Sep 06
27
Shel Israel in Toronto
I recently joined up with the Third Tuesday group, which is a Toronto-based group discussing social media, with a heavy skew towards Public Relations practioners. Considering I talk about the merge/clash of PR and Advertising a lot, I figured that even as an ad guy, I had better crash the party.
Shel arrived, we all sat down and Mark Evans blogger (and oh yeah, Senior Tech Writer at the National Post) interviewed Shel for about 45 minutes with questions and comments from the audience afterward. The inaugural event was held at the Pour House in Toronto and had probably about 50-60 people. The discussion was lively and the schmoozing afterwards was fun. Without a doubt though the highlight of my evening was getting beaten by Shel in a lightning round of Rock Paper Scissors (his Scissors sliced into my Paper) and in the process convincing him that there is indeed strategy to the game. He was pretty taken aback when I told him that I literally written the book on RPS strategy.
To be honest, I was not nuts about the Naked Conversations book, not because it isn’t insightful, valuable or that Shel and co-author Robert Scoble aren’t correct in what they say, but I felt I knew most of the content already. I certainly recognize it as an extremely important book for those outside the blogging echo chamber or those who have been reluctant to drink the social media Kool-Aid. Also as an author I can testify to the eternity it can take between submitting a final draft and seeing it on the shelves and a lot has changed in the blogosphere over the course of a year.
Nice to meet you Shel, and look forward to your next book.
