This weekend the fifth EBE – EventoBlog España – took place here in Sevilla. In fact, it’s still going on until tomorrow. But I’m done.
I dunno, maybe it’s me. I don’t like huge crowds of milling directionless people and I also don’t like wasting my time. But I had a look at the programme for this year’s event and thought that, as a blogger of many years, perhaps it was time I got more involved in a face-to-face and personal way in this whole Social Media biz. But in the end I was left feeling disappointed and that I could have – and probably should have – spent my time better.
Perhaps things just got off to an unfortunate start. I attended the inauguration talk, all about what’s different now from five years ago. Which was my first clue that the organisers should perhaps rethink who their audience is. What I saw were some very hip young guys (almost all male here) back-and-forthing across the stage and telling us what a blog is, and how blogs are different now than before. And, well…duh! Who did they think they were talking to? More than half the audience wasn’t even listening. They were either busy tweeting or otherwise engaged on their smartphones, or else working away on their netbooks or iPads. And the other few talks I attended there were equally dull… and I mean dull in the sense that I didn’t actually learn anything new, and I certainly wasn’t shown anything in an interesting and entertaining manner. And yet it was apparent that masses of time and money had been put into staging this event.
I suppose one way of looking at it – and this certainly was the case with a few people I spoke to – was that the event was more about networking outside of the scheduled talks. And well, okay, I could actually see how that would be more interesting for most of the people there. But again… network with who? It seemed that it was mostly about hanging out with people you already knew – and perhaps meeting someone new that way. There were no social point areas set up for specific blogging groups: technology, sports, gastronomy, photography, etc , though there was clearly plenty of space to do so. Instead it was just a huge mass of people mingling in a very haphazard manner – it rather felt like being in the middle of a huge and noisy shopping mall.
After my second visit today I left feeling quite let down by the whole thing. If you were there I’d be interested to hear what you thought of it. Personally I think it’s a great idea, and it is obviously very well organised, but I felt the content simply wasn’t that interesting or pertinent.
What do you think?
