Last week, I had the pleasure of being the opening keynote speaker at the second annual Social Media Business Life Conference produced by Chuck Hall. I’m usually the guy writing speeches for others, so it was an interesting role reversal to be the guy in front of the audience for a change.
Chuck does a great job organizing this conference and putting together a full-slate of content that is, refreshingly, vendor-free. Too often, those of us who have been involved in social media for years forget that many people are still ramping up. There were nearly 250 people drawn to learning about how they could use social media to improve their organizations. In a suburb of Philadelphia. As my friend, John Patrick, often said when the web was first molten hot: “We’re only 10% of the way there.”
My talk focused on the need to look beyond the tools of social media and see the humans behind those tools. I also challenged the audience to stop using social media to sell…which I think forced Chuck and several members of the audience to wonder if I’d started the conference-ending happy hour a bit early.
(My keynote starts at ~9:30 into the video.)
Mike Maney 
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