“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”
—Winston Churchill

WZZM, the ABC affiliate in West Michigan, reports on “what is being called the largest social media extravaganza in Michigan.”

It’s called The aimWest Midwest Social Media Confab, and it’s “a daylong event held at the JW Marriott.”

But shouldn’t a genuine “social media extravaganza” be held … oh, I don’t know — maybe in some form of social media and not in a Marriott?

I’m just sayin’.

Marilyn Moran and the folks over at Team and a Dream are taking the lead on implementing an interesting new idea for developing social media action plans for companies.

It’s called SociallySourced, and I’m pleased to have been invited to participate from the get-go. Read the press release here.

I asked that question about a month ago in the Future Social Media group over on LinkedIn. This morning, the thread received its 50th comment. A few excerpts:

“Social media, in my work, is the democratization of media – Where movies had a bandwidth of maybe 150 known stars in the 1940s, it went to television with a bandwidth of about 1,000 smaller stars, and in the modern era it’s tens of thousands of microcelebrities. Simply put, anyone can be a star now.” (Jason Pace, Community Manager and Social Media specialist)

“There is no online or offline, there is only blended reality.” (Alan Moore, Founder consultancy SMLXL, entrepreneur, author, blogger, speaker)

“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it, nobody knows how. When it’s finally done, there is a surprise it’s not better.” (Mehmet Günce Akkoyun, Owner, Publicist Reklamevi)

There’s some good stuff in the thread, by turns entertaining, thought-provoking and occasionally silly. If you’re a LinkedIn member, I suggest you check it out.

When all is said and done, though, I still haven’t found a definition of “social media” that nails it better than this.

One of the best scenes from any season of Mad Men is when Don Draper makes the pitch to Kodak for the carousel projector. Boing Boing has a clip of it over here.

Across town, meanwhile, some bizarro version of Don was pitching ads to Bell & Howell. No clip exists, but I can only imagine there was an over-emphasis on the words “projection equipment.” The result: The ad you see here, one of 25 vintage tech ads posted by CIO magazine that are well worth your review.