2008.06.18

An early morning analysis of three social media conferences

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.

2008.05.22

For the record…

Thank you to everyone for commenting on my site, sending me emails and Twitter messages, and stopping me in the hallways at Mesh to talk about and support my coverage of the conference.  I didn’t expect this kind of response.

Despite all of that, I’ve learned my lesson.  I will again never live-blog a conference!

2008.05.22

Reputation management and monitoring

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:

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.

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