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Event Review: BlogPotomac 2

Friday was the second BlogPotomac conference, held at the State Theatre in Falls Church, VA. Since it was exhaustively tweeted (organizer Geoff Livingston notes that Friday saw about 3,300 posts that used the hashtag #blogpotomac), photographed, liveblogged, recapped, folded, spindled and mutilated, I will just share a few thoughts:

* I think this is the first social media event that I’ve attended where the event hashtag (#blogpotomac) became a Twitter trending topic (at least, since trending topics were added to the Twitter.com main page at the end of April.)

Attendees displayed a perverse pride at this fact, as well as an artificial sense of competition with the hashtag #beatlesporn (a Twitter meme involving turning any Beatles song title into a porn movie title), despite the fact that it simply means that a few dozen people are posting simultaneously to capture an identical moment (usually a speaker’s quote).

It was also my first experience personally monitoring a hashtag stream that attracted the attention of spammers, and thus started to get polluted by Twitter hashtag spam.

* While I do look a little askance at the phenomena of lots of people posting the exact same tweets about the exact same thing (see this Gizmodo article for a variation involving digital cameras), all that redundancy in crowdsourced note-taking does have its uses:

- Attendees can pay attention and free-ride off of the note-taking twitterers’ work

- Note-takers have a safety net in case they miss something

- Speakers can easily see which words and concepts grab people’s attention (at least from a soundbite-y perspective)

* Recurring themes:

- Blogging: In case of emergency, break glass: In response to a question / statement that “[corporate] blogs are dying a bit every day” (in the face of Twitter and other tools), Shel Holtz noted that while every organization should use the right tool for the job, each should have at least one blog (whether it’s a customer service blog, corporate group blog, CEO blog, etc), so that there’s a viable platform in case the organization need a rapid response from an authoritative, archived location. It’s a sentiment I first heard expressed by Steve Rubel back in 2006 (as corporate blogging was reaching peak hype), and it still applies even in an era of Twitter ascendancy.

- Hashtags: Shireen Mitchell, a prolific (even chronic) hashtag user, addressed the roles of hashtags, in both making communities more coherent to insiders (by helping to self-organize conversations), as well as making them more accessible to outsiders (that is, once you can decode hashtags that are often space-constrained to the point of arcana.)

- Crisis as Danger / Opportunity: Although I agree with the sentiment, I deducted a few cliche points from Ford’s Scott Monty for using this expression of dubious provenance — I group it with “teachable moments” and “making lemons from lemonade.”

However, I did like his points, including his notes on a mobilized, engaged community as both your early-warning system and “digital armor” for attacks, as well as his reality check for companies uneasy with employees using blogs and social media: Do the lawyers vet every e-mail and phone call that their corporate communicators send out? In an age where every e-mail or phone call can be published (well, wiretap laws notwithstanding), a lot of this discomfort is simply unfamiliarity with the context of the tools.

I add in this decidedly non-Far Eastern wisdom: “You gotta be in it to win it.” (The old motto of the New York Lotto.)

- Personal Branding: Yet again, personal branding was kind of trainwreck-y, mostly because you can never get people to agree on just what it is they’re talking about. Amber Naslund took issue with the idea of personal branding as a shortcut to building a real reputation; Aaron Brazell framed it in the context of “confidence vs. cockiness.”

In the context of personal brands coexisting with corporate brands, I do think you can have it both ways — people can use the company’s authority to boost their visibility, while companies can increase their humanity. As long as each has a succession plan (Scott Monty’s term), everyone benefits.

- Customer Service: Shashi mentioned the notion of customer service being the purest form of marketing, which tied in with other speakers’ notions of getting more employee voices to communicate. Again, to tie it all off, getting more employees to participate in social media increases positive contacts with customers, reduces dependence on any one social media communicator, and helps break down silos. So do it.

Other than that, Geoff dropped a small bombshell in announcing that the third BlogPotomac (scheduled for October) would mark his final involvement (not wanting to be “the guy who’s a community leader, but whose kids are stealing”)

In summary, it was another good event. To some degree, as with any blogging / social media confab, there’s a degree of preaching to the converted (especially as attendees are more familiar with the tools and concepts), though that’s where the community-building aspect comes into play.

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