Paul's Web Space 2.1

BlogPotomac - June 13, 2008

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending BlogPotomac at the State Theater in Falls Church, VA, hosted by Geoff Livingston and Debbie Weil. I thought it was a great (un)conference, filled with interesting talks, lively Q&A, and great networking opportunities. On her blog, Debbie recapped the event, linking to varied social media coverage; she also highlighted two of my favorite talks (but all the presentations were interesting).

Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post, recently spearheaded the launch of the WashBiz blog. He spoke about local business blogging at a newspaper, and how social media is affecting the Post and the newspaper business in general. (Read the preconference interview with Dan.) Then Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, one of the world's largest PR agencies helping business navigate the world of Web 2.0, spoke about the impact of social media on traditional PR.

Frank Gruber, gave the post-lunch keynote talk. Frank is principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite, and spoke about social media efforts underway at AOL. He then led a lively discussion on "Bright, Shiny Objects" — his favorite social media tools, ultimately a fairly comprehensive list of the most interesting and useful social tools available today.



KD Paine is author of "Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success" and is the publisher of KDPaine's Measurement Blog and The Measurement Standard. She presented a methodology of measuring engagement in social media, and later sent me numerous presentations and links, most of which are catalogued at her company web site, Measures of Success. In an interview conducted by conference co-chair Debbie Weil, Katie states that measuring engagement goes beyond counting clicks or visits, but rather should seek to determine the quality of the interaction.



Kami Huyse closed BlogPotomac by leading an interesting discussion of ethics in PR and marketing; she posed hypothetical cases involving creating fake campaigns, and discussed a real fake campaign by Coach, astroturf (fake grassroots political movements conducted by lobbyists and trade associations), and even mentioned The War of the Worlds (different media perhaps, but many of the same issues). They opened the State Theater bar for this last speaker, which may have enlivened the conversation.

I also met up with several people I know from the local social media marketing scene; for the first time in person: Chris Abraham, George Brett, Suki Fuller and Helen Mosher. Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda was among a raft of Flickr shutterbugs, Shireen Mitchell, and Jill Foster bent my ear about the BlogHer conference and blogging the Democratic National Convention; Jill also captured many attendees using Utterz.

Labels: blogging, blogpotomac08, marketing, measurement, socialmedia

   Link: http://www.blogpotomac.com/

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