
I also caught up with the beguiling but terrifyingly bright Brian Condon, broadband campaigner and co-founder of #C4CC. Brian’s lively Audioboo which captures the #newsrw energy and insight can be found here.
This conference had all the right ingredients: ideal venue at MSN HQ in SW1; great programme, top speakers, an extremely lively back channel, good sarnies and covetable stuff in the delegates’ bag – (Note to event organisers: can’t do a decent baggie? Just don’t bother?!)
It was a relief to be discussing the real challenges created by the new open media (personally, I find “social” to be a limiting term?) although there is still far too little candid discussion of real-life business models, ROI or the scary drain on resources which the monitoring & filtering of our new media cacophony inevitably occasions.
Liz Heron’s assertion that the NYT has a whole team of busy-bee editors “hand-selecting tweets” stretched my credibility. Can the NYT really afford such a luxury? Can any media organisation? There was an awful lot of cooing about what great stuff my old stomping ground, the Guardian, and the BBC are doing, social-media wise, with only a few voices on the back channel pointing out that the Scott Trust and the license fee mean neither organisation really needs to worry about the bottom line.
We did have a stimulating session on paid-for-content models which provided my personal highlight contribution of the day from François Nel. Not only did he quote Claude Lévi Strauss on reciprocity, he also showed super cute pics of his twin nephews.
It seems a tad churlish to highlight specific prezos from an overall excellent day but, in no particular order, I would like to thank the following for stimulating my aged brain: @sifter; @darrenwaters; @dougiegyro; @khaddon; @currybet; @kevglobal; @mikegoldsmith; @natelanxon; @fieldproducer; @rondiorio and @tomstandage.
Great to catch up with i.a. @GabrielleNYC @andrewgrill, to meet IRL (congrats on you know what btw!) @Sarah_Booker & to meet among some rather smart ladies: @HelenRoxburgh of @economiamag, @caroline beavon & @SallyGriffith.
There was excellent live-blogging and tweeting from the inimitable @adders and his partner-in-crime, @egrommet. The hosts, including @joelmgunter, @rmcathy @SarahMarshall3 @KTKing @peteclifton and supremo @johncthompson all made it look like a swan gliding effortlessly through the choppy waters of our noisy new media environment. As we say #Twitter: kudos.
