SoCon09 – Social Media Unconference
This weekend I attended a social media unconference near Atlanta called SoCon, hosted at Kennesaw State University.
What’s an unconference?
An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. The term is primarily used in the geek community.
The conference kicked off Friday night with a dinner at Maggiano’s where I hosted a table on Twitter. Half of my company at the table had a good bit of Twitter experience (Thomas Strickland, Information Architect from UPS, Eli Wendkos, Product Manager of Social Media and Messaging from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and tech blogger, Matt Smith), a couple people had recently joined Twitter but most knew very little about it. The conversation went back and forth between how to communicate over Twitter, what tools we used, and how addictive it is. One participant kept asking me how they could charge their clients to run Twitter profiles on their behalf but had no first-hand experience whatsoever in the medium.
A few thoughts immediately came to mind:
Are you only interested in using Twitter if there is a direct monetary benefit?
Why do you want to communicate on their behalf?
Do you crash parties often?
It is essential to have a plan before choosing any medium of social media to engage with. Why this site or tool? How will I communicate on it? What do I hope to achieve from this? How will my choices affect my goals? Once you have a rough plan of action, join in and test the waters.
Listen before speaking. I used a party analogy at the table to describe how important this is. When you walk into a party, you first look around. Who is here? Any familiar faces? Where is the bathroom? Where do I grab a beverage or food? The answers to all of these questions influence and potentially dictate your next actions. If they don’t, sorry to break it to you, but you’re “that guy” at the party. These social behaviors work the exact same way online. You need, at the very least, an idea of who your audience and company are before you begin communicating or entering a new environment. Conversations online, especially in briefer forms like Twitter, should be treated the same way you handle your offline conversations.
In response to monetizing Twitter, I encourage anyone interested in pursuing these types of options to first and foremost follow the path I outlined above. You must be comfortable and aware in any environment, online or offline, in order to have any basis in which you can develop a strategy for revenue.
The conference continued on Saturday on KSU’s campus where I hosted the Social Media For Social Change discussion in an afternoon breakout session. I was approached to lead this session due to my work with Blog For Food and Atlantans Together Against Crime (ATAC).
Social media can offer a very efficient way of using the tools you already have or can adopt for no cost beyond manpower to help enable widespread communication and conversations. The group in attendance was of wide variety — some faces included Laura Bellinger, Social Media Coordinator for Care, Tirza Hollenhorst, President of if People and Stephen Rosenberg, a University of Georgia MBA student and founder of the Terry Entrepreneur blog (moonlighting as a guest blogger for TechDrawl). The discussion jumped frequently, discussing questions such as how to find your audience, language and limitations, tools and measurement, and (cough) how to monetize efforts.
For those who attended my session, the web-based Twitter client I mentioned was Hootsuite. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and track your URL click-throughs in a simple web interface. Hootsuite also offers a browser bookmark for easy tweeting without interrupting your flow of work.
After my breakout session, I dropped into two breakout sessions: Amber Rhea‘s session on “Online Etiquette: How To Balance Your Personal and Professional Image Online” where there was much talk of whether others’ personal perspective influences your professional image, related to the content and tone that you feed into your online communication; the second session was Chad Israel, Director of Social Media at Engauge, leading the discussion on “Planning For Tomorrow: What’s Next With Social Media.” The conversation when I entered was again on the topic of monetization. All of the talk in the room was invoking big box approaches to monetizing social networks without considering interruption of conversation or flow.
This reminded me of a few points that were made at Social Media Club Atlanta‘s December meeting — the ever-popular Twitter took the floor and there were many adamant voices against joining an ad network that would tweet advertisements in your stream as though they are you. These voices stated they would immediately unfollow a user who participated in these types of practices. I informed the room that I participated in one of these services to test what sort of responses I would receive from my followers and how aligned the content from the ad network would be with my usual Twitter content. 95% of the room was following me on Twitter and all except one were completely unaware of the handful of posts this ad network had made in my stream. In the process, I earned almost $18.00 off of five tweets, that were on the front page of my Twitter profile for less than a day each. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered whenever we discuss options for monetizing a social network including but not limited to content, tone, visibility, tracking, and image.
The conference wrapped up with mingling at Mellow Mushroom Pizza across the street from the University. Over the course of the weekend, I met many people who were very interested in adopting and integrating social media into more of their work and lives and a fantastic mix of familiar faces. I would love to see more social media focused events in the Southeast and perhaps the next one in Atlanta! Great meeting you all.
Tags: Conference, Social Change, Social Media, Twitter
