The number of conferences with a social media slant has been increasing over the last few years. I have attended a few of them and have found each to have their own unique style of promoting knowledge, community and collaboration. I decided that I’d take a few moments to share my experiences and offer my thoughts on three social media conferences.

PODCAMP

Even within the PodCamp unconference movement, each event has its own style. PodCamp Boston 1 and 2 were strong in their efforts to promote community and the media of podcasting. PodCamp Toronto 07 and 08 catered very well to the marketing interest and had strong focus on podcast promotion and technology. PodCamp Philly had a decided education and community flair. PodCamp Ottawa was truly unplugged. Of course, these conferences had a lot of breadth of coverage in many domain areas and became the catalyst of conversation that stretches beyond what I mention here. What PodCamps have in wide-angle scope, they lack in specific depth of focus. Being a free event that is community organized offers the ability for the community to decide what it wants to share and that gives the movement a lot to grow on.

MESH

This event attracts a lot of key players from pop-culture, marketing, communications and social media. Mesh was packed from end-to-end with innovators and thought leaders who were excellent at delivering on the promise of the Mesh motto, “connect, share, inspire”. The panel discussions and keynote format (in which there was no real speech, but a discussion between a guest and co-organizer) offered the audience some amazing insight into some incredible projects and people. However, I felt that because there were so many panels and keynotes, there was little opportunity for many of the speakers to dig deep into their subjects and propel innovation beyond its current state. Those sessions where more a discussion of the past and present and offered little to push the envelope of innovation. For me, the best sessions at Mesh were those delivered by an individual or team that shared details of a specific project or idea. They made me want to get up and do more.

PODCASTERS ACROSS BORDERS

What started out as a grassroots event aimed at helping the community advance together in a meetup-meets-conference format has become something more credible and formal. Being a co-organizer, I am both proud and critical of our accomplishments to date. Our first two years were vastly different from each other and that has allowed us to examine the stuff that works (lots of engagement with the community) and the stuff that doesn’t (too much programming, insufficient breaks) and find a way to make the best of our event meet the stuff I love most about other events to hit one out of the park with PAB2008. My lofty vision is that PAB establishes itself as the TED of social media — a conference that changes the way people think in twenty minute segments and then offers a forum to explore those ideas as a group. I believe that this year’s program represents experience and a maturing of the conference and community. I’m looking forward to this year’s conference which we can almost start counting down to in hours.

PARTING THOUGHT

People often talk about the best part of conferences being the networking and socializing. In fact, I often hear of people attending one conference in particular (name withheld) just to socialize and have given up attending the sessions because, for them, the sessions lack substance. I believe that conferences should always excel at providing worthwhile networking opportunities, but never at the expense of offering high quality sessions and high quality speakers.

I had the chance to hang out with Saul Colt and Mike McDerment of FreshBooks yesterday. They were in Ottawa to be remarkable with their current and prospective clients. It may not seem that traveling to eat a meal with people is particularly remarkable. It is. It’s just one of the many ways in which FreshBooks engages in something that Saul calls Karma Marketing.

While I learned a lot about their approach from Saul during a lunch gathering, it was the insights that Mike and Saul shared at Third Tuesday Ottawa that brought it all together. They talked about driving from Florida to Texas in a van, stopping in fourteen cities along the way to dine and engage with customers. During that trip they unwittingly connected some of their customers to work on their own projects and engage in new opportunities. They talked about following their customers’ online activities (not in a stalking kind of way) and making sure to acknowledge personal and corporate victories, and do token gestures for people having bad days (sending flowers) or pining for something Canadian (shipping mustard and Triscuits around the world). In many cases, they use the phone, noting that email is an incredibly ineffective way to communicate.

If Karma Marketing is the umbrella to the FreshBooks approach, then two powerful statements offered by Mike outline an approach to make that happen.

• “I take care of my team; my team team takes care of our customers; our customers take care of our business.“

• “Engage in extraordinary experiences everyday“. There is a great blog post by Mike here that further explains his 4E philosophy.

The FreshBooks approach of having all new hires start by answering the phones and handling customer calls is a brilliant way to ramp up new hires on customer engagement and relationships, as well become familiar with the service that FreshBooks sells. It doesn’t stop there. Each employee does their reserve period on the phones on a rotational basis — like milu’im in the Israeli army.

