Co-authored by Sara Giles
This is what happens when you unleash SNL’s Seth Meyers on social media: “Facebook is the only place where a 12 year old stranger can call my vacation photos gay.”
Meyers hit the nail on the head during his set at Buddy Media’s party Social Marketing Is No Laughing Matter, which Sara Giles and I attended on Tuesday at New York’s Hiro Ballroom. If you’re a PR looking to make more fun of yourself, PRNewser has a good recap of the other Meyers highlights.
Now let’s back up. A few things hit me when I walked in the door:
A) Apparently writers from the Huffington Post and New York Times are VIP and Account Coordinators from Bite are not.
B) I vaguely recognized at least 50% of the people in the room from their avatars.
C) Letter B was a little creepy.
Aside from my apparent stalkerish tendencies, Buddy definitely knows how to throw a good party. Sara and I found it surprisingly refreshing that aside from a short and sweet video on the power of social marketing, the event was all about having fun and meeting interesting people.
The event circuit in the PR/social media/tech world can be too focused on driving home a key point about the industry. Sometimes it’s best to just give guests a few free drinks, some food and let them at it. Funny how in a room full of people with iPhones, Blackberrys, Droids, etc., wearing the “Hi My Name Is” nametag is still very effective – no Twitter handle introduction required.
Not that this is news to anyone reading this blog, but the sheer variety of people attending on Tuesday only reinforces how ubiquitous social media has become. In a little over two hours, we’d chatted with creatives, developers, PR pros, monitoring experts, venture capitalists, investment bankers and real estate managers looking to market over social media channels – basically if you think about it, the perfect blend of folks needed to fully furnish any brand’s social marketing needs. And this diverse crowd all care about social media and find it relevant to their line of work, which is proof in and of itself that we’re far, far beyond a fad.
A final more sentimental takeaway after meeting the folks at the Buddy Media event: nothing compares to the dynamism of New York’s media scene. As the New York Times’ David Carr would have it in his November 2009 piece “The Fall and Rise of Media,” New York’s media landscape “is not an island sinking, but one that is rising on a fresh, ferocious wave.” Happily I can’t help but agree –the people we met on Tuesday are the future of the city’s media landscape, and the future, well, it doesn’t look so bad.