So I never managed to have that afternoon nap. Suffice to say I was a broken man by the end of the evening but thankfully the adrenaline of this event kept me going.

A few highlights of the evening:
Dinner – these Greeks can cook! I was a very happy gastronome.
I played Guitar Hero against Josh Spear and I chose a Pearl Jam song as I thought it would give me an advantage because I know them all backwards. To cut a long story short – it didn’t and he thrashed the pants off me.
Here is a pic of Josh shredding the World Champion Diabolo Juggler (no I’m not kidding). He chose a Rage Against the Machine track which was probably recorded before this kid was born so perhaps he had an unfair advantage.

I met Adam Selig the Chief Exec of reputation monitoring and management company, Visible Technologies and the makers of Trucast and Truview. Adam is a really smart guy who has clearly put a lot of thought into the ins and outs of ORM.
I certainly learnt a few things and he gave me some great ideas… but I also realised that the work Quirk is doing as far as ORM goes is pretty cutting edge. Excellent!

After dinner we had the “Gadgethon” where 26 people each had 2 minutes to show off their gadgets. From portable IP TVs to an original Apple Newton we saw some pretty crazy stuff. Dr. Yossi Vardi ended off the show with his advice on local warming: a male specific problem for those of us who use our laptops on our laps (like I’m doing right now). The word scrotum was used far too often and now I have officially used it in a blog post… now there’s a first!
His gadget was the Phillips Body Groomer.

To end the evening off, I had a bit of a chat with Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder of Blogher. She had some cool stories to tell but the thing that struck me most was her experience of brands taking positive and negative learnings from their engagement with social media. From her experience, the bottom line is that brands must give consumers the fuel they need to talk about the brand but NOT to try and force or control that conversation.
One of her examples was GM giving women at the Blogher conference cars for them to drive and mess around with. They just handed over the chariots and left the rest up to the ladies. The result was a huge amount of genuine buzz without GM prompting anything.