"Fish Where the Fish Are"... Takeaways from BlogPotomac

Had a REALLY GREAT time at BlogPotomac, a Social Media Marketing conference for bloggers organized by Livingston Communications (you may have heard of their blog, the Buzz Bin, linked later in this post). Before everything gets superseded by the superhectic streams of my normal work and life, I thought I would try and write down some takeaways for you.

First things first. The awesome thing about being in a room full of bloggers and techy 2.0 enthusiasts was that everyone was Twittering (here's the Summize stream, and here's the tweme), a million pictures were taken and uploaded to Flickr while we were there, Jonny Goldstein took visual notes, the conference was streamed live by Ustream (although I heard the quality was not too good - no link as it's now off air (obviously)). Some of the speakers' presentations were instantly up on Youtube (Here's the opening speaker Lionel Menchaca of Dell), Jimmy of East Coast Blogging already has an Animoto video up, and generally there was loads of backchannel commentary which was all openly part of the experience. I think this is the way conferences should be now - with an understanding that there is a realtime social media layer of experience that will happen more and more and should be embraced.

The conference was described as an "unconference" - which is not exactly accurate, however it refreshingly had NO POWERPOINT AT ALL. Yay!! There were seven speakers, which each spoke for maybe ten or fifteen minutes then opened up the floor to questions and discussions. There was a great facilitator, Josh Hallett (who founded the first version of this conference in Orlando), who was really good at keeping the conversation going when there was a lull in questions (bloggers do generally like to hide behind their computer screens, I would say, we are not necessarily the most extroverted types!)

I'm not going to go into detail on each speaker, but I will mention a few. There was a fascinating conversation with Dan Beyers of the Washington Post, which is still clearly struggling with how to navigate between its "old media" sense of professional hierarchy and entitlement to "real" news and its buy-in to "new media" vehicles which is what its audience wants and which is taking place with or without the paper. The Post does have a blog, and as I happened to be in the middle of reading Chapter 3 ("Everyone is a Media Outlet") of Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, a good recap of how the traditional news media industry was completely caught short by the explosion of new media, I found it really interesting that they have still not figured this all out, beyond making their content "shareable and embedable"(per a comment from Helen Mosher). A great question was asked by Jared Goralnick about how local bloggers can be more directly involved in supporting our local paper and stories, when there is no way to link to our blogs in the Post blog's comments, for example. Dan didn't have a good answer. I kinda felt sorry for him, in a way, in his self-representation of the traditionalist with one foot in obsolescence - although it does not have to be that way, at all.

Another fantastic speaker was Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group. Her agency helps businesses dive into web 2.0, so she really knew what she was talking about. She said, ask yourself these questions: "1) Who do we want to talk to? (Where are they? Where are they talking to each other? What are they talking about? What kind of technology are they using?) and 2) What are your business objectives? These need to be clear. She talked about the death of the notion of the "campaign" - in terms of which people still make the mistake of working - where there is a set time frame. We are now looking at a conversation, which may, can and should take an undefined and long amount of time, not just x number of months or until the money runs out. She mentioned the 1:10:90 rule, and said that one possible metric was that 1% of your measurable web traffic was how many commenters or content creators a company should have. She was asked about Twitter, and described how an organization could use it like a "bot" to push out content only, which would not be expected to necessarily reply to questions even though it would monitor the responses, or it could have a real persona, where someone would be willing to have a conversation with those who spoke to them. Aaron Brazell of technosailor fame had the room all abuzz when he asked the question, "Twitter or Friendfeed"? but Maggie was fairly noncontroversial when she said she preferred Twitter for the moment. (Nobody really gets Friendfeed yet, apart from as an aggregator - more on that in a later post).

Here's some video of her introductory comments (skip to when she starts talking).



Jeremy Pepper spoke next; I think he was a PR guy. He said you should always ask "why?" (as in, "we want to have a blog" - "why?") Pretty obvious stuff, for this crowd. He also said you had to sell the idea of social media internally, to get buy-in first before you can engage externally. I found it interesting that he got the least number of questions from the audience. I thought if traditional PR is about crafting your corporate message then pushing out via media outlets, then clearly PR is dead. I used to work in PR - never again, I tell you. It was horrible. Moving right along...

Frank Gruber of Somewhat Frank came on stage after lunch. (My blog title credit goes to him. I plan to use that a lot!) Bad speaker, but nice eye candy (I am sure he would not mind me saying that, we're all among friends here). He was cool, anyway, because he asked about all the shiny new tools we all like to talk about. He then kindly provided a list on his blog here, so I don't need to list them. Although, Lindy and I had to laugh, because someone asked what he would do if someone gave him a pot of money to create a new tool. Ummm, honey - that's exactly what he does already. He's AOL's product development guy!! We all want to BE him. I'll tell you though, despite his discomfort, he gamely tried to answer the question by saying something vague about some photography tool he'd come up with, because he loves taking pictures. I'll tell you, if you gave me a pot of money to come up with a new tool, I'd have a whole ton of ideas. Just one I keep banging on about is a Brightkite-like GPS-enabled way to keep track of your mileage. It takes me about four hours to do a month's worth of expenses, just because I have to go and figure out what meetings I attended, then dig up addresses of places and plug them into Google Maps and remember if I was coming from the office or home and if I went home after or back to work or what. There MUST be a better way!! Anyway. I digress.

KD Paine spoke next, about social media measurement and metrics. She said, "measurement" is NOT just "monitoring". I won't say too much here because I want to talk to her more, she was an AWESOME speaker and I think if she could come and speak to ASAE that would be just what we need. Associations are desperate for knowledge of how to measure the ROI of social media. She would rock as a speaker for Great Ideas, for example (ASAE take note!) - but in the meantime, I hereby reserve a full blog post to her ideas for later.

Finally, Kami Huyse spoke about ethics. The bar opened just before her talk, so I don't think too many people paid attention at first, but she did eventually get the crowd going into a full fledged boxing match over the subject. She mentioned that WOMMA has a good code of ethics, which is boiled down to this: you must have 1) honesty of relationships, 2) honesty of identity, and 3) honestly of opinion. The subsequent arguing was about whether people stealing your content by scraping your blog was ethical or not - and I lost interest. I feel that I have a duty to myself to be honest, but I am Gen-X and I (typically for my generation) do not trust any media, whether it's "big"media or other bloggers, unless I know them personally. Scraped content still sends people back to the source, I think... Someone had a good comment that the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has a good downloadable resources on legal rights of bloggers (what constitutes "fair use", and that kind of thing).

And that was that!! We all headed out for a drink afterwards. A ton of stuff to think about. And as usual, the best takeaway was the wonderful bloggers I met for the first time, some of whom I had been following on Twitter. I'll mention four: I plan to start reading their blogs if I haven't subscribed already, and hope you enjoy them too.

Qui Diaz - @beautifulthangs on Twitter - her blog is Evange.LIST, "social media for social causes". We need to get her involved in the association space soon.
Jennifer Berk - @jcberk - Information Squid, "Better communication through technology".
Joe Loong -@joelogon - Dumb Things I have Done Lately - met him briefly but had a wicked sense of humor!
Andre Blackman - @mindofandre -Pulse and Signal - a look at the intersection of health and technology".

These are just a few of the many great people in the room and just a few of those I met and hope to see again. It was a real privilege to be part of it and I think these takeaways and more will feed my brain for quite a while yet. Can't wait for next year, and can't wait to see how far we will have come by then... and if we haven't, we will only have ourselves to blame.