Last night, we attended a book party at the Daylife headquarters for “What Would Google Do” by Jeff Jarvis (journalist for TV Guide, People, Entertainment Weekly, NY Daily News, San Fransisco Examiner, creator of BuzzMachine, and Associate Professor of Journalism).

After some initial mingling, Jeff Jarvis took the stage to give us the speed-talking version of the book with accompanying slides (to which he cursed the PC they were using more than once with, “Get a MAC, people!“). Immediately, a fury of tweets began to hit the twitter waves, as fellow attendees transcribed their favorite quotes almost as fast as Jarvis could spit them out.

Basically, the book focuses on the idea of using Google as a success model for ways we should all be implementing our own businesses, careers and lives, by exploring a better philosophy for the consumption of information.

Choice quotes from Jarvis included:

• “We all want to create. 81% of Americans think they have a book in them, thank god they don’t all come out”
• “Facebook is a close competitor to Google. They could lose though, they could pull a Friendster”
• “How many people wish that Google owned their cable company?” (crowd woo’s)
• “Life is a Beta”
• “Middlemen are dead”
• “Are there any Real Estate Agents in the audience…?” (silence follows) “Good, I f’n HATE real estate agents.”
• “I believe firmly that there’s a market demand for news…I believe in the future of news.  I teach journalism.”

…and the best doozie of the evening, “Public Relations is hopeless.” OUCH!  With power in numbers, 3 of us publicists surrounded him after the speech to ask him why PR is so hopeless, to which he responded, “It’s not the publicists that are hopeless it’s the clients of PR that are” (and I omitted an expletive here).  Well, hey – the man thinks fast on his feet!

*Jeff Jarvis with blogger/journalist, Maegan Carberry

*Jeff Jarvis giving his speech, standing up on a safety hazzard waiting to happen.

[Alyson Campbell for It's All Very PR]

Tags: Alyson Campbell, amp3, AMP3 pr, AMP3 Public Relations, Daylife, It's All Very PR, Jeff Jarvis, Maegan Carberry, What Would Google Do

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 5:46 pm and is filed under pr talk, special events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.