Jaffe in person: Turning social networks into social reality

Who's that man? Joseph Jaffe who I had the pleasure of spending much of yesterday with. Joe was the keynote at the Digital Marketing Briefing, and I was there to present a couple of sessions, too (Power of the Network and why we should be more than witnesses to it).
Joe and I twittered and emailed beforehand - I'm one of the marketing team for his latest book (in that I've reviewed it).
And thanks to twitter we organised a tweet-up for other followers immediately after the DMB finished at 6pm.
I'm using twitter more and more. It's not only a fabulous multi-dimensional means of microblogging, it's also proving itself to be the most effective way of turning digital social media into social reality.
For example, none of the parties who came together for the tweet-up had met before. This kind of gathering is easy to organise on the fly with twitter (particularly if you're a mobile twitter user, too). Somehow twitter manages this more effectively than facebook.

During the morning I presented one session. In the afternoon I had another. In between I followed David Armano's mostly micky-taking tweets from the Adage conference in New York. And I took one of the examples he witnessed into my afternoon presentation. All of this achieved without a pc.

ie: I got relevant news to me filtered by a source I trust, faster than any other way I know.

The example that amused me, by the way, was of kiosks in Bloomingdales in which you can try on new clothes and send images of you in them to friends to get their view on which you should buy - kind of a changing room with cameras I guess...
Of course, that could just be a mobile app. Who needs a kiosk when you have a mobile phone... except perhaps you need someone to take the snap for you, but that really shouldn't be so tough. Social shopping is the big buzz at AdAge, apparently. Makes sense: social networks plus intent to buy - the missing link!

And talking of mobile. If you're interested in why it's going to be THE hot ad medium, Tomi Ahonen does a great job of pulling together the themes of permission, segmentation, co-created advertising, the whole ad-as-content thing. Enjoy it.