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.

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!

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.

Given my involvement in reBookMe.com, I decided to hear the CEOs Julia Johnston (mEgo), Leah Culver (Pownce) and Ryan Carson (DropSend) tell their stories in a discussion led by Mike McDerment.

Conversations that are based on stories are incredibly engaging. In that respect, this panel was strong. More importantly, they engaged with each other. They were energetic and dynamic in a way that no other panel or session has been so far.

Ryan waxed poetic on various topics throughout the session. In particular, he offered some interesting sound bites including marketing a web app is a full-time job, the hardest thing for an entrepreneur is focusing on one thing, don’t hire friends and don’t take money if you don’t to.

Julia joked that her hope is to sell out to Google. In the meantime, unique opportunities such as a global promotion with Adidas, strong angel investment and revenue through banner ads keeps the company financially strong.

Leah, who was surprisingly quiet most of the time and burst with excitement at others, signed with relief when she announced that Pownce is about one-year-old and things are much easier now than they were when the team first started out — it’s trying on your mental health.

Each company monitors uninstalls and departures and depends on their community managers to follow up on departures. Clearly, they all take this role very seriously.  Ryan also offered that entrepreneurs would be wise to read all customer feedback.

Ryan was a standout when I asked for each panelist to give a 15-second Purple Cow pitch of their company and products. Even though he didn’t detail why I’d want to use his product, it took him no time at all to describe a team and company culture that would be the envy of anyone.  Julia took about a minute to itemize the features of a great sounding service and Leah struggled to summarize Pownce as being remarkable.

Being remarkable is key to the success of a startup.  The question becomes how do you define success in relation to the rest of the web — can you co-exist with your competitors or do you stand out?

This panel was very solid, entertaining and loaded with valuable information.  I can’t help but feel that each could have spoken at depth for more than an hour.   This was definitely a standout session.

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.

Ahh… a workshop on creating content that people want to consume. This one was led by the MGImedia team (makers of CommandN.tv) including Amber MacArthur, Jeff MacArthur (yes, Amber’s brother) and Chris Dick.

I’m going to start off with two counterpoints so I can get them out of the way.

Why is it that so many people feel compelled to push making revenue directly from the production around web-based content? Specifically, this clunky word monetize — even worse, monetization. I have yet to attend a conference or session that specifically promotes the idea of producing and distributing content to build and strengthen a personal or corporate brand. I’ve decided to leave the discussion of how to monetize your content out of my post.

While content is extremely important, I disagree that content is king. Newcomers are often indoctrinated into the concept of content is king at the expense of context and delivery. While it is true that absence of content is a killer (Whitney Hoffman has dubbed content-free speech as oral kegels), strong content without relevant context and accessible delivery is going to be victim to the ’skip’ button. Scott did acknowledge in his talk that bad video will derail good content.  Jeff brought up a great point with respect to content and frequency — there should be a direct correlation between the strength of your content and the frequency of your production schedule.

Okay… that’s out of the way, now.

This session was full of great takeaways:

• The equation E² = education x entertainment.

• Engage your audience.

• Lighting will make a huge difference in your video. Use a bounce board to reflect light on your subject. The larger the board, the softer and more natural the light.

• Use a tripod to ensure a steady shot. For hand held use, zoom out and get close to your subject to avoid magnification of the shake.

• Every image you use should tell a story. Use the rule-0f-thirds to make your composition more interesting.

• Attention spans are short and YouTube imposes a ten-minute limit on all videos.

• Serve a need; fill a niche.

• Stick to a production schedule.

• Make sure your camera has connections for an external mic (1/8″ or XLR).

• Every camera has its strengths and weaknesses.  Any brand will do.  Prosumer cameras have great default settings to get started.

• A lot of what you will do will be sweat equity.

Amber, Jeff and Chris were able to draw on a lot of experience and creative collaboration for producing interesting content. This audio guy is ready to fire up the video engine and start experimenting.

Note: the presentation will be available on mgimedia.ca.

Mesh represents the first time I’ve truly ‘live blogged’ an event.  I’ve learned a few very interesting things in the process.

• It’s a great way to take notes and kick off a conversation

• When you record your thoughts in a stream-of-conscious method, you can sometimes miscommunicate or forget to review some of your initial thoughts that have evolved

The opening paragraph of my blog on Michael Geist’s session (Michael Geist: Digital advocacy is the new normal) is one of those paragraphs that needed to be revisited.  Michael’s session was loaded with new examples of digital advocacy in many disciplines, and featured a great list of pointers for successful digital advocacy.  What I had meant by overlap of content is that there is a common thread in Michael’s presentations — which is a good thing if you’re presenting on a common theme.

Michael, I owe you a beer.

Amber MacArthur led a talk about the proliferation of video content on the web called Video is Everywhere. The panelists introduced themselves and their roles within their organizations as follows:

• Dina Kaplan (blip.tv): original episodic content on the web and matching of content with revenue opportunities

• Andre Gaulin (CTV): tasked with bringing online social media craziness to television for CTV

• Guinevere Orvis (CBC): mobile and online strategy production; putting behind the scenes video added value content that doesn’t appear on television online

This panel featured a classic display of the perceived personality stereotypes.

Dina represented the excited and passionate, over-caffinated envangelist of a grassroots community whose passion to create great content is increasingly obscured by the ambition to convert user-generated content into independent wealth. Dina’s near message-track focus was on maximizing revenue opportunities by packing as much advertising into any available corner of a video clip. She also really liked every question (’That’s a great question”, “It’s a really interesting question”…).

In contrast, Andre explained in his calm demeanor how CTV is working with various production companies to bring terrestrial content to the web and web content to our televisions. When posed with the challenge of explaining why some US content is not available in Canada, he spoke at a high level explaining that rights and licensing is an extremely complicated legal are which involves different production houses with different requirements and licensing restrictions.

Guinevere summed up the session’s unique qualities  by eloquently pointing out that the three panelists represent three different approaches that won’t likely converge into a single model, ever. Where CTV is pursuing unique ways of cross-pollinating content from various media, CBC is on the cutting edge of exploiting new technologies to inspire custom content creation and distribution. Among their innovative initiatives (for a public broadcaster) is the distribution of Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister using Bittorrent.

Say what you will about the dinosaurs of broadcast media, their primary interest remains the creation and distribution of quality content using innovative and accessible technologies.  They understand the competitive nature of content creation and consumption. Meanwhile, the grassroots are giddy about the idea making a buck. (note: Dave Fleet suggests that a buck might be more than they will actually make)