*SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A TREND*- it’s a fundamental change in the way companies reach their audiences.
Overview of social media landscape – what tools are out there.
Blogs – lots out there, becoming mainstream news (Huffington Post); case study about the Direct2Dell site that came directly from a blog post that coined the term “dell hell” and was picked up within 2 days by NY Times and Business Week.
Microblog – Twitter has 4.5 Million users; uses of Twitter: live discussion, reinforce your brand, promote content, speed linking, content syndication (hi everyone who is reading this because I tweeted my new blog post!!). Case study: @comcastcares – search for Comcast in Twitter, respond to complaints, become one of the most effective customer service campaigns in social media.
Social Network Facebook – 120+ Million users, Facebook groups, applications and photo sharing. Case study – Barack Obama – 6.8 Million supporters (John McCain, 518,000 supporters) in Facebook, 2.5 M in Twitter with 392 updates, 179,000 subscribers in YouTube and a social site of his own at barackobama.com
YouTube 1 billion video clips shared every day; useful for marketing. Case study: Cadbury’s Gorilla Ads
Flickr (photo sharing), Delicious (bookmarking), Digg (social relevancy), Amazon.com (collaborative filtering & recommendations)
Social Listening
Where? Technorati, Google Blog Search, Twitter, Google Alerts – very important to hear what folks are saying about you.
Crowdsourcing – Case study: Project Dogfood – built a targeted, effective event through direct collaboration with the audience. Case study: Netflix prize – 1M to anyone who can improve their recommendations by 10% – crowdsourced programming…
LISTEN. ENGAGE. MEASURE.
Why social media campaigns fail – no strategy, poor listening, unreliable content, lack of metrics for success.
Social Media Stragegy – define target audience & get in-depth understanding of their problems & questions, become a trusted source of info, build an online presence with relevant content, make it easy to transition the client from learning from you to buying from you.
“you don’t need a million customers, you need the right 10,000” – Chris Brogan
Tag: conference
Categories
IT Disaster Planning -ITEC
Now I’m in (in Theater 1, which has wireless…) an IT disaster planning session. He’s starting off discussing BCDR (BC? – DR = Disaster Response) and his company’s (Starfire Technologies) experience in creating them.
To begin, he discussed the different types of disasters that could befall us (small, medium and large “never-happen” disasters). Medium disasters are the ones we should be planning and testing for. Smaller ones happen often enough (accidental email deletions, etc.) that we should be in practice. Medium disasters (server failures, etc) should be planned for. Large disasters include facility failures (fire engulfing the building) and have their own special needs.
BCP – Business Continuity Plans, not for DR but for daily business operations, requires process documentation, timelines for recovery events, ineffective training, etc. BC vs. DR – frequency & scope differences, can be complimenting solutions.
BCDR Plan – important characteristics
- Skill assumptions and expectations
- Automation of processes
- Application landscape review
- Sufficient infrastructure at recovery site
- Recovery data currency
- Identify external vendor dependencies
- Long-run planning
- Production-return planning
Next he talked about tiers of multi-site service. When I get the internal MRRL cloud up and running, we’ll be on Tier 4 – Dual Active Sites with all the data being shared among all locations.
The data – get rid of classic, aged backup methodologies for unified solutions (backup/restore, archive/retrieve, space management)
The Infrastructure – Storage; centralized arrays, internal fault tolerance, remote mirroring. He recommends offloading backup processing from systems (again, something I’ll be doing more of when we go to our cloud backups)
Infrastructure – Technologies; remote sites, vendor cloud offerings, virtualization and deduplication (no mention of internal cloud offerings… other than maybe a mention of storage virtualization)
That’s as far as he got before his time was up and up next is lunch – some sort of buffet… I’ll post more after!
TJ O’Connor led this session on using Web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise. He mentioned a couple of tools I was unfamiliar with – Clearspace (which has apparently become SBS since he created his slides) and Present.ly -and then talked about using blogs, microblogs (that’s where Present.ly came in), IM (we use Gmail’s chat for just about anything Present.ly could do, but I appreciated the pointer anyway!), RSS Feeds and Wikis. He finished by talking about how to get 2.0 tools adopted in the Enterprise. (*foster grass-roots adoption, encourage emergent behaviors, combine with top-down support and remember your goals)
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Keynote – ITEC
I’m at the ITEC conference in KC today, getting ready to learn all kinds of IT-related stuff. Right now, the keynote by Tom Henderson is on. He’s talking about the changing environment for IT in this economy. Both companies and customers are feeling the pinch from changing economic conditions. Another pressure point for IT is the fact that the workplace is evolving – with an intriguing bullet point, “Web-2 as IT Drama”. It’s immediately preceded by “Social Not-Working becoming huge”, which sort of raises my hackles… Just ’cause people are on Facebook doesn’t mean they aren’t nurturing professional relationships along with social. I’ve got no defense for Farmtown. Sorry folks.
