Deb's SM Survey:

An incredible organizing team made Podcamp Boston 3 a huge success, and they deserve a lot of credit.  Thank you all!

Chris Penn and Chris Brogan are of course personal heroes of mine, and as the “faces” of Podcamp they have done so much to make this type of event friendly, accessible and productive.

The questions they asked at the end were:  What did you learn?  What will you do?  Now?

Their questions resonate extraordinarily well with Joseph Campbell’s advice to “follow your bliss.”  And I intend to.

I learned:

•     The importance of humor and a compelling story from Stever Robbins (who is a great storyteller himself).
•     That I could strike up conversations with people sitting next to me over and over again and enjoy the experience.
•     That social media has to “earn” the viewers’ attention, a challenge for marketers and messengers of all types.
•     David Meerman Scott is a very nice guy.
•     That community can’t be just online, but must extend to physical spaces.
•     Companies think they are losing control, but they are really losing the perception the had control.  In fact, collaborating and listening to customers can create better control than they ever had.
•     That the bigger the camera you have, the more likely you’ll be thought of as “press”
•     Educating your advocates on your message is important; they will make it their own.
•     We want a “world wide rave”
•     SWOT
•     Ask for what you want.
•     Be yourself, be human, be honest, work hard, give back.  Do what you love.
•     Youth have incredible expectations put on them, but the tools they use aren’t valued.
•     List blog posts are very popular.

What I will do?

• Participate more
• Listen more
• Explore and play with more multi-media
• Keep up the connections and friendships I’ve made
• Have fun doing it!
• Hone my skills.

Now:
Check out my version of a social media resume and let me know what you think.

I promise I will write about Podcamp 3 this week: the great people I met, the great information I got, the new friends I made and the ideas I’m still pondering.  But while I’m still synthesizing my thoughts, here’s a photo from the courtyard at the beautiful building at Harvard Medical School where we gathered together.

Text and photo licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Tuesday night was the 18th WebInnovators Group  and as always it was great to mingle with a huge number of smart, entrepreneurial people.  The local social media gang was also out in force, checking out the ideas and products of local start-ups.

When I’d looked at Zeer the night before, I wasn’t impressed with the user reviews of junk food on the front page.  But Michael Putnam gave a great demo and really showed off the impressive features of this online food community, including the nutritional information for 100,000 products and the usefulness of the site for those with food allergies.  The ability to port your Zeer shopping list to a cell phone is also very handy.  Zeer won the audience text-in award, so they obviously won over the crowd as well.  I do agree with a questioner who didn’t get the chance for an answer: a feature that would tell you where to find the products will be very helpful.  Hopefully it’s coming in the future.

I’m going to give Webnotes a whirl for some vacation planning.  There are other web site annotation and organizing tools out there, but I liked the fact that you could share your annotations with people who don’t have Webnotes installed.  There’s also the flexibility of a web-based interface if you don’t – or can’t – install the toolbar.

Third of the main dish presentations were my friends at Totspot, an online baby book where parents can create a profile for their baby, post content and track their child’s growth.  They’ve made a lot of progress on the site; it looks easy to use and friendly which is important for harried new parents.  I was glad to see Adam and Michael up there demonstrating their very nice site.

The “side dish” companies didn’t get a chance to present, and I didn’t get a chance to visit all their tables in the crowded room, but check out the list on the Web Innovators Group site for links to their sites.

The next WebInno will be September 15, 2008.  See you there.