Socialmedialand

Archive for the ‘Happy Unconference’ Category

Hi there! I know I haven’t been actively blogging in quite some time. No excuse really, just got super distracted with trying to implement Thesis (which is much harder than I thought it would be) and haven’t spent much time on the actual writing side.

I hope to change that soon, as my schedule allows. But I wanted to make a note of the event I’m speaking at tonight (see details below.) I’m currently putting together some notes on what I want to talk about and it occured to me that it could be some great blog fodder so I’m committing to putting up the outline of my talk after tonight for people to reference.

Hope to see you there!

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Title: Phx Marketers Meeting
Location: Sitewire
Link out: Click here
Description: This month’s Phoenix Marketers meetup is being graciously hosted by our friends at SiteWire in Tempe.

Join us as Katie Van Domelen leads a conversation about social monitoring and social media roles and responsibilities between clients and agencies.

Katie is a Social Content Manager for SiteWire, a Social Media Marketer, a Social Media User (like, duh) and can probably teach us a thing or two about bikram yoga!

Hope to see your smiling face there at SiteWire next Thursday 9/17 at 6:30 PM. You can RSVP to our meeting on facebook here – http://bit.ly/1gMnN

SiteWire is located on Mill Ave. in downtown Tempe:

740 S. Mill Ave., Suite 210
Tempe, AZ, 85281
PH. 480.731.4884

Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2009-09-17
End Time: 20:00

After the success of Tuesday’s seminar on How to Market Your Business Through Social Media, @agencyside’s #180series is going to continue with hands on events and conferences in Scottsdale and Tucson. “Give us 180 minutes and we’ll give you a 180-degree change in your marketing results.” Can’t beat that, huh?

I’m normally behind schedule on letting everyone know about these events – but this time I’m giving you all the schedule well in advance. In fact there’s an early bird special! You can get $10 off any June event if you sign up before 6.12 and $10 off any July event if you sign up before 6.29. See the schedule of events I’ll be speaking at below. Register today to get your early bird special!

Sitewire’s sister company, Agencyside, has asked me to speak again at their upcoming seminar, The 180 Series, on Tuesday, June 9th. I will be presenting “The Tools & Technologies that Drive Your Business Socially.”  It’s a slight update on the last presentation with a few more interactive and hands on elements.

Registration is only $49 and the information is going to be highly valuable and most importantly, actionable.

If you’re interested in Agencyside’s seminar series visit Agencyside or follow @Agencyside to keep up to date.

Title: Agencyside: 180Series
Location: MADCAP Theaters
Link out: Click here
Description: Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. The business world is abuzz over social media and how to use it to impact the bottom line. But for most that have tried, it turns out to be a bust.

The reason’s pretty simple: everyone is focused only on the tools and technologies, without thinking about why. In other words, what’s the outcome you want – specifically?

In just three hours time, we’ll show you how to think about what you want, whether it’s realistic for social media to deliver, and only then the tools that can help get you there.

Grow your business by gaining insights from social media experts and advertising agency executives who think about this every day. We’ll focus on brand names and small business examples, B2C and B2B companies.
Start Time: 8:30
Date: 2009-06-09
End Time: 11:00

Sitewire’s sister company, Agencyside, has asked me to speak at their upcoming seminar on Monday, April 27th. I will be presenting “Tactics and Tools: How to implement social media strategies for your clients” along with my coworker, Dustin. I’m really excited about it- we have a pretty great deck put together with a lot of real actionable items you can take home and use.

It may be too late to sign up for this seminar, but webcasts of each session will be posted online after the fact. I’ll update you with more information on that in the next week because I think a lot of valuable content is going to come out of this event. It’s mainly geared towards marketing and PR professionals/agencies but I know my session, and likely several others, will be useful to a broader audience.

If you’re interested in Agencyside’s seminar series, another event is tentatively planned for May. Visit Agencyside or follow @Agencyside to keep up to date.