As the evening wrapped up and people started to disperse, Saul joined the group I was with and offered some advice he suggested will save us spending $20 a year on a new Seth Godin book. “Be remarkable”, he said.

As I walked home, I remembered the book, Creating the Service Culture, which I’ve blogged about before. The premise of the book (written in the 1980’s) is that services and products are becoming more homogeneous so companies must distinguish themselves by how they manage their customer relationships. That sounds like FreshBooks.

The first Social Media Breakfast Ottawa took place at the offices of Ramius Corporation this morning. It was a great inaugural event and attendance exceeded expectations. There always seems to be new people to meet in the Ottawa social media community.

The guest speaker was Adrian Salamunovic of DNA11.com, a company that creates custom art based on their client’s DNA — fingerprints, lip-prints, DNA samples, etc… (”From life comes art“). That means that each piece or art they create is unique to the individual who orders it.

Adrian’s talk traced DNA11’s creative yet simplistic approach to marketing and promotion that harnessed the power of social media to make inroads into mainstream media including Wired and Playboy — something he referred to as turning a spark into an inferno. In his talk he gave examples of how the fire can burn with both positive and negative results.

Simon Chen asked that I do a podcast of the event and I couldn’t resist. I thought I’d do something a bit different this time and dovetailed voices of the community with excerpts of Adrian’s speech.

For good measure, I threw in Stevie Z’s promo for Podcasters Across Borders at the end of the show. Don’t forget to register!

 

 How they started the fire [18:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Bryan Person started it all in Boston, now Simon Chen, Ryan Anderson and Rob Lane bring the franchise to Ottawa when Ramius hosts the first Social Media Breakfast Ottawa on Tuesday, June 10 beginning at 7:30am.

The event features guest speaker, Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of DNA11, a company that pioneered the creation of personalized artwork from the DNA of its customers.  Adrian will tell the story of how buzz about DNA11 spread from blogs, to magazines, to TV and mainstream media.

At the time of this post, there are seven spaces left for the event.  You can register here.

See you on Tuesday.

Sociologist Sam Ladner was direct when she opened her session on reputation management and monitoring. “We won’t talking about reputation systems”, she said. “eBay reputations will not be part of our discussion. Read Bryce Glass’ blog if want to know more. He also has a Slideshare called Designing your Reputation System“.

In fact, Dr. Ladner led an amazing session in which she explored the meaning of reputation, attributes of reputation and the impacts and contexts of brand conversations that could be reputation impacting.

Despite the response of McNeil and the amazing brand-recovery case study that is the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident of the 80’s, the company still took six days to respond. Can you imagine a six-day response time today? How would a six-day delay convert in a twenty-year span?

To setup the discussion, Dr. Ladner presented the three elements of the Looking Glass Self:

• We imagine how we appears to others
• We imagine how others judge that appearance
• We react to that imagined judgment

Consider that reputations cannot be managed. To help understand why, Dr. Ladner outlined the three key attributes of the Online Self:

• Hidden (online sources lack contextual cues)
• Digital (easily broken down, re-arranged, mashed-up and rearranged)
• Proliferating and Permanent-ish

What’s most interesting is where brand discussions are taking place and how that context affects the brand reputation and the opportunity of individuals and corporations to participate in that discussion (Forester Research and Statistics Canada):

• 48% of North Americans participate in social computing
• 30% of Americans have posted online ratings
• The average Canadian spent 35% more minutes talking on the phone in 2003 than in 1997

Dr. Ladner walked through a number of online tools and services that allow individuals and companies to monitor reputation.  There are several classes of tools available:

• Social Media analytics (Technorati, Google Trends, ePinions, etc…)
• Social Media observation tools (Neilsen Buzz Metrics, Cymfony)
• Social Media Response Tools (Umbria, TruCast)

Using examples that involved these tools, we learned of a number of studies in which included brand reputation of breakfast cereal based on health and nostalgic references, and brand reputation based on online attitudes on sustainability.  The examples were incredibly interesting and I would have been grateful for an extra hour to explore these examples in more depth.

Before leading a more interactive discussion, Dr. Ladner proposed some reputation monitoring best practices:

• Systematic (develop standard metrics, stick to them)
• Regular (measure at consistent intervals)
• Governed (assign accountability for metrics, create a task force)

We were all encouraged to use Google Labs to do our own research on reputation conversations, offering that we research Dell and Best Buy together over a period of time and look for when the Dell announcement on selling their computers at Best Buy.