Anyway, he just did a survey on who’s updated their Facebook page, who tweets, and who just shakes their head when others tweet. I got my book deal because I tweet – you can’t dissuade me from the utility of tweeting…
He’s on that last bullet point now – is it IT drama or productivity. No answer from him – just something for us to consider.
He’s talking about auditing and accountability now, but I’m not hearing much because the freakin’ vendors behind me are just chatting away and they are closer.
The next slide shows an IT challenge – growing and retaining employees.
He’s now talking about SLAs for users and the fact that, unlike 10 years ago, we are required to keep systems up and running far more reliably. Even an hour of email down-time can be disastrous for an organization.
He’s asking a bunch more questions now, but I can’t hear any of them…
I completely missed the end of the keynote, but I’ve shared what I did get out of it! Next is “practical and doable Web 2.0 tools”. I’ll try to blog that, too – but the wireless situation here is iffy…
Categories
Keynote – ITEC
I’m at the ITEC conference in KC today, getting ready to learn all kinds of IT-related stuff. Right now, the keynote by Tom Henderson is on. He’s talking about the changing environment for IT in this economy. Both companies and customers are feeling the pinch from changing economic conditions. Another pressure point for IT is the fact that the workplace is evolving – with an intriguing bullet point, “Web-2 as IT Drama”. It’s immediately preceded by “Social Not-Working becoming huge”, which sort of raises my hackles… Just ’cause people are on Facebook doesn’t mean they aren’t nurturing professional relationships along with social. I’ve got no defense for Farmtown. Sorry folks.
Anyway, he just did a survey on who’s updated their Facebook page, who tweets, and who just shakes their head when others tweet. I got my book deal because I tweet – you can’t dissuade me from the utility of tweeting…
He’s on that last bullet point now – is it IT drama or productivity. No answer from him – just something for us to consider.
He’s talking about auditing and accountability now, but I’m not hearing much because the freakin’ vendors behind me are just chatting away and they are closer.
The next slide shows an IT challenge – growing and retaining employees.
He’s now talking about SLAs for users and the fact that, unlike 10 years ago, we are required to keep systems up and running far more reliably. Even an hour of email down-time can be disastrous for an organization.
He’s asking a bunch more questions now, but I can’t hear any of them…
I completely missed the end of the keynote, but I’ve shared what I did get out of it! Next is “practical and doable Web 2.0 tools”. I’ll try to blog that, too – but the wireless situation here is iffy…
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Online conference – starts today!
The OPALescence conference begins today at 11am (CST) – there is a nice lineup of topics and speakers (including me at 2pm CST today, blathering on about Collaboration 2.0) as well as “unconference” sort of unscheduled discussion groups going on at the same time as the traditional conference sessions. If one of the sessions doesn’t do it for you, hop into an unconference session and talk about what is important to you!
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Chillin’ in St. Charles
Today was my driving day – I went from Jefferson City to the suburbs of Chicago on 2/3 tank of gas. I love my car. Anyway, I left this morning and got in at 4ish, registered, got settled and decided to go exploring. Since it’s a bit rainy (not quite Noah’s Ark rainy, but close…), I confined myself to exploring inside, though the outside of the Pheasant Run Resort & Spa looks pretty damn amazing. Can’t wait for the storms to pass so I can wander! The inside is nice, too – with an indoor recreation of Bourbon Street (complete with a Ben & Jerry’s shop!!!) and lots of little shops and cool little nooks. While I was exploring, I stopped and registered for the conference and got the best bag of swag I’ve received for a conference yet. It included a lovely NAGW (National Association of Government Webmasters) polo shirt, a 2G thumb drive and my ticket to Zanies Comedy Club on Friday night to see Kevin Nealon. Score!! 
I then took off for dinner (IHOP – close and cheap…) and came back to go through the paperwork in my bag. I made sure I know what I’m doing for the next few days – tomorrow is pre-conference day where I will be learning about prototyping techniques in the morning and PHP5 in the afternoon – and checked my email/friendfeed/etc.
