Tonight was the opening night of SoCon08... the dinner. It was at Maggiano's Cumberland Mall. About 200 social media peeps showed up to confuse, bewilder and amaze each other with buzzwords and technological mumbo jumbo. I did my part and confused no less than twelve people.
Kidding, of course. Most people actually know more than they realize... they just lack the lingo.
I sat at the Marketing/PR table. With seven women and two dudes it was the place to be. We discussed some of the basics and some contemporary topics. More than anything it was nice to get to know some people who were interested in social media.
I met two dNeero users! In the flesh! Michael Mealling of Masten Space Systems is a dNeero user and will send anything you want into space for a rather reasonable fee. I asked him what it would cost to send Bug into space and, on the spot, he calculated that Bug plus the life support systems would probably cost $13,500-ish. Beware Bug... bark at 4:30am one more time and you're outta here. Jacqui Chew of iFusion was a dNeero user before she knew me or Sr. She just stumbled onto it. Pretty cool stuff.
Name dropping time: Kyle Young of multi-taskingwoman.com. Jeff Haynie of appcelerator, who many have said I need to meet... much like they said I needed to meet Allen Graber. Jeffri Epps of foureyes. Mike and Kristin of Radius3. Dunara and Gulbahar, MBA students from the Stans at Kennesaw State University.
So I'm doing something new at this conference. I looked over the list of 250-ish people and picked out about 30 that I'd like to chat with. I printed those out on a sheet along with some summary info grabbed from a proper Googling. Which means that I'm able to focus my discussions more. Basic Conference 101 stuff, I know... but stuff I haven't done in the past. Normally I just walk around and talk to random people.
Speaking of Conference 101... Lance says that you're supposed to take off your name tag when you get your picture taken or when you get up on stage. Never heard that before. And while I'll give it a shot, I realized I had failed tonight when I found myself pumping gas after the event... with my name tag on.
Good work Sherry Heyl and Jeff Haynie... this event is growing and energetic. Just what Atlanta needs.
Post-Ironman Melancholy