Camping out to kick off Social Media Week in San Francisco
February 1st, 2010 by Ken Yeung
Today marks the beginning of Social Media Week around the world. Social media enthusiasts gather in Berlin, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Toronto and here in San Francisco. To kick off the week, Chris Heuer & Kristie Wells of Social Media Club organized the Social Media Camp in the Presidio. Designed to be both a conference and an unconference, today’s event centered around helping people understand social media. Presenters offered much more than a “101″ view on social media and gave lively and informative discussions on things like how you can measure your return on investment, creating a social media business, understanding the synaptic web, professional storytelling and a panel that addresses the reality of the real-time web.
If you’ve never been to an unconference before, the standard model is that at the beginning, the attendees submit panels that they are interested in participating in, typically as a speaker/panelist. Once voted on, the ones the majority find interesting are placed into different times. Essentially the agenda isn’t set until that actual day so participants will be able to have a thorough and customized plan for the day.
The Social Media Camp opened with three great keynotes. The first one was by Echo founder Khris Loux who talked about the synaptic web and how the depth of connections was a powerful mechanism designed to continuously bring important information to our attention. After that, Ribbits/BT’s Vice President of Web Services, Kevin Marks, took the stage to promote the chief communication officer before Cathy Brook’s thought-provoking keynote on personal storytelling and why the hell we are really matters.
Afterwards, the agenda went into full swing with breakout “camp” sessions and more panels that helped educate and influence the way people used social media. According to the organizers, the hope was that the attendees would enjoy hearing from leading voices in social media and make some connections with people of different backgrounds.
Even our very own Jeremy Toeman took part in helping to educate folks at Social Media Camp. During the last panel, he teamed up with Collecta co-founder Brian Zisk and ReadWriteWeb’s community manager & blogger/reporter Jolie O’Dell to wage battle on the reality of the real-time web. It was a lively debate on how people how people have & are responding to customers almost immediately and even presented some great takeaways.
When all was said and done, the attendees left hearing from these “thought leaders” on a wide arrange of topics. It wasn’t about how to use Twitter or what benefit you could get from Facebook fan pages or anything elementary. The Social Media Camp helped teach people how to communicate using social media with an emphasis on listening and customer service. It was all about understanding the fundamentals of social media and not about transparency, authenticity, credibility or any other buzz word imagined.
So for the opening day of Social Media Week, I’d say it was a good one. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing more in the next few days.
