Back to reality..

My last week was very busy with time spent at two conferences in New York City and then a trip out to Altoona, PA for a view in the real world. The four hour drive out to Altoona gave me time to sort through all of the hype I had ingested from the Social Ad Summit and the Web 2.0 conference held in New York City.

I’ve been an online community practitioner now for over 12 years and have a bit of digital road tread down the middle of my back from all of my experiences in building & operating online communities. What I heard at the conferences last week really was not that much different from what was being pitched in the late 90’s. This time around my sense is the VC and investment community is not throwing around as much money as the good old days and are looking for actual business models that might work.

At the end of the day one of the participants at the Social Ad Summit remarked that the conference should have been re-named “How to advertise on Facebook.” Google even thinks the same in a relative way. I just did a Google search on “Social Ad Summit” to find the URL for the event to put into this posting and the top sponsored link in Google Ads was for FaceBook Ads, how ironic. My question…are the advertising strategies now for the Facebook platform any different than was being attempted with the old AOL platform?

The Web 2.0 conference in New York City gave us a lot of good exposure. I’m not a big fan of large conferences since it is almost impossible to get above the noise of all the other companies. But launching a great new product (LiveBar) provided us a lot of attention. The best moment for me from the conference was watching the staff of one of our competitors walking out early on the last day when we still had a booth full of good prospects talking with us.

With all of the people that I saw at our booth, I would ask about what was getting their attention at the show. The two most common themes of response were excitement over new web services from companies that could be mashed-up into new products and people wondering how many of the new companies were still going to be standing in 2 years.

So back to the theme of this posting of coming back to reality…

Having been raised in the Midwest, I always keep the worn out phrase of “will it play in Peoria” in the back of my mind when I deal with new technologies. Making the trip out to Altoona, PA to visit my daughter at school gave me the opportunity to see how much social networking and online communities have impacted mass society.

The truth is we still have a way to go. I was in a community lacking 3G connectivity (but a surprise was it did exist only in Beaver Stadium at PSU) and a lot of open WiFi networks that fuel my iPhone addiction for networking with the world. The local community newspaper will still a healthy size and had a full classified advertising section.

So time to continue digging at this and keep focus on enabling conversations.

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