Podcamp Philly 2010 (Day 1 Recap)

I had a fun and learning-filled day at Podcamp Philly 2010. I have found blogging about sessions of conferences (or uncoferences, in this case) a great way to cement the key thoughts I took away (check out my post from Social Fresh Charlotte). But better than that, I enjoy hearing the thoughts and insights of others. Here were some things that caught my attention today. And, whether you were at Podcamp Philly 2010 day 1 or not, I would love to see your thoughts. So please leave comments, and I can’t wait for day 2!

Session 1

The first session I attended was called “Social@Work” and it was given by Dave Young of Purple Strip Productions. He highlighted 10 reasons to implement social networking inside the organization. I can see myself in the future referring to this list as a way to build rationale for skeptical clients. Thanks for some great thoughts Dave! Here is this list:

1. Knowledge Sharing
2. Identify Experts
3. Knowledge Retention
4. Analytics
5. Trends of Interest, Activity & Dissent
6. Improve Performance of Temporary Teams
7. Identify Emerging Leaders
8. Build Trust Among Co-Workers
9. More Lines of Communication
10. Reduce Costs

Session 2

The second session I attended was a presentation by Matt Peters (@fracked) of Pandemic Labs. He spoke on ways to measure the ROI of social media efforts.

He began by outlining the four ways results are measured by Pandemic Labs. Because they can be measured and clients tend to view them as a legitimate justification of their efforts, Pandemic measures for awareness, engagement, revenue and lifetime value comparison.

The presentation had three points that I really found valuable. First, Matt spoke about how Pandemic will not undertake efforts unless they can prove to clients how it is providing measurable improvement to at least one area of the following: awareness, demand or revenue. Without the ability to show results in one of these areas, there is no reason to proceed.

He then spoke about metatags and some of the useful measures that they can provide. I am appreciative of the fact that one can now, generate and shorten a link with metatags on it all with Google.

The last thing that Matt spoke about was a very interesting topic. He touched on how some larger brands are now looking to measure what the added value in a customer being a Facebook fan is, over their lifetime. Or, said another way, how much more business they are likely to have over a lifetime from someone if they are a fan, compared to if they were not. Interesting stuff, and I am sure the math and algorithms used to do this would be way over my head.

Session 3

The third session I was able to attend today was titled “Demystifying the Momosphere.” A very informative session by Cecily Kellog (@Cecilyk)who blogs as Uppercase Woman, that looked at ways marketers and PR folks can better relate with those mom-bloggers we love to have write about our products.

She gave some unique tips on how to ensure your pitch stands a chance with a mom blogger. First, she suggested you read at least 5 posts by the blogger. An interesting suggestion was to have someone who is a parent read it. Interestingly, pitching mom bloggers seems to fall to ‘fresher’ practitioners, many of whom are not parents. By having a parent read it, the tone is more likely to be something that resonates with moms.

After this, Cecily provided a list of ways to make a pitch fail…

• Inappropriate pitch (Don’t send a Mormon a bottle of wine to review)
• Send a form letter with the wrong name on it
• Require lots of work for a “chance” to win
• Send bloggers press releases (Though there may be some exceptions)
• Insult the blogger’s beliefs

Cecily also shared some key things to remember about mom bloggers. They want to be viewed and treated as professional. Also, they want something for their time and effort. To this, I say that there are a great abundance of mom bloggers who run their blog like a business, but there are some that still treat it as a hobby. For those who run their blogs as a business I have the utmost respect and will advocate that they deserve compensation for their work.  Her last point was that when approaching a mom blogger to collaborate on a project, you have to allow and encourage her to present her own ideas on how to make the collaboration work.

Session 4

The last session of my day was Melinda Emerson’s (@SmallBizLady) very engaging talk on building a social media brand. She had lots of great tips. She encouraged people to pick a specific topic and stick with that. She rightly warned people against blogging about disparate subjects. She also counseled everyone to make sure their LinkedIN profile was at 100%. This is just a taste of some of her great advice. For a full dose, head over to her blog!

Melinda was by far the most quotable speaker from day one, and theses are my favorite quotes from her session.

1. “Be shameless.”
2. “Stay in your lane.”
3. “My blog is the soul of my brand.”
4. “You make riches in the niches”
5. “You only need 1,000 loyal followers to live the rest of you life on.”
6. “You ARE going to buy my book today, because you saw me speak.” (Full disclosure, the gentleman she said this to, was purchasing his book as I left for the day!)
7. “It is real nice to steal that kind of information”
8. ” ‘Cause I’m a typo queen, please”
9. “I’m real intolerant of when self-published authors make tons of mistakes”

So these were my thoughts from today… What were yours?