360DigitalInfluence

Spending the weekend at the Blogworld Expo was an enlighteningly thorough look at the world of social media that few other events offer. Unlike many other social media events which focus narrowly on one sector of the landscape (such as marketing blogs or mommy blogs), at Blogworld - you had people who were writing just about every kind of blog you could imagine participating. At the trade show, you had the Godblogging booth right next to the “Milblogging” (Military Blogging) booth (a particularly ironic combination if you think about it). The speaking tracks at the event were similarly diverse, with more than 50 seminars, panel discussions and keynotes. I was fortunate enough to be on a panel on the first day about social media success stories with speakers from Intel (a client), HP and Cisco (an Ogilvy client), and also moderating a keynote discussion on the second day with bestselling author of The Four Hour Workweek Tim Ferriss and artist and musician Mike Shinoda from the band Linkin Park.

In the social media success story panel, I shared some metrics and thoughts about our campaigns for Lenovo (that Kaitlyn just posted about) and a program we did for the Ford Taurus about a year ago. I also talked about some lessons I learned from running my own Facebook group for my book, Personality Not Included. Here are some of the visuals I used:

The keynote discussion with Tim and Mike was a lot of fun as well, despite our tragic timeslot of 9am on a Sunday morning in Vegas. Even with the early hour, we had a full room - a testement I think to bloggers interest in hearing about Tim’s success with his book, and hearing a real life bonafied rock star. Our conversation turned alternatively to Tim’s analytical personality and how he used Google Adwords to test title and subtitle combinations on his book before deciding on the title, and Mike’s story of the naming of Linkin Park and how the spelling of it was inspired mainly by the fact that they could get the domain name www.linkin.com when they named the band and felt that domain would be important to have.

What are some key lessons I took from the panels and the show as a whole? Here are a few:

1. Blogging is a far more diverse activity touching so many more types of people and interests than most of us realize.
2. Most bloggers are willing to share the most important lessons they’ve learned freely and generously with others.
3. Using Twitter actively at an event like this was almost like speaking English … if you didn’t do it, you were missing a huge part of the event.
4. Brands executing social media well (like Intel, Lenovo, HP and Cisco) are finding smart ways to measure their success, prove the value internally and even start to share results publicly.
5. There are many bloggers that marketing and PR people are completely ignoring, and others that are chased too often and badly. The trick is to know which is which.
6. In the virtual world we all live in, actually meeting in person, shaking hands and sharing a beer still matters to making a virtual relationship actually feel real.