PodCamp Boston 2, or, The Things We Think and Do Not Say

Over the weekend I attended the second annual PodCamp un-conference here in Boston. It was great for a lot of reasons, chief among them being the chance to meet people I've corresponded with or spoken to, but had until then never seen in the flesh, as well as the opportunity to meet folks I didn't know before but am glad I do now.

On the "meeting in the flesh"-front, I finally met C.C. Chapman, Paul Gillin, and David Meerman Scott.

On the "glad I know them now"-front, there were, among others, the "Hollywood Podcaster," Tim Coyne, Doug Haslam and Sandy Kalik of Topaz Partners, the "golden" Jay Berkowitz, and the "twisted" Mitch Joel.

While many folks at PodCamp made an impression on me, I would say the impression I've been wrestling with most vigorously was that made by Mr. Joel. Mitch's presentation was entitled, "Building Your Personal Brand," and, frankly, I wasn't planning on attending it until C.C. told me that Mitch was a great speaker.

Having seen him in action, albeit at an "un-conference," I must concur with C.C. Mitch is a natural. He addressed us in a casual but sincere way. Although he spoke about "being passionate," as many nowadays do, his approach to passion was decidedly understated but, for all that, somehow inviting.

The interesting thing to me was that, although by all appearances Mitch is a successful marketer, he did not talk about his successes or trot out superheroic case studies. Instead, he spoke about personal branding more in terms of personal fulfillment and self-actualization.

I'm fascinated by the application of business terms and concepts to personal journeys and "life careers," but will save that fascination for another post. Instead, I want to talk about my Jerry Maquire moment while listening to Mitch.

At one point, he quoted The Economist and asked, "Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?" Now, oddly enough, I would. I'm intelligent, articulate, funny, and, as people who know me will tell you, kind of weird. Mitch's point wasn't about dinner, however; it was about the content we create. Specifically, he was asking, "Would you want to read the stuff you write?" In other words, "Are you passionate and interested in the things your write about on your blog or talk about in your podcasts?"

When I ask those questions about this particular blog, it gives me some pause. While I do tend to write about marketing things that interest me, I'm nowhere near as passionate about marketing as I am about music, for example, or my friends and their exploits, interesting strangers, or the way the trees looked against the blue sky while I was apple picking with my children on Sunday.

Would this blog be better if I wrote about that stuff? Would I want to read it if I stumbled across it? This isn't just an academic exercise in self-searching. It was brought home to me in a relatively brutal way when talking to my friend, Steve, about the podcasts I've been doing. He said, "Well, they're about your work so they're probably kind of boring." Ouch.

Image courtesy of DRB62.

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