I only got to attend the first few hours of SoCon. I had to run off and coach a third grade girl’s basketball game; the most exciting 6 – 6 game ever played I might add. But the time I was there was pretty interesting.

After some brief introductory remarks by Leonard Witt (I loved this copyleft comment) and Sherry Heyl it turned into a raise your hand and pass the mic session. If you can picture the audience participation portion of Oprah or Jerry Springer with geeks, you are pretty close.

As has been chronicled before, I tend to sit back and observe a lot before talking. Well I waited a little too long yesterday and had the mic in my hand when they cut off the discussion for Chris Klaus‘ presentation.

First of all, a little war broke out between some old media folks and new media folks. This war actually took the form of an IE vs. Firefox browser debate. At one point some dude from Creative Loafing literally called the entire gathering elitist because the vast majority of normal people still use IE and some other guy ranting about the Wicked Witch of the West. They were, of course, both right.

Then somehow the discussion turned to money. Of how we were all in the room due to money. Which is, of course, wrong.

Finally the subject of word of mouth marketing came up. Some guy with some app was trying to figure out how to make that happen.

These three different topics all coming together was what prompted me to ask for the mic. And here what I was going to say.

The vast, vast majority of the people in the room are not necessarily elitists. They are one per centers. 99% of the people in the room were the 1% that contribute to social media. For example, my bet is anyone reading has visited Wikipedia or Youtube and viewed the content on these sites. I contribute to Wikipedia and YouTube. Its not being deal. It is not elite. It just is, and folks that do have a certain lens that others do not.

People don’t contribute for money. In a study done by Pew last year only 85% said that money was not a factor in their decision to blog. I postulate this is true for other forms of user generated content as well. It’s not about the money; it’s about self-expression and being heard.

And while some people have suggested that in the current environment viral marketing will just not get you above the noise level that exists, the way that you do it is to ferret out the one per centers for your product concept, work with them to create a killer product that appeals to their reasons for having a Web life, and make it so easy that their not so geeky friends can use it when they tell them about it. The key is coming up with a concept that appeals to people in such a way that they want to help you to make it a success.

The devil, of course, is in the details, and I was a little bummed that I missed out on the session where it was going to be discussed in detail in the afternoon.

Haynie is talking about doing an unconference on entreprenership in the not too distant future. I have already told him that this comes to pass I want to play a bigger role.