Ok, so here’s how this went down.

Last Summer our communications group worked with Cannes to set up a social media panel at their International Advertising Festival in June.  Part of the gig was that the BzzAgent CEO would sit on the panel (me) and we’d help find other participants to join.   We rallied a few folks from places like MySpace, Ford — and Justin Siegel at Mocospace.

I ran into Justin shortly thereafter and we talked about the panel.  We were both griping that the folks at Cannes weren’t paying for speaker’s fees, or even travel, and to make matters worse, were charging us a few thousand bucks to attend the conference.  They also assigned our panel on a Sunday, meaning we’d have to fly out on a Saturday, ruining our weekends, etc.  We figured we’d at least have a good time together in France…

Then, I had to cancel for family reasons.  This happened shortly after Ford bailed, and then MySpace changed up their attendee from a big heavy hitter to someone out of Europe we’d never heard of.  I never spoke to Justin about it, but always wondered if he was cursing my name for signing him up for this boondoggle without the boon or the doggle.

Fast forward to last month – I was asked by the AdClub to arrange a panel on community, and invited Justin to be a part of it.  Other attendees included Jason Jacobs CEO of RunKeeper (awesome guy) and Ben Fischman CEO of Rue-La-La (also an awesome guy), moderated by Paul Gillin (social media guru, solid dude all around); I figured with the group we’d collected, this was a solid makeup for the Cannes issue.

This morning, as attendees munched bacon and slurped orange juice, we waited for Justin to show.  We neared launch time, and reached out to him via email – he wrote back something vague about waking up late.  We, of course, thought that was weird — for the CEO of a company to just not show for a panel that he was heavily promoted for.

Then it struck me: maybe, just maybe, this was Justin’s payback.  I mentioned it to Ben and Jason, and we all got an incredible kick out of it. Ben and I giggled about it through the panel.   It was something straight of Seinfeld, or even Curb Your Enthusaism.  Pure Genius.  I wish I’d thought of doing this…

To Justin, if you truly overslept, don’t tell me.  Let me live with the joy of knowing you maybe had the last laugh at my expense.  I would respect you even more for it.

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