I had forgotten how crazy conferences can be! We registered to attend a bootcamp today, Communilytics: Applied Community Analytics presented by Alistair Croll of Bitcurrent and Sean Power of Watching Websites. (They wrote a book together, Complete Web Monitoring, which I plan to pick up tomorrow.) The overall gist is how to track and utilize statistics about your online community.
The session started out with them telling us we had license to Tweet (on Twitter, for those of you who don't know that term). Phil looked at me and just about rolled his eyes. (I should also mention that at check in, they had ribbons we could add to our badges, one of which said "Twitter Addict." I have not put it on my badge as I have not yet admitted I have a problem. I will probably have come out of denial by the end of the conference.)
While our bootcamp was going on, so were a few other sessions. I kept the #w2e Twitter search going on my Droid (yes, I'm loving my new Motorola Droid and the 3g network up here) so I could get updates from other sessions. To save the noise on Twitter, I took notes in my notebook and only occasionally made a tweet or retweet.
The real highlight of my day came from a lunch meeting I had pre-arranged with Scott Porad of ICanHasCheezburger.com. I was going to miss his session tomorrow to go to David Letterman, so I dropped him an email to see if there was another time I could possibly meet up. I was shocked when I had an email back so quickly, and we connected via Twitter to meet at lunch. Such a nice guy, and I had no idea was also behind FailBlog.com (as well as 30 other sites). Scott gave me a package of ICanHasCheezburger buttons, and I put one on my lanyard (very cute). It's amazing how much you could learn about a person in 30 minutes. Scott has never been to Georgia (hadn't even heard of Paula Deen), and I have never been to Seattle. We joked about the little quirks that make our hometowns special, and he shared with me how he came to be part of ICanHasCheezburger (oh, check out the newest one, FailDogs.com).
Lunch came and went too fast. Scott was incredibly gracious and a lot of fun to chat with. I went back to my afternoon session, took some more notes, then came back to the hotel. After a nice, long, hot shower, I'm about ready to head out to the Ignite New York event this evening. I'm so glad it is only a couple blocks away; I have developed a small fear of cabs in the last 24 hours.
So, for those of you not attending, here's a few highlights from my 14 pages of notes:
There is no such thing as a social media marketer - communities are a medium.
Companies doing well are adaptive to their audience.
The US is 8th in social networking (Jamaica is #1, and I think it is actually my parents and their friends sending photos when they go down to party... I mean vacation.)
Online marketing made advertising accountable - community marketing builds trust.
Caring about your online community encourages self-support thus saving businesses lots of $ - cost of using an online community for support is $0.24 per instance vs. nearly $4 of using the phone.
It's ok to retweet and repeat your items 3 to 4 times per day.
Keep a search on Twitter of #yourcompanyname #fail.
The best time of day to tweet is 4:01 pm any time zone.
Facebook will overtake Google in unique visitors in the next five months.
Make lots of mistakes and learn from them.
Being talked about is nothing; being remembered is everything.
Books to pick up:
Complete Web Monitoring
Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Online Tools to Use:
SpyFu
WatchingWebsites.com
Rollyo.com
TweetDeck
Facebook Lexicon
Twitalyzer
SiteVolume
Socialistics
Trendrr.com
Compete.com
Kissmetrics
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