Title: @SocialMedia seminar (Agencyside)
Location: Tempe Mission Palms
Link out: Agencyside
Description: Using social media in meaningful ways for your clients and your agency

Start Date: 2009-04-27
End Date: 2009-04-27

One of the things I learned at SXSWi that really resonated with me at the time (and has stuck with me) came from Kathy Sierra’s talk on breakthroughs. It was repeated throughout the panels on community building so this is more of a summary and not a direct quote:

Customers really suck at making breakthroughs

That’s right. You heard me. Your customers’ or community members’ ideas can be sub-par.

It makes sense when you think about it. It’s the classic dichotomy between writer/editor. Individuals have great ideas, they put those ideas into some sort of form, format, place, media, product, etc. Then the editor comes by and says things like, “You should spell check this” and “You should take out this part and add more explanation here.”

Customers are the same way. They buy your product/service or join your network, like it, then think up ways it could be better. It should be blue, it should go faster, it should have more memory, it should play music, it should be made of more durable materials. That is the crucial role that they play, and they do it well. They’ll take your product and do things with it that you never thought of, and in your next version you can adapt and add to it to make it better.

But when it comes to redesigning your whole service, or coming up with a brand new product – they’re not your best resource. As a collective they tend to think inside the box and, as people, they are naturally resistant to change. If you asked a group of cell phone users years ago how they would improve the phone they might’ve suggested “Add a camera and MP3 player,” “make it come in different colors,” but they wouldn’t have come up with the iPhone. This is why Alpha and Beta releases are so popular. You can put your revolutionary idea out there and let your customers do what they do best, suggest improvements.

This is crucial when it comes to social media and crowdsourcing. Using social monitoring tools to gather insights about your product and service from your consumers is a fantastic idea. And using them to make incremental improvements is a perfect application of that information. But beyond that, it’s up to YOU to internalize those insights and use them to make the breakthroughs your company needs to get ahead and reach the next level.

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m misinterpreting something? Leave me a comment -

Photo credit: Capture Queen (Flickr)

I’m actually going to SXSW! I’ve never been and hadn’t planned on going this year either until there were a few shifts in responsibilities at work and a spot opened up for me to go. Talk about lucky.

I’ll keep you updated on it as it happens, including what events I go to and all the awesome things I’m sure I’ll learn (you’ll be able to find these posts in the ’Happy Unconference’ category – A new category I created for any conference news/updates with a nice little reference to the Happy Unbirthday tea party…)

For right now I’ve signed up for “My SXSW” which is – as you could probably tell from the name – the social network for SXSW attendees.

It’s powered by the Social Collective which specializes in conference communities. Pretty decent functionality – you can:

• Import your friends from Facebook and Twitter.
• Use a twitterlike message system
• Create a “badge,”
• Build your own schedule
• Find people you’d like to meet (search by Name, Industry, City orState)

I like that they provide a community up front like this – if I wasn’t already going with some people I know it would help me to feel more comfortable being able to get to know people before heading out there. But I wouldn’t expect anything less from SXSW.

And if My.SXSW isn’t enough to get you excited, there are all the parties and mixer invites going out on Facebook…uh, I mean all the conference event descriptions… :) 

Anyone else going or have you gone before? Any advice or suggestions you have are welcome!

PodCampAZ was this weekend at the UAT Institute in Phoenix and I have to say I’d been looking forward to this event for weeks. As a newbie in the Phoenix/Arizona marketing scene I was really excited get out there and meet new people as well as learn whatever I could from the people who have more experience in this space than me.

