Virtual Insanity

So I just had the honor of speaking at the 2009 National Catholic Development Conference and after a frantic morning of racing around trying to make sure the conference room where I would be speaking had wireless internet access (it did, thanks to the herculean efforts of one Ryan Gates Gold...who organized that conference so well, it ran like a well-oiled machine - and I know how stressful and challenging it can be to put conference events together. She deserves a standing ovation.)

Anyhoo...my session was called "An Introduction to Social Networking" and much of my prepared presentation was to show Facebook Fan Pages in detail...and wouldn'tcha know it...Facebook Fan pages (at least ours and all the ones I could think of) were down!!! By the time I took the train back to Baltimore, they were fine, but in the 60 minutes I was standing in front of a room full of people, I could not get access to our page. A frantic call to my colleague back at the office, quickly confirmed it was not just me - she couldn't access it either. Drag!

Most people would have to think fast on their feet. Me, I just sorta had an out of body experience...still not sure exactly what I said. I am usually pretty calm about public speaking, but man, I was so flustered!

Trying to talk about social networking in the abstract to a room full of people who have very limited knowledge of Facebook was, let's say, quite a challenge. Of course, being that it was NCDC members, they were all just as nice and polite as they could be, but I felt like I was explaining how to do brain surgery on the moon while speaking in another language. I wish I could have done a better job.

Anyway, lesson learned for next time...screenshot backups. Definitely.