We were able to wrap up with a more lighthearted discussion on the doppelganger effect.  I guess there are some advantages to having a one-of-a-kind name.

Note: this session will be available in slideshare.

Today’s second session was a conversation between Mesh organizer Michael McDerment and Garrett Camp. Garrett is a co-founder of StumbleUpon, a social sharing site bought by eBay in 2007 for $75-million.

StumbleUpon’s origins are in Calgary which makes it one of many Canadian web 2.0 success stories; stories that include Flickr and Club Penguin, both of which got their start in Vancouver. At the time of the purchase, StumbleUpon was looking for more venture capital to augment their $1.5-million in working capital.

According to Garrett, StumbleUpon is a tool that best serves visual content and websites. People can share their findings such as a site that a group of us found through StumbleUpon this morning that shows a collection of bad album covers.

eBay allows StumbledUpon to function as a startup within a large organization. This affords Garrett and the team the autonomy to self-direct their development in the best interest of the tool that they built and the spirit in which it has been embraced. It’s refreshing to hear stories about big companies buying startups and letting the founders continue with their vision.

Given my recent experiences with the Ottawa Web Weekend — which was largely about the coming together and collaboration of thirty-six strangers — I find it particularly interesting that Garrett felt he waited too long build the team out.  That’s significant when you consider the size of the eBay purchase.  His focus now is how to build the team, spread the knowledge and try to build the business to be strong in the same was as Facebook.

Garrett suggested that he’d like to explore social advertising which would target ads to individuals based on recommendations by their StumbleUpon friends. This presents a more obvious fit with eBay.

The session was dry and skewed, heavily, to venture capital and corporate purchase. The key takeaway from that discussion is that the money is in the United States.

There was a lot of comparing which Mesh sessions resonated most with those in attendance, last evening.  I was particularly impressed by the Metronauts session (Government 2.0: from community participation to co-creation) and found that there were some folks in the session that disagreed with me.  Their argument was that it was a familiar story — old news.

While Metronauts has elements of familiarity, it’s a particularly important case study and something to be excited about.  You see, a group of citizens was able to thwart a long-established public procurement process that was well underway — a process that, in many cases, presupposes the winning contractor and that suggests that the public consultation process is a charade to appear transparent.

For all of the frustrations that Metronauts may be experiencing dealing with the municipal government, Metrolinx appears engaged and committed to the open-source process despite its incovenience.  Indeed, the success is probably due mostly to the open-mindedness of the Metrolinx brass and the safe third-space in which the Metronauts have invested a lot of thought and energy — two important achievements.

Much like the corporate examples we are all familiar with, Metrolinx has and is going to be the beneficiary of great publicity and a lot of public goodwill for their legitimate collaboration in this process.  There’s a lot of trust capital to be gained and for government to be tapping into that is significant.

Metronauts teaches us that there are opportunities for citizens to engage collaboratively and productively with government no matter where the government is in its long-established processes, and we are at the beginning of an era in which the public sector needs to hire open-source/social-media marketing and communications folks to be their community evangelists.

I’m a huge fan of case studies so I’ve been looking forward to this session by Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard. This is one session with a specifically built-in audience largely of government employees, consultants to government and government relationship representatives of private sector companies (including what appeared to be a lobbyist-by-another-name).

This was the first session today in which the presenters asked each participant to introduce themselves and their work — which speaks to either the size of the crowd or the type of presenters they are.

When the Metrolinx (the greater Toronto Transportation Authority) posted an RFP for the redesign of its website, Robert Ouelette put the challenge to the Toronto blogging community: “what should the Metrolinx website look like?“. This led to the creation of Toronto TransitCamp, an event modeled after BarCamp to bring together the most passionate 1% citizens to engage with the Metrolinx and each other with the vision that the Transit Camp would not be a complaints department but a solutions playground.

The key drivers behind TransitCamp are that the current public consultation process is broken, the best ideas do not come from within anyone organization and Black Swan ideas always come from unexpected and unplanned places.

Here’s the best part — Metrolinx was invited and they came. In fact, a representative was in attendance of this session!

Metronauts was formed; a group of individuals engaged in a process that is still in its early stages. That is, they are still in phase one of a three-phase process. As such, final results were not available for this case study.

