Canadian bloggers are getting together more …off-line. Last night was the second Throng, a monthly meet-up of Canadian marketers interested in social media.  Web 2.0 conferences like Mesh are great but I never get the chance to discuss ideas with other delegates. Hence...Throng was born. No guest speakers, just conversation about interactive media over drinks. 

Last night was a good mix of bloggers and interactive marketers with Agent Wildfire's Sean Moffit, H&K’s Ted Graham, Maclaren McCann’s Mark Daley, Entrepreneur Mike Myers, TBWA’s Doug Walker and Profectio's Dave Forde.  We talked about dividing the line between entertaining content and inauthenticity looking at Lonelygirl15 on YouTube.  The question of whether she is real or not was the buzz: in fact she isn’t real and was created as an experimental project, fooling a lot of people. Does it matter in and of itself? Does it matter when it makes the front page of the Globe and Mail? 

We briefly touched on an auto manufacturer's recent flying cars viral campaign and argued about the objectives and impact. Some felt the campaign made no difference to whether they would buy a car, others felt it was a repositioning to an important new market, and others saw it as the flailing of marketers desperately trying to reach out to a particular audience. We agreed that auto manufacturers seem to be more on top of social media than many others. We also discussed the rise of advertising spends in mainstream media despite a decline in some important viewer demographics due to DVRs, media fragmentation, gaming and Web usage.

 Most of us are going to Third Tuesday Toronto next week – a similar monthly meet-up that brings in guest speakers (next week is Shel Israel) and is a little bigger and probably better organized than our informal get-together.