Blogger Social ’08

It was billed as a weekend to remember and it clearly lived up to expectations. Over eighty marketing bloggers from all over the world jumped at the opportunity to go beyond the confines of their social media tools for one weekend and have face-to-face conversations with their peers. After months of planning, CK & Drew threw the most incredible party this past weekend in New York City.

Social Media is all about building relationships. Those who don’t participate in Social Media sometimes have trouble understanding the real, meaningful relationships that can develop through Social Media interaction. Social Media removes the barrier of distance making it easy to connect and engage with like-minded people who share common ideals, interests and passions. From that interaction, virtual communities evolve to share ideas, offer support and encouragement, and to do good things.

Meeting your digital friends in person is an unusual and somewhat surreal experience. You recognize them from the pictures they share on-line and you know some things about them from their writing. When they walk into the room, you get that “Hey, great to see you again” feeling, only you’ve never really seen them, spoken face to face, exchanged a handshake. Nevertheless, the conversations start up easily as if you are old friends. Prior to this weekend, I had experienced this only once before when I met three Valeria, Geoff & CC for dinner last fall. That meeting was wonderful, but with 80+ digital friends in attendance, Blogger Social was an emotionally overwhelming experience.

Digital friendships can be can be very strong, but lack a sensory component. I can read a post, watch a video or listen to a podcast, but that just can’t compare with hugs, dinner conversation, silliness, jagerbombs, shared laughter, cigars, hearing a voice for the first time, karaoke at 4:00am……. Blogger Social was all that and so much more that it’s virtually impossible to adequately describe. Many others have tried this week and do it much better justice than I do so check out their posts.

If you are a more visually-oriented person, check out the Blogger Social Flickr group. With 1300+ and still growing, that’s worth about 1.3 Million words, which is still not enough to really describe that Magic that was Blogger Social.