Social Media Club NYC meets Content Nation Author John Blossom

At last night’s Social Media Club meeting in New York, John Blossom, author of the book Content Nation joined more than 30 attendees to discuss his book and engage in a lively debate.

Topics ranged from the future of Twitter’s business model to the future of the Newspaper industry’s business model. There seems to be a common theme – in the words of the philosopher Snoop Dogg, people have “their mind on their money and their money on their mind.” (link to lyrics- not safe for work.)

Our initial discussion on Twitter’s future business model included conjecture about Zappos. If Twitter were to charge for commerical accounts (not yet a fact), how would the over 400 Zappos twitterers be handled? They’re using their accounts both for work and for personal use.  Many consultants in the room also noted they use their Twitter for both business and personal use, and were not sure how that would work either. Discussion was tabled until we know more.

Update: John published his slides and notes on “Content Nation Meets Silicon Alley, Madison Ave. and Wall Street.”

John Blossom then presented on Content Nation. The book is a great discussion of how we are all turning into a nation, or even a world, of creators, sharers, and social connectors.

As you can see from the Twitter Stream, there were a bunch of good nuggets from John’s 7 Secrets of Social Media (in the book) including:

• “Social media is about Mass contextualization”
• Social media is more about the law of the campfire, not the law of the jungle
• Social media is civilization’s new DNA. Can offer civilization new scale and diversity to thrive.
• publishing defines the organism of society -animal altruism and cooperation-in business it gets encoded in publishing

The great thing is that much of the initial draft of the book is online at the Content Nation site, so you can read it yourself!

After John’s presentation the discussion of the business of content creation, and specifically newspapers as a model came up. While I can’t fairly summarize it, the discussion was very similar to what happened on this week’s Yi-Tan call.

Thanks again to John for coming and thanks to @lesblatt and @napril1023 for contributing to the twitter stream of the meeting. Next meeting – something exciting – tenatively on March 25th.

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