Notes from the Stream Event in Athens

So once in a while I attend an event that I can say rivals BlogHer in personality (never beats, of course, just rivals). Stream07 was a special event hosted by Martin Sorrell of WPP and tech entrepreneur Yossi Vardi. When I decided to go to this event, I thought, cool, I'll get to see John Bell and Alison Byrne Fields of Ogilvy's 360 Group, go to Greece, and talk incessantly about women and blogging. What I didn't expect was that I would have one of those coming-home experiences that helped remind me why I got involved with a bunch of geeks in the first place.

Stream was not your typical prove-that-we-get-the-new-media-thing-event, but more the decent-looking love child of well-meaning, progressive marketers and devout geeks. Throw in a few European Club Med employees who ensured you were always so very happeee and it was like attending summer camp with an open bar. I had fun, I evangelized, and I learned a lot.

Yossi Vardi hosts an event like Stream in his native Israel, and he brought the quirky, holistic approach to this event. There was a gadgethon one night, which--truth be told--I wondered if anyone would participate in. Shame on me, thinking that no one would shlep gadgets with them half-way around the world. The Israelis are fairly close to Greece geographically and brought robots, instruments, and a fun sense of humor. Dan Dubno, former tech virtuoso at CBS, brought more hardware than you'd see at a Best Buy. A European's contribution of an automated, er, male sexual enhancer met with disapproval from the oddly knowledgeable digital evangelist Peter Hirshberg: "That was around, like, five years ago," he said.

This was a crowd to be reckoned with. It seemed everyone was up to something. I met an entrepreneur named Rob Stokes who moved from Cape Town to London to grow his marketing company, Quirk eMarketing, nine years ago. Caroline Slootweg, director of digital marketing for Unilever, who has worked in mulitple countries and an excitement for conversational marketing that is refreshing. A venture capitalist named William Bao Bean who left Silicon Valley in 2002 and now heads up a fund in China. A bunch of slackers, all of them.

Yossi reminded everyone to leave their business titles at the door. Of course, that's hard to do when we're all there for business, but I found it quite easy to talk shop, then make myself and Peter Friedman s'mores, negotiate having a 1 a.m. burrito from chief strategist and temporary chef Kurt David Kratchman, and dance with Mike Lundgren from VML and Michele Azar at Best Buy until 4am. These people have kids and more energy than me; I had no excuse to let them down.

I learned from Bob Gilbreath that we can market with meaning (actually I knew that already from BlogHer, but now I have a framework by which to describe what we do).

I learned that Andrew Keen isn't the devil--he just played one on The Colbert Report. His session on how Web 2.0 is destroying traditional media was interesting indeed, albeit, limited. I agree, there's shlock everywhere, but this ain't limited to social media. WE didn't start the obsession with Britney or Paris, we only got there after the fact. We don't replace, or threaten, traditional media, we hold it accountable, and we get into those hard-to-reach places where marketers are trying to have substantial conversations.

I learned from Katharina that being a woman in digital media editorial is still a rough thing. Apparently some people still have trouble accepting that women are able to do things like read, write, and innovate. Her stories of the sexual insults she received when she became the internet editor for the WAZ Mediengruppe is all-too-similar to the madness Kathy Sierra experienced earlier this year.

Most important, I learned that I can live with minimal bandwidth. Not very long, mind you, but a couple of days before I starve from Internet deprivation.

Comments

Excellent Jory. Sounds like you had a good time and learnt a lot. I just attended the Web Directions South conference in Sydney which was pretty good but I can't compare to BlogHer.

I've also been asked to speak at a conference in Sydney next year and am freaking out as I've never spoken at a conference. I've not written about it on my blog yet but will when it's confirmed.

Have you done a post yet about speaking at conferences? I'm sure you've got some great tips - hint hint.

Posted by: jen | October 07, 2007 at 10:22 PM

Hello,

This will be a pretty useless and irrelevant comment, but I just had to leave a small mark here. I wanted to say that you were the first person in the world that I heard of that shares with me the same first name. I was however a little surprised to find out that you are a woman... I'm sure my mother never heard about that movie where yours took the name from, and I believe that she has not heard that name ever before choosing it for me. I first guessed that the reason Jory was chosen for a boy was because of the way it sounds in French, but from your last name I'd guess you have some (maybe deep) french origins as well.
Anyway, sorry for the offtopic, and have a good day :)

Posted by: Another Jory | October 10, 2007 at 08:39 AM