By Sree Sreenivasan
DNAinfo Contributing Columnist
Columbia Journalism School’s newly-expanded Continuing Education division recently hosted Social Media Weekend, a conference that brought in people from as far away as California, Oregon and Florida (and one person from Dubai). Here are several things I learned putting the weekend together:
1. There's a lot of demand for ways to figure out social media. More than 400 people attended various parts of the conference, which combined a series of panels and workshops with one-on-one coaching we called Social Media Doctors. The audience was filled with folks with all kinds of levels of experience: newbies and skeptics (though these skeptics paid up to $150 to test their skepticism); those with intermediate levels of knowledge; and those with social-media-something in their titles. It tells you something about how complicated and ever-changing social media is that all these folks came hungry to learn, share, collaborate.
2. People are incredibly generous. I decided to test the limits of social media to pull this conference together. I announced the event on March 4 with just three rooms reserved at Columbia. No plans, no staff, no speakers — nothing but the belief that social media can make this happen. And I learned how generous people who use and believe social media are. A core group of a dozen folks stepped up as volunteers to do all the work, from booking speakers to finding sponsors to coordinating the logistics. Using a variety of new and old tools (more on that below) to supplement and harness all this energy, we were able to set up a successful conference. Next time, I won’t be so foolhardy, but I do know I can count on the incredible generosity of social-media believers.
3. Facebook is serious about working with journalists. When Vadim Lavrusik (@lavrusik, a former student of mine) was recently hired as Facebook’s first Journalist Program Manager, I knew they wanted to work more closely with journalists, trying to help them make better use of Facebook. But it wasn’t until Lavrusik’s Saturday evening keynote presentation that I learned the full extent to which Facebook is working with journalists and what it can do for them. See his presentation, "Facebook & Social Journalism," using a cooler-than-Powerpoint service called Prezi, http://bit.ly/fbjournalism. He had hinted about some of these ideas in an in-depth post at Nieman Lab, "How Journalists Can Make Use of Facebook Pages."
4. We are #NotAudience. NPR’s Andy Carvin (@acarvin), who opened the conference, made the point that he doesn’t like to think of readers/listerners/viewers as just "the audience" — but as people who are like to have lots to contribute and share. In keeping with that spirit, instead of having a closing keynote session, we used the last hour of the conference to have attendees share tips, advice, ideas publicly. They did that by a pass-around mic and by posting the tips at http://bit.ly/smwknd2011.
5. There are several cool new services for conference organizers. Here are some of the tools and services we used to put together the conference:
• FreeConferenceCall.com: Exactly what it sounds like — free conference calls for upto 96 people at a time. There's no catch (I believe it works by capitalizing on some loophole/incentives in long-distance telecom access). We used it to set up dozens of conference alls.
• WordPress.com: This free service allowed a group of us to quickly setup and run the conference website: http://socmediaweekend.wordpress.com, proving again that the URL isn’t as important as the content on it. That is, we didn’t bother buying a dot-com vanity URL for the conference.
• Google Docs: This free Word and Excel alternative is how the dozen of us worked to keep track of everything from panelists to volunteers. Because it's cloud-based, we were able to make sure we were always using the latest version of the documents.
• Eventbrite: I used this popular ticketing service for the first time. It's much more sophisticated than I had imagined, with several useful features, including a variety of discount codes, easy attendee check-ins and timely and customizable ticketing reports. No wonder they've processed more than 30 million tickets overall, despite charging a fee. In case you are curious, here's how that fee breaks down: 2.5 percent plus $.99 per ticket, plus credit card processing fee of 3 percent of ticket value (or if your attendees use PayPal, 2.9 percent of ticket value + $.30 per ticket). For our maximum ticket price of $150, that meant Eventbrite collected $9.24 on each of those tickets (the maximum they collect is $9.95).
• OfferPop: I learned about Offerpop, which allows you to create incentives for people to share your annoucements on Twitter and Facebook. For example, we created a campaign that promised to release a 15 percent discount code if 150 people retweeted our announcement; we also gave away a free pass to encourage people to tweet. You can see the descriptions here — http://offerpop.com/columbiajourn/7605 and here — http://offerpop.com/columbiajourn/9797.
• LinkedIn Groups: To keep the conversation going after the conference, we created a free closed LinkedIn Group for the attendees to connect for weeks and months to come.
• Posterous: We used this free service to create a real-time crowd-sourced photo and resource gallery, where you can see pictures, documents and more, at http://bit.ly/smwknd2011. You can also use Google Realtime to travel back to the weekend of May 13-15 to see the #smwknd tweets from the conference (at one point, we were the #2 trending item in NYC, ahead even of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn).
By the way, the 40+ speakers of the conference might make for good additions to your Twitter feed. You can see them in this list created by social-media consultant Eliza Cooper (@ElizaIn140): http://twitter.com/#!/Elizain140/social-media-weekend/members
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Every week, DNAinfo contributing editor Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia journalism professor, shares his observations about the changing media landscape.