» A Night with Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan

I just came back from A Night with Chris Brogan at Chapman University in the city of Orange, California. Chapman was the eighth venue of the day for Chris, who was touring the greater Orange County area talking about the importance of social media integration and selling a few copies of his book Trust Agents.

Chris was introduced as a Social Media Rockstar. Which he is. He has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. He’s one of the top five bloggers in the nation and he has been at the forefront of social media for over a decade. But, in the social media world a rockstar isn’t the same as it is in the music industry. Chris was humble and soft spoken. “I’m a typist. A guy who types, that’s it,” Chris said in response to the moniker. He even found an opportunity to make a joke at the expense of Chris Garrett, a regular contributor on this blog.

To me Chris came off more as a social media philosopher. His speech wasn’t punctuated with bullet points. He didn’t have a fancy PowerPoint presentation. Although his message was clear, he still spoke in generalities. He spoke about the broader importance of this transformational period in our society. It was obvious that he had a deep seeded love and passion for his topic. He seemed to respect it enough to not pimp it out to his captive audience.

Chris focused on the humanity of social media. Social media allows companies to be human again. They can speak to their customers and more importantly they can listen to their customers. Businesses can become part of their tribe and when they are able to connect with their customers through this humanity, then they can truly grow as a company. The problem with business today has been the loss of that humanity.

It was nice to see someone who spoke about social media as if he was writing a love letter. From time to time businesses can lose sight of the things that are truly important and after seeing Chris speak about this social media utopia where customers speak and they are heard, I was hopeful that it would become a reality sooner rather than later.