ISSUE 262 : Wednesday, September 9, 2009

This week I spent a lot of time with old friends brought together by the Jackson Funeral and new acquaintances encountered in anticipation of an upcoming speaking engagement at the upcoming Association for Corporate Growth Business Conference. You could not imagine two more diverse groups of people. Old and fading Movie Stars and minor luminaries in the one. Old and fading Wall Street and Fortune 100 stars and minor mercenaries in the other. But one thing was abundantly clear in my interaction with both groups. Once you get out of marketing and technology circles the Internet ceases to exist.

That is not to say that there is not an awareness of the impact of the web on our global economy within these groups. There is. But the focus is extremely different. In the A list Hollywood circle the web is simply one more distribution channel with a sketchy track-record for doing what it says it can do. For the boardroom types who will be gathering to hear Condi Rice, Milton Friedman and me ( Ha! I wish.) the web is just a nuisance that doesn't represent enough revenue to warrant their attention just yet.

Guys in suits are much more concerned about swine flu being downgraded to a bad cold than they are about the impact of Drupal on Web3.0. And those guys who just cashed their first million dollar checks for their jobs on Transformers. They care far more about the price of Real Estate on Broad Beach near Danny DeVito's place then anything Twitter has to say about Facebook.

There is an entire world of people who never heard of Jerry Allaire or Seth Godin and who seem to be quite alright with that. They don't try to stuff every thought into less than 140 characters in hopes of being retweeted. These are actually people who hold complete conversations.

Like the woman I met in a ACG briefing, who explained over lunch how the Obama teams first year in office is looking a lot like what the Bush Team's third term in office would have looked like. There are some really smart women out there once you get past the pixel pushers and web slaves. And smart is definitely the new sexy to a knuckle-dragger like me. I've been in the drone zone for so long, I didn't even know the TED conference was in Long Beach this year, right across the street from my old office building.

All of these revelations are the by-product of actually pushing myself out of my Knoll chair and away from my comfort zones and familiar haunts and into areas and social strata I had long ago abandoned for a life on-line and plugged in. This Labor Day Weekend I made a point of cutting back my time on-line and getting face to face with people I hadn't seen in years. It was great.

I got to try out a lot of our NeoAdNet engagement theories as real conversations. I got to see what engaged real people in real conversations as opposed to one dimensional text people in one dimensional fake conversations.

At first, I thought I would be bored. By the time this morning rolled around I came to the realization that I was the boring one. Reality is a trip. I may never come back.