Metronauts identified three methods of gathering insights:

• Explicit: specific ideas and solutions offered by informed and engaged citizens

• Tacit: insights derived from observing the interactions and conversations of informed, engaged and enabled

• Latent: needs that are not known until they are seen for the first time

The BarCamp model was adapted for the purpose of achieving specific results. This includes an evolution to the law of two feet which permits those who are not getting anything out of a particular session to leave the session, to explicitly telling participants that if they are not getting anything out of a session that they are obliged to leave and find another session which will allow them to contribute.

Part of the process has been gathering tags that help participants to identify words that describe their TTC experience and associate elements that play into the importance of their TTC experience.

Metronauts has managed to create a safe third-space for all participants in the process. The means that the Transit Camp experience has been incredibly positive and productive and is leading to human-centered solutions that will benefit the service providers and consumers — crowdsourcing and collaboration at its best.

One of the greatest challenges is the control of communications from the government; public servants are not permitted to engage in the online dialog on behalf of the government. This can marginalize the commitment and transparency of the government in the eyes of the community. Success depends on the appointment of a community evangelist that can speak freely, with authority and without the continuous and per-engagement clearance of the legal department. Any organization that is committed to progress and remarkability needs to have its own RichardAtDell.

Note: this presentation will be on slideshare tagged mesh08.

I’ve seen Michael Geist speak on several occasions and each time, despite the overlap of the content, each presentation is engaging and fresh. (defensive clarification: There is a common thread in Michael’s presentations, which is a good thing. This presentation was loaded with new examples on a theme I have heard Michael speak about)

In today’s keynote at the Mesh conference, Mr. Geist provided a steady stream of relevant examples of sites, videos and blog posts that have been instrumental in spreading important messages and rallying people for issues in the public interest. There were also examples of the use of Twitter to rally for intervention of citizens in matters that involve local authorities, and mashups of technologies such as the use of Google Maps to geo-locate violent activities.

What makes digital advocacy effective:

1. organizing power (Here Comes Everybody)
2. online AND offline
3. mainstream media (what gets reported gets blogged, what gets blogged gets reported)
4. educate
5. bring to action
6. speed
7. new digital tools (thanks Dave Fleet)
8. localized
9. government 2.0
10. general purpose sites

In the conversation that followed, Michael defended the idea that a large online gathering (e.g. 40,000 people in the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group) is not necessarily representative of the interested population of subject matter experts and concerned citizens. Michael pointed out that any large gathering is representative of a larger group of people made up of different levels of understanding and experience. The groups are necessary to effect change.

The issues that Canadian citizens are up against are politics, not policy. Michael used the example of Canadian copyright reforms to demonstrates that, where once policy people informed and supported politicians in creating policies that would satisfy a majority of Canadians, politicians are now directing the policy people on what the policy should be and how it should be crafted based on external influences such as US government pressure. The missing ingredient seems to be public consultation, particularly with key stakeholders including the artists affected by the law.

Laws including the DMCA are based on projections of where the technology and society will go. This approach has hindered, not helped, advancements of technology and the arts. It has also created divides and distrust of governments and the key beneficiaries (such as record companies not artists or consumers, movie companies…) of the laws.

After a long and opinionated discussion about the political establishment, someone asked about the danger of online advocacy being co-opted by consumer rights instead of human rights. Michael agreed that duplicating the impact of the Fair Copyright for Canada would be difficult in any situation though there are great examples of digital advocacy. The impact is really up to the people the initiate and participate in various campaigns.

It’s hard to get people engaged. However, getting them connected in a social media community that targets a specific cause, that’s a start. There is a formula that politicians use along the lines of every single letter represents 1000 other citizens. The more people that become involved, the better chance we have as individuals to become groups that can effect change.

Mesh opened a few minutes ago with a great monologue about social media by The Voice from CBC radio’s The Current.  I would love to get a copy of that monologue!

While I had been looking forward to the keynote by Matt Mason, a visa problem has kept him from making the trip from the UK to Canada.  In his place, Michael Geist will be delivering the keynote in a few minutes.

The program is packed with great sessions which has made it difficult to choose between concurrent sessions.  I’m counting on the hallway conversation to fill in the blanks for me.   If this morning is any indication, the hallway conversation is going to be strong throughout the event.

It was great to meet Mark and Alex from Viigo and I am looking forward to using their technology on my iPhone when it’s ready.