I never met Trey Pennington. I wish I had.

Many people close to him have written moving tributes to him in the last few days.

Others have tried to rationalise Trey’s passing, the illness he suffered from and the helplessness of social media in his death.

I won’t go there. Trey touched many people’s lives. He struck a chord with me.

Of the many people highly active in social media, he always struck me as someone who was naturally at ease with the true human socialising that his profession brought him, those moments where he would get together with other Like Minds without the barriers of technology inbetween human relationships.

Sure he would like to document so many of these moments incessantly with any sort of cam, but you really got the impression the guy relished true interactions with people.

Like many people I did wonder how the one hundred thousand plus followers made any sense and how his prolific and relentless output was possible.

Maybe I’m mistaken but Trey would have met you all in person given the chance.

When people have queried me what social media really meant in terms of a mindset, I would often cite him and express a sentiment along the lines of  “look you have to be totally selfless in a karmic kind of way if you’re prepared to do this…“

I feel as if that came naturally to Trey.

People’s affection towards him seems heartfelt. In the British parlance, the man was surely a great bloke if any person stood up to that description.

He made a massive contribution to social media and I trust a celebration of his life today and in the future will recognise that.

I contend there’s enough wisdom in his archive to merit a Trey Day.

However if there is one video, one tip, one piece of sound heartfelt advice that would most resonate about him and his thinking it may well be this video with Zig Ziglar.

Would less have been more?

Trey’s thoughts, podcasts, blogs, published material, tweets and interactions made for compelling content in the last few years although recent months his output did change.

I don’t do Facebook so I don’t pretend to know all of facets of his life, but some time ago I did think, what if he could produce more.

More?

What if his tweets were more repeatable by shortening his Twitter id. Could he produce more Trey Pennington content by allowing more content to fit in his tweets?

So about a year ago I had this email exchange with Trey.

The gist of it was this: Trey, go shorten your Twitter name, it’s possible here you could have this username.

After all Trey, you are one of the biggest names in social media, literally. You are 10% of every tweet!

After these emails followed a series of Direct Messages on Twitter (which unfortunately I can no longer access or reproduce) and @ replies that have forever withered away.

About this time on Twitter it was possible to recuperate dormant accounts of usernames, I had done it before and Trey could have owned @treyp had he so wished.

I opened a support ticket on Twitter, sometimes exchanged cryptic @ replies with him and sent him DM’s along the lines of :

Trey, lose the ennington and get yourself a five letter Twitter name, you can do it – you’ll become six and two thirds per cent more interesting.

Trey did ponder it, perhaps he may have been minded to do it had we met at the Like Minds event in the UK in 2010 but alas I wasn’t able to make it in time despite being in London at another marketing event.

Perhaps not.

Perhaps he would have remained Trey Pennington.

RIP