Later this week Shel Israel is going to wrap up his Canadian tour for Twitterville with a stop here in Vancouver–SEPT 17: Shel Israel launches “Twitterville” in Canada – Third Tuesday Vancouver (Vancouver, BC) – Meetup.com–and I am honoured to have the privilege to both introduce Shel and moderate the questions at the end of his talk.
I’ve known Shel since the pre-Naked Conversations days, when he was “the other guy writing a book with Scoble”. Of course what this really meant was that we didn’t know Shel yet. Shel is the first social media storyteller I knew. He sat down with people (like SAP) and tried to get to the heart of what social media was all about for them.
In the time between Naked Conversations and Twitterville Shel undertook an ambitious project to interview people around the world. I think he covered a fair bit of the world and in doing so, opened our eyes to worlds beyond our own.
Shel’s influence isn’t something you can just point out. He spends a lot of his time advising big players in industry, so they aren’t really going to go out there and be tweeting about their meeting with Shel that day. What is important is the subtle sea change in business attitudes about social media. It’s taken folks like Shel, me, and many others years to get social media to a place where it is now.
I’m proud to consider Shel a friend, and prouder still that he considers me one as well. Thursday will be a great opportunity for me to wax poetic about someone who might not grab headlines, but whose influence is deep and vast.
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. He is the author of Create Your Own Blog: 6 Easy Blogging Projects to Start Blogging Like a Pro and Using WordPress.
