Having not lived in places like Silicon Valley, New York City, Chicago, Las Vegas, or any really large major city (aside from Honolulu), I’ve never attended this many social media events. I’ve been a participant at the Social Times Launch party where I met the folks at Searchles, played Street Fighter with someone at a bar, learned about accessibility at Refresh DC, attended WidgetDevCamp and gained a better understanding of why widgets are so propagating faster than rabbits, and now to MashMeet DC Remix.
But you know what, it’s not just about what events you’ve attended nor about what you’ve learned from these things. Because as we all know, it’s not what you know that will get you ahead in life, but who you know. Take for example, I’m glad that I’ve met Ann Bernard as now I can pick her brains to learn about her experiences with a startup and how she’s managed to create such a great product that’ll soon become uber viral like Facebook. I’m also glad that I know Peter Corbett, one of the best minds in the DC area that I know who’s super skilled and who I’ve tried to adapt the technology I use based on him (e.g. Twitter, Seesmic, Tokbox, etc.), and Ernie Mosteller, a great creative mind who even though he roots for ‘dem dawgs, I can talk to him about his experiences from an agency and learn how to better myself with the clients.
So I must admit that I was rather caught off guard when I saw Pete Cashmore, the founder of one of the best social media websites out in the void at a local DC event. That was awesome. And like I said, within the last 24 hours, I’ve been looking at who’s reading my blog (yes, I’m spying on you right now) and Adam Ostrow from Mashable is following me on Twitter. How can I stand all this attention?
Well as the title of this blog says, it’s just not fun until you meet these people. Of course, I’m following great web minds like Guy Kawasaki, Shel Israel, Robert Scoble, Jim Long, and Jeremiah Owyang, but honestly I haven’t met them so I feel it would be in really poor taste if I walked around town and started using their names in vain without some other credible evidence. So I’m glad I went to these events because I would not have met such great people that I can now drop their names and let people know that I’m acquaintances, if not friends, with these famous people. Thank you DC…you can now be proud, you have people I’m friends with!
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But I digress slightly. To respond to Shel's comment about "great web minds"...for someone who is kinda in the middle of the social media pack, not a newbie, but also not a subject matter expert, I think having the insights of someone that I consider "great web minds" is very beneficial. Everyone is overrated by someone and that's a valid opinion. I'm not going to argue that. But for someone to say they know Guy Kawasaki who has achieved so much during his time at Apple to forming several of these web entities or Jeremiah Owyang who takes social media with him to work to help broaden his audience base or even Shel Israel himself who writes great blogs and passes along his knowledge to other people...these are the type of people who I'd love to consider being my contacts so I can weasel out their experience and become a better expert of this art form.
DC has a great many of these people and I'm only breaking the crust and hopefully that'll only get better as more people begin to pay attention to me :-)
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