Webvisions: Hacking the enterprise with social media

DL Byron is nothing if not a nut. He’s the geek behindTextura Design,and the co-author of Publish & Prosper: Blogging for Your Business. He runs the srs bike culture blog, Bike Hugger and does cool stuff like host Twitter giveaways at conferences. To be clear, I like any dude who starts a presentation by encouraging the audience to do epic shit. Although I didn’t really get all of the aspects related to hacking the enterprise, DL did give a decent seat-of-his-pants overview of 2.0 social stuff, peppered with such phrases as “Yeah, you gotta pursue your vision — stuff you love, and rock it hard.”

His presentation was like a PMOG mission on PCP—endless 2.0 sites flashing by on a screen. Sometimes I was on-board with what we were viewing and why and other times I really had no clue. No matter, what it was all entertaining. I’m still not sure what mello cluttr (mellow clutter) is all about, but it has something to do with some of those sites that flew by.

The driving concept behind his presentation on social media is that we use this stuff to fuel our narcissism. We create what he refers to as “Planet insert name here” sites: read my blog, follow my tweets, see my feed, me me me. It seems that DL has discovered that people, particularly web users, thrive on narcissism. Isn’t that ultimately what you do online? Check yourself out, check out people who think like you, people who don’t think like you but you want to highlight because they make you look better, etc.

Also noteworthy is that the Twitter generation has decided that email is only for the old fogies out there. After all, keyboards still require more than just your thumbs, what 12-year-old is down with that?

I came away from the session with a screenful of “notes”, most of which are interesting statements DL threw out there for some reason or other. Applied to just about any twopointopian context they make sense. Here are a few I was able to decipher on reviewing my notes:

Talk about what you know. You can’t just change who you are or what you have experience with.

Use social media to be the person who brings the beer to the party, not the person who throws the party to talk about themselves.

There is no ROI on Facebook.

It used to be that you were famous for 15 minutes, now you’re famous for 15 people.