The Mesh conference is winding down as I write, and I have to say I was as impressed by the second day as I was disappointed by the first.
Perhaps it was because of the specific conferences I chose to attend, but it seemed to me that the conversations were much more concrete on the second day.
The problem was largely with the format. The guests were just guests; the moderators lobbed them soft pitches across home plate, and each was easily batted out of the park. There was no one there to challenge the guests, to ask them pointed questions; this latter role was passed to the attendees, whose questions were rarely more challenging than those of the moderators.
It turned largely into a techno love-in, with all the guests being largely on the same side of the social-networking fence, and so they were all largely in agreement with each other. Moderator and Mesh co-founder Mathew Ingram (and Globe and Mail blogger) on the morning of the first day said, “Welcome to our party,” which pretty much tells you what the conference was all about: a celebration of shared interests, and little more. No serious exchange of ideas; no conflict of belief.
I got the definite feeling that people who might have disagreed would be, well, party poopers.
This is, after all, what social networking — Web 2.0, call it what you will — is all about: creating a community of like-minded people who support and amplify each other and rarely disagree about the fundamentals of what they’re discussing.
For instance, it was assumed that blogging is a Good Thing; I heard nothing about the signal-to-noise ratio in a world filled with bloggers.
The point was made, albeit by silence, the second morning, when the admirably intelligent Richard Edelman, head of the Edelman PR company, could have been confronted on the Working Families for Wal-Mart blog he created to support Wal-Mart, a contentious a bit of PR work, as you can imagine. At the Mesh conference, Wal-Mart was mentioned, once, and not in a challenging way.
Things got to be much better today in the afternoon, with an intelligent group of people who have had extensive experience with Teaching Old Media New Tricks, as the conference was titled. Jennifer Evans (president and founder of Sequentia Communications), John Jantsch (creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system) and Maggie Fox (president and founder of Social Media Group) offered up their experiences trying to drag companies mired in old-media thinking into the world of social networking.
I liked several of the comments. Evans noted that too many people promoting the new media are “getting caught up with the technology, and not discussing how to use it.”
The moderator asked Maggie Fox, “What’s the biggest problem facing people dabbling in the new media?” And Fox shot right back: “Dabbling.”
Jantsch also offered a great way for bloggers to feed the insatiable hunger of the gaping blog, which he recommended updating three to five times a week. “Use a tape recorder,” he said. “Just walk into someone’s office, shove the microphone at them and say, ‘What do you think of this?’”
This is the meat-and-potatoes stuff people go to conferences for. I wish there had been more of it.
