Social Media Seminar: Bringing It To D.C.

Last Thursday we hosted our second Social Media Seminar. We held our first seminar last month in New York City and this time decided to take it on the road by heading south to Washington, D.C., and just as we did in New York, we partnered with the good people at Clickability on the event.

The idea behind these seminars is to provide people in the trenches with insights, best practices and tips from practitioners who are themselves in the trenches. The half day seminars are chock full of case studies and informative presentations as well as what has become an extremely interactive Best Practices panel to wrap things up. Oh, and also lotsa drinks during the cocktail hour!

The impetus for heading to D.C. was that we believe that the application of social media has a natural home in the public sector. It’s now very clear that there are many opportunities for government agencies, non-profits and other public interest groups to use social media and the Internet to more effectively achieve their organization’s missions and goals around education, awareness and engagement with its constituents.

Many that attended the seminar on Thursday recognized that the possibilities are endless however also realize that there are unique challenges that the public sector faces. Much of this right now is centered on  simply grasping what social media in all its forms means to their organizations, how to craft a strategy to meet their goals, how to get buy in from superiors, training and frankly, where to even begin.

This is where we hope the seminar provided a starting point for attendees. After a lovely lunch provided by the Willard Hotel, I kicked things off with a brief introductory presentation about the State of Social Media (Alex usually does this however he was stuck at LaGuardia because the Northeast was hit by a terrible storm that day, so, apologies to everyone who was expecting him). This was followed by:

• Alan Wolk of The Toad Stool did a presentation about the basics of social media. He hit on everything from social networks to blogs and message boards to mobile.
• Mario Armstrong, who among many things is a correspondent for NPR covering technology, has his own show on Baltimore’s NPR affiliate, WEAA, and XM, spoke about how he’s using social media as a platform for increasing interest amongst high school aged students around science, technology, engineering, math and the environment. I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with some of the students from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute that are working on designing their online community site and all I have to say is wow! What an impressive group of people. (Disclosure: KickApps has partnered with Mario to provide the social media platform for the site.)
• Todd Marks of MindGrub presented a case study around Voice of America’s USAVotes2008.com. He talked about how the site fit into VoA’s mission and provided a behind the scenes peek into how his team helped VoA put the site together in a mere two weeks. (Disclosure: USAVotes2008.com is powered by KickApps.)

The Best Practices Panel delved into topics about strategy, internal buy-in, things to avoid, transparency, conversations, and much more. The panelists were:

• Sandy Carter of IBM. Sandy heads up marketing for SOA and Websphere and has done some very innovative things with social media and marketing. Her book, The New Langauge of Marketing 2.0, is a must read—has a bunch of case studies that are very helpful.
• Craig Stoltz of Stoltz Digital Strategies and author of one of my favorite blogs, Web2.Oh…Really? His observations about the seminar can be found here.
• Rebecca McMenamin of Voice of America.
• Mario Armstrong.

All in all, a good day that was full of informative and inspiring conversation about social media. Two highlights stand out for me personally:

1. Engagement between attendees, presenters and panelists. Check out Pete Erickson’s blog about some of the discussions.
2. Sandy Carter giving away a copy of her book to the person with the best question. Pete, who ‘won’ the prize handed it to the woman who he refers to in his blog as, “a woman who claimed openly to be barely web 1.0 literate asked the panel if her non-profit is even a candidate for web 2.0.”

We’re starting to plan for our 2009 seminars. Let us know where you’d like to see us bring it!