Let’s just say things didn’t work out quite as I expected. First of all I had technical difficulties getting there Saturday morning. I night before I dyed my hair blue for Halloween, which I recognize now was a seriously bad choice. After several “rinse and repeat”s I was finally ready to leave. Until I remembered I’d taken a taxi home the night before to be safe and still had to find a way to pick up my car (cue foreshadowing music…)

After finally getting all these issues under control I made it in time for the last two sessions of day 1. The first one I attended was Chris Pirillo’s “Cultivating Community” discussion and I couldn’t have been more impressed. I was floored by his passion and obvious love for the subject matter and the things he said about community really resonated with me. He said that community is an internal connection we’re all born with, community is already everywhere, and blogs, forums, networks, etc are all just tools that further that sense of community – they’re not the communities themselves. He also reminds us that in a community the voice should be personal – and this is something I learned myself when I was working on a Twitter campaign for a fashion event. People responded much better to me when I used personal pronouns and talked in my own voice, and frankly, I enjoyed it better myself. He explained that people are like walking Venn diagrams (an image I especially like) and it’s very likely there are other people who exist in the intersection of our own various interests – and that leads to community. This was his example:

I really like this vision of the way people define themselves and figure out who belongs in a community, it makes a simple sort of sense.

After this session I met up with @austinmiles and he introduced me to a few of his friends, including @chuckreynolds – who I already follow on Twitter but had never actually met before, so that was cool.

The next session I attended was Aaron Post’s “Kids & Their New Networks.” I read the blurb in the schedule and was very interested in the topic of how social networking affects the way kinds are being conditioned to think and the implications that has to us as marketers. I also thought it might apply to a project I’m working on right now regarding children’s television. He had some very interesting data that talked about how kids now are growing up so used to using these technologies. They don’t need to be taught how to use a desktop or how a user interface works. They don’t see a division between their real self and their online persona. They are very transparent about themselves online and they expect the same from others. They are master multitaskers and can handle multiple messages at once.

All of this was really interesting to me and I would have liked to have more discussion about these things but I was disappointed when the conversation quickly disintegrated into personal theories about parenting styles in this setting and whether or not the internet is “good” for kids. There were a few times I was offended as I was lumped into the 18-25 age range of people who are “desensitized” by the internet and several people questioned how people raised in my generation would be able to function, (I contend that I’m able to function just fine but you can judge that for yourself at the end of this post.) This seemed to miss the point in my opinion but thinking back on it, it really comes full circle into my entire premise for this blog. We are all social media users as well as social media marketers and of course listening to this kind of information would cause any parents to get distracted into how this will affect their own child. At the time I was annoyed that things got “derailed” but now I think it was a natural progession. In addition - everything I learned by listening to these parents as users will help me when I’m thinking about how my client should position themselves. Still I’d love to revisit this topic at another conference and maybe stay more focused on the research and the information and less on the parenting skills part.

Side note: Shelley Rodrigo gave a talk titled “Resident Feminist: Alice in the Wonder of Web 2.0 Technologies” earlier in the day. I wish I’d been able to attend that as it comes so close to my own analogy for what social media feels like to me and is (if you can’t tell) the theme of my blog. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch her another time.

All in all it was a successful day.

I left pretty quickly after, I wanted to get home and get some things done and maybe see my friends that night and since I planned to be back the next morning I didn’t think much of it.

Anyways, after the conference I got in my car, drove up to the next light to make a u-turn and get back to the freeway. I was looking directly into the 5pm Arizona sun and as the light turned yellow I saw that all the cars appeared far enough back and I made the turn. Bad choice. This one truck had decided to speed up and get through the light and rammed into the front right side of my car, barely avoiding pushing me back into on-coming traffic. I’m fine except a bruised foot, sore neck and shoulders and a broken car. It looked like there were more people in the other car than seats or seatbelts so a few of them had bruises from hitting their head on the seat in front or hitting against the side of the car but thank God that no one sustained any major injuries. My thoughts and prayers are still with their family as a few of them opted into checking into the hospital to make sure there were no other complications. I’m also very thankful to everyone who stopped to help and all my friends and family for their concern and help.

Long story short I wasn’t able to make it to the second half of the conference today because I was wrapped up dealing with all the paperwork and things that come along with something like this.

Already looking forward to next year though…