The Geekend conference kicked off last night with a presentation by Scott Stratten, author of UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.
He said one thing at the end that I’ve found to be true. Once he was done talking about engaging people, even people who constructively disagree with you, he talked about trolls. He showed the Twitter comment below.
The tweet reads, “Am I the only one who finds @unmarketing to be an annoying, blabber mouthed, self prophetic ass?” Now, this is not a constructive comment. This is a troll. How do you respond to them?
The answer, Stratten said, is that you don’t, and I couldn’t agree more. Who wins if Stratten were to reply to this? The troll does. Stratten has 44,000 followers; this troll had 37. By responding, Stratten wouldn’t gain anything, and the troll would pick up a bunch of new followers. Sometimes you just have to let things that are said about you go, to avoid wasting mental and psychic energy and being dragged down to the troll’s level.
So anyway, after the keynote speech there was an after-party at The Distillery, a bar with 100 different beers near the conference:
They had an extensive list of beers they serve – 21 on tap and another 80 in bottles – but there are some beers they refuse to serve. See pic below.
However, they do sell this:
My kind of bar.
Here’s one more pic, me posing with the robots which are Geekend’s mascots. I’m determined to be the person at the conference who wears the loudest shirts.
And here’s what I’ll be doing today:
Keynote speaker tonight should be really good – the chief digital architect from NBC Universal. This conference is just loaded with talent.
About time to get down there. For the first time in a long time, I actually ate breakfast this morning. I had two turkey sausage patties, a banana, and three cups of orange juice. Now I’m drinking a Mountain Dew as I type this.
Possibly more posts later today, if I find time.