Last night the who’s who of the Sydney social media set gathered for an informative Social Media Club event. It seems that if you provide the location (The Ivy) and the promise of free canapés (which got Andres Lopez-Varela through the door) and a steady flow of wine, people will gather. And gather they did; with nerds, trendy blogger types and wannabe trendy blogger types well represented.
Without meaning to bag my like-minded social media associates, I have to say, the evening was one of frustration.
The theme was a cracker – Social media: how is the social media you different from the real you? Or to break it down: Authenticity v superficiality.
We’re all guilty of it. Carefully selecting Facebook profile pics, untagging like a feind and crafting our wall updates with more attention to detail than you afford your mother’s birthday card. Or the polar opposite, letting go and using your status update to have a little rant, only to realise you’re a complete psycho, so you delete or reword like a motherf#cker, for fear people will actually think you suffer real emotions, bad days or that your life is less than perfect.
A mate of mine hates Facebook. In fact she fumes when her co-workers whip out their iPhones at Friday night work drinks, take painstakingly posed photos, and then (in the trifecta of rudeness according to her) casually move to the corner of the dance floor to upload to Facebook immediately. An interesting point made here by KPMG’s Bernard Salt who spoke last night is that this kind of behaviour is not dissimilar to that of the avid mobile phone user of the 90s. You know, that guy who took a call in the middle of dinner in a restaurant, only to shout obnoxiously in way that says “Oh yeah, I got a mobile, I’m awesome”.
Some interesting stats also came out of the night, i.e. there are more PR’s in Australia than journos (no kidding) and that the 25 – 34 year age bracket are the fastest growing on Facebook. There were also a lot of discussions around Gen X and Gen Y and their adaptation to the “always-on” nature of social media.
My frustration? Well it came from the room. More specifically, the pretentious crowd, who spent more time, on Twitter, following the conversations happening about the event, rather than paying attention to the actual event itself. And I generalise; not everyone in the room was like that. But a good two-thirds. To me, it defeated the purpose. I need to clarify here and say that that posing questions to the presenters via Twitter was encouraged, but what you actually got left with was a room full of hundreds of people, heads down, thumbs going crazy, chatting away about the dumb shit people Tweeted. Didn’t feel overly authentic to me.
Kate x
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