I’m going to call home now and say goodnight to the kid and the boyfriend and then settle in for some TV. I thought I might check out one of the lounges, but I’m seriously tired and have to be up and at my pre-conference session at 8am tomorrow! I’ll blog about what I’m learning as I learn it!
Oh – I almost forgot – as I was registering, I gave my name and the lady behind the desk started laughing and said “oh yes, the webgoddess!”. I had completely not realized that my job title would be published on the list of attendees page on the website and was way amused to see it there. Apparently she was too. I was blushing like a schoolgirl by the time I left the booth…
Our last night in Jamaica, Michael, Mary and I went to an English Pub a bit down the road for a final dinner. We were joined by Loida Garcia-Febo, Tony Tallent, Carrie Gits (can’t find a blog for her – anyone else know where she can be found online?) and her husband. All were American presenters and we had fun discussing our experiences at the conference. I had the Nottingham Steak & Kidney Pie, since my boyfriend kept telling me to get it while I was in England and I never did. It was ok, but I’ve tried it, and I’ll not be ordering it again…
I got up at 4:30 the next morning and made it to the airport in plenty of time for my 7:25 flight – which, in true Island Time fashion – didn’t take off until 9:30. The rest of my travel home was on time and – mostly – worry free. We had to divert around to come into St. Louis from the west, because the southeast approach was closed due to weather and the descent was a bit rough, but I landed and got home safely!
The conference was great! One of the last sessions I attended was an informal meeting of the Academic SIG and there was a lot of discussion about Web 2.0 “stuff” as used in the Caribbean. The discussion about the differences in culture and in the way they do things, as opposed to the way us Americans do things, was eye-opening. They are starting to experiment with things like blogs and Learning 2.0, but the penetration of computers into the population is fairly low, so they aren’t focusing on those things like we do here in the states.
Overall, the people were friendly and welcoming to us American visitors – we all had a chance to really get to know some of the librarians who are working so hard in these countries to bring Internet access and books to their patrons. Between the conversations in the hallways (or outside in the coffee break area – that was where I hung out a lot!) and the videos from Eric & Jaap (you may have to be a Facebook user to see this video) giving us all a great view into the local libraries, there was a lot of learning going on, at least by me! I’ve always said that the best part of any conference is the “extra” networking that happens between sessions, and that held true for this one. It was a fabulous conference, with a bunch of great librarians who shared their cultures and their ideas with us!
Updated 6-13-08 Carrie left a comment with her blog address on it and I wanted to be sure that everyone knew that her name is now linked to her blog. The blog is at http://librarianandherblog.blogspot.com/ – go say hi to Carrie and give her some biblioblogsphere love!!
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Day 2 of my Jamaican Adventure
Today I shopped, then I laid on a lounge chair on the beach. That pretty much sums up my day.. I registered for the conference and cleared up the hotel room issue as well, but for the most part, I bummed around until about 6:30pm, when I attended the ACURIL opening ceremony. The ceremony part was nice – a presentation of the flags of the Carribbean nations, lots of welcoming from the various people who have worked hard to put this conference together and a speech from a representative of the Ministry of Tourism about how libraries assist in getting tourists to their destinations (with lots of facts and figures about the number of people who use the Internet to make or research travel arrangements). The real fun of the evening came with the Hatfield Folk & Cultural Group, though. 
They did some traditional folk songs, some drumming and some dancing. It was a really cool introduction to the Jamaican culture! We also heard the Mount Peace Mento Band do some Bob Marley tunes – which were real crowd pleasers!
After the ceremony was the reception. I sat (somewhat to the dismay of the ACURIL president, who wanted us to mingle) with most of the American presenters at the conference. Michael Sauers, Stephen Abrams and Cliff Landis – as well as Michael’s wife and a Jamaican librarian whose name I never did catch – sat around the table and discussed issues of librarianship and the sad, US-centric state of both the US and US librarians. As Stephen is a Canadian and we had a Jamaican at the table, the insights into how silly we Americans often look were enough to make us one of the loudest (laughing, not arguing) tables in the water park (where the reception was held).
Tomorrow is Stephen’s keynote speech (which I’m looking forward too – I always love hearing him speak!) and my Mashups presentation. I’ll blog about both of those tomorrow night – stay tuned!
