Sociable Book Cover

Come out to the plus V Lounge in Yaletown to support local authors and social media phenomena Shane Gibson and Steve Jagger, who are launching their new book Sociable! Deets from the Facebook invitation:

5-8pm, Thursday, January 28th

V Lounge above Earl’s in Yaletown

1095 Mainland Street, Vancouver

This is the official launch party for the book Sociable! As many of you know Sociable! is about using social media to connect with people and develop meaningful business relationships. Come out, mingle and be Sociable!

Copies of Sociable! will be available for purchase and Stephen Jagger and Shane Gibson would be pleased to sign them for you.

* Those who plan on purchasing a book, please bring cash or a cheque as we won’t have credit card processing capabilities on site.

This year has seen an explosion of books on various aspects of social media, most particularly from local authors. Not only Shane and Steve but also Tris Hussey, Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, and Rebecca Bollwitt have new books out this Spring. All are both local to Vangroover and world-class experts in social media, and all of them are friends of mine so I dare not play favorites here except that AHEM Shane, Steve, Julie and Darren are the only ones who’ve invited me to their book launch…yet…and somehow they’re also the only ones whose announcements made it onto my blog). All six were profiled recently in a Vancouver Sun article by Gillian Shaw, whom I also know, for lo, yo, I know everyone in this scene.

Vancouver is the most Facebooked city in the world per capita and, I believe, the second most Twittered. It’s a socially quite isolationist city, and cliques here can be very difficult to break into; it’s not that people are really heartless, but for whatever reason we’ve got these social silos side by side and there’s very little interaction between groups. That’s why Lori and I started the Shebeen Club almost five years ago: to provide a place where everyone involved in Vancouver literature, whether magazine publisher, book designer, journalist, screenwriter, poet, storyteller, or student could come together as equal participants and share ideas and a few drinks and a lot of fun. Getting back to digital social media (whisky is very social, duh!) I think that one of the key reasons Vancouverites are so interactive online is because we do sense the lack of connectedness in our culture, and are driven to address it in easily-accessible ways. Essentially, the social urge in Vancouver is diverted online, where it can find fulfillment almost instantly.

This year I’ve been to more events I found out about on Twitter and Facebook than any other method of communication. Sure, Tweetups were more fun before the recession when companies bought the drinks, but they’re still a fun, casual way to meet great people. The one key thing to remember about social media is that it’s SOCIAL, and people use it to socialize. Online engagement doesn’t replace life, it is life, just conducted on different platforms. The telephone is social media. The bus is social media. Airplanes and the post office and pony express: all social media.

So, even though you read this announcement on a blog, it means very little unless it inspires you to get off your chair and out to V Lounge on Thursday to meet the authors in meatspace! In the meantime, here’s a teaser: you can read the first chapter of their book on Scribd right here (first page is blank, just click onward):

And you can buy Sociable at Amazon if you like the chapter and cannot possibly make it to the book launch.