Social Media Breakfast

On Thursday morning, I attended a social media seminar at the MLC Centre in Sydney, level 47. See views above--not too shabby! The seminar itself, however, was less than impressive. The speaker was Aaron Goonrey, a lawyer that specialises in Workplace Relations & Safety. That, I'm afraid was the problem. I'm confident that I could have given a better presentation on social media with my eyes closed! First of all, his statisitcs were outdated. 40 million users on facebook? Really? Try 50 million. He talked for a while about Second Life, which I find to be totally irrelevant in the social media landscape, and didn't once mention 4square, which while only boasting half a million users worldwide, I think is growing into something huge. It must be, in fact, with facebook's recent launch of facebook places. Funnily, the logo for facebook places is literally a four inside of a square.

Anyway, the seminar was pretty boring. I didn't hear much that I didn't already know. The whole thing had a negative connotation to it (go figure; it was presented by a lawyer) and the 50 or so of us present were warned about the various ways in which social media can be damaging to a business, not the ways in which it could help. Don't worry; I was sure to leave some verbose feedback on the response forms :)