 Social Networking "South by" Style
By this point, any of you that did not attend the South by Southwest Conference in Austin, TX are sick of hearing about the uber-social media geek fest. I'll admit, I was fortunate enough to go as many of you who read this blog and follow me on Twitter already know. However, I'm not here to gloat -- well, maybe a little -- but rather to relate an important lesson that many of us at the conference talked about incessantly, namely Social Networking is better when it's done online AND offline.
This may not come as a shock to you because philosophically it makes sense. What's different now though is the fact that more and more people are meeting online first via social media sites/applications like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter before they meet face to face. And we don't just "meet" online but many of us chat daily, sharing anecdotes, favorite blog posts, business ideas and much more. As a result, we get to know one another better than we know some of our neighbors or even co-workers.
Unfortunately, we have too few opportunities to connect with our online friends save for the occasional conference or local breakfast. I'm fortunate because our friend, Bryan Person, runs a monthly Social Media Breakfast series (next one is April 1) and as a result, a number of us in the Boston area get to connect regularly in person over coffee and bagels. This of course does not solve the problem of meeting with online friends who live in other parts of the country like San Francisco, Dallas, Oklahoma or Idaho (I threw that one in for you Becky/Britt.) Enter South by South West!
From the second my colleagues, Jim, Colin, Heather and I joined Gary of WineLibraryTV.com's ad hoc wine party in the lobby of the Marriott Saturday night to the last time we said goodbye to our new friends at the SXSW blog house on Tuesday, we started connecting to new/old friends that we had met on Twitter (or in the case of Rohit Bhargava, I met on a virtual MarketingProfs panel we did recently.) What helped these conversations were two things:
- We had already been talking to each other for months so we could refer back to certain experiences (like group-watching the World Series)
- We had other friends in common
Unlike any other event I've ever been to (Community 2.0 version 1.0 being the exception), I've never walked away feeling like I had connected with so many people in such a deep manner. Now I can not only e-mail them from time to time -- good in theory but poor in practices -- but I can actually talk to them regularly through their blogs, on Facebook and in particular, through Twitter.
Photos of the event on Flickr.
So now that I've waxed poetic about the power of live social networking, I'd like to touch on my five biggest highlights of the conference:
- BlogHaus - this was where all the action happened. I found out about prior to the conference through my new good friend, Chris Brogan (Chrisbrogan.com). He of course tweeted it and made us all sign up in advance through Facebook. While we chilled at BlogHaus (powered by AMD, PodTech, The Conversation Group, InternetGeekGirl), we deepened our relations with people like Chris Brogan, Scott Monty (Crayon), Laura "Pistachio" Fitton (Pistachio Consulting), John Eckman (Optaros) and Steve Garfield (Stevegarfield.com) -- all of whom we had met a the aforementioned Social Media Breakfasts.
I also met or connected with too many people to mention but here are a few that come to mind: Adele McAlear and Colleen Coplick (99directions), Roxanne Darling (Barefoot Studios), Allen Center (Center Networks), David Parmet (Marketing Begins at Home), Pete Cashmore (Mashable), ShashiB (Network Solutions), Jason Falls (Doe Anderson), Shaun King (BlogTalkRadio), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Stephanie Agresta (InternetGeekGirl), Andrew Hyde (startup weekend), Sam Lawrence (Jive), Charlene Li (Forrester), Erin Kotecki Vest (BlogHer), Tris Hussey (b5media) and of course our new best buddy, Valerie Cunningham (PodTech).
- The disaster that was the Zuckerberg keynote. This was better than you think in terms of content. I actually liked the Zuckerberg redo at Pangaea the next day with 200 people better. I've linked to my two blog posts for details.
- The "Conversations" party on Monday night sponsored by Dell and the Social Media Club at the Iron Cactus. The party itself was good but the big win was doing 15 podcasts with some of the smartest names in social media. My colleague, Jim Storer, has done a great wrap of this in his two posts:
- Conversations Part I
- Conversations Part II
- Great conversations in the hallway with people like Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (FastCompany.tv), JJ Toothman (Stanford), Melissa King and Nick Huhn (Yum), Alex Williams (Podcast Hotel), and Mike Bayer (Utterz).
- Our blogger dinner on Sunday night at Stubbs BBQ. Yes, we had to wait for an hour and a half before we got seated but the conversation pre/during dinner with Becky McCray (SmallBizSurvival), Britt Raybould (Bold-Works), Chris Brogan, Rick Calvert (Blogworld), Liz Strauss (Successful Blog), Sheila Scarborough (BootsnAll), Wendy Piersall (eMom) along with my colleagues Heather, Jim and Colin was worth it! We continued the night at the Blogger party down the street -- a great time for sure. Most impressive was Chris Brogan sending a tweet out to everyone telling them this was the party to be at -- 45 minutes later, they started pouring in! We also had great conversations (including Twitter) with Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (Church of the Customer | The Society for the Word of Mouth.) If you check out Ben's first tweet, you can see Scott's, Jim's and my fingerprints all over it. ;)
Wow! That was easy. It only took four days to write. Now I'm off to read about what everyone else learned at SXSW! Can't wait for next year. p.s. If I missed your name, it wasn't on purpose. Either comment or call me out on Twitter!
Fri, Mar 14 2008 |
Blogs
