Podcamp Boston 4. Photo Credit: Elizabeth Thomsen

As originally posted on the PerkettPRsuasion blog, I attended my first Podcamp in Boston recently, the birthplace of the original Podcamp, founded by Christopher Penn and Chris Brogan, back in 2006. From the show of hands to find out who else was new to the “UnConference,” I realized that I wasn’t the only newbie – there were actually too many of us to count. If you are unaware of what Podcamp is all about, according to the official Podcamp site, “A PodCamp is a BarCamp-style community UnConference for new media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media.”

I was amazed at the size of the crowd, especially during a weekend conference on one of the nicest days of the summer. It was a wonderfully diverse audience but despite this diversity, the common theme joining us together was our passion to learn – from the sessions and, of course, from one another.

If you weren’t able to attend, don’t fret. CC_Chapman put together this awesome slideshow that includes some great shots from the entire weekend. See anyone you know?

Aside from the hilarious Battledecks and Pecha Kucha session led by Gradon Tripp – where he shares with us the 24 reasons why Twitter sucks – I wanted to highlight the “False Metrics and ROI” session led by Leslie Poston.

During one part of her session, Leslie stressed the importance of first listening to your customers because they are talking about you. If you don’t currently have a social media strategy in place to listen to what your customers and the industry are saying about your business, then you could potentially be dealing with a big PR nightmare like the one that happened with Domino’s Pizza, where a few employees decided it would be fun to post a video on YouTube as they “tampered” with the food. After only two days, that little video was viewed more than 550,000 times, potentially damaging the 50-year-old brand that Domino’s has worked so hard to build. Luckily, Domino’s was watching and listening, and they were able to take action immediately.

But not all companies are as social media savvy….at least not yet.

For example, we can’t discuss listening and not bring up the United Airlines situation where they mistreated musician David Carroll’s equipment while he watched helplessly from his seat on the plane. After trying to resolve the issue privately, which proved ineffective, David decided to create his own music video about what happened and posted it to YouTube. That video went on to receive almost five million views and tons of online buzz. Finally, after more than a year of disputes, United finally admitted they were in the wrong and decided to compensate David for his damaged equipment – A little too late in my opinion.

Listening to online conversations doesn’t have to be difficult. As Leslie pointed out, there are several online tools (both paid and free) available to help any organization do a better job of listening to online chatter. These tools are designed to make social media participation easier and more streamlined, as well as help companies do a better job in monitoring and managing their online presence. Some of the tools she highlighted include:

• Radian6 (paid)
• BlvdStatus.com (free, offers campaigns)
• Google Alerts (free, keyword based, boolean search terms to help you narrow)
• Google Analytics (free, fully customizable)
• DNA13 (Paid, encompasses print and web)
• HaveAMint (free, fully programmable in php)

If you aren’t currently using some of these tools above, you may be doing more work than you should. Don’t miss out on valuable discussions – both positive, which you’ll want to elevate – and, as in the cases outlined above – some negative, which you’ll want to address as soon as possible

If you are interested in seeing Leslie’s Podcamp session for yourself, you can view it in two parts below:

Overall, PodCamp Boston was an amazing experience and it will definitely not be my last. In fact, there are plans in the works to bring the first PodCamp to New Hampshire and I am proud and very excited to be on the planning committee for that event. If you haven’t been, be sure to find one in your area and go. I guarantee a quick ROI on your very small investment!

Photo credit: Elizabeth Thomsen

PodCamp 4 Boston

Along with about three hundred others, I attended PodCamp Boston 4 (#pcb4) this weekend, August 8th and August 9th, at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harborside Campus Center. If you are interested in podcasting, want to learn from seasoned practitioners, welcome the opportunity to meet others from all walks of life and a diversity of fields, and can spare $50, then next year you can’t go wrong attending this informative and engaging event.

My Goals for Attending PodCamp

My main reason for attending PodCamp was to begin understanding the mechanics of delivering information via podcasts. Whether for purposes of technical communication (for example, see Tom Johnson’s podcasts) or marketing communication (see Christopher Penn and John Wall’s Marketing over Coffee podcasts), podcasting seems to me an information-distribution mechanism that no forward-thinking communicator can afford to ignore.

I was looking especially for specifics on how to get started podcasting, and PodCamp delivered those introductory details, with plenty of resources for further reference. In addition to the nuts and bolts of podcasting, there were also sessions on general social media topics, including SEO and how to measure the value of social media. (The range of topics was probably the biggest surprise of my experience this weekend. I thought podcasting would be the major focus, and though it was a well-covered topic, I would say the spirit of PodCamp Boston is much broader.)

PodCamp’s Unconference Approach

Founded by Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn, PodCamp-Boston follows the “unconference” format—meaning that the sessions are provided as only a starting point for deeper and more interactive discussions on not only podcasting, but also general social media topics. In A PodCamp Primer, the organizers describe the event’s “unconference” approach:

If you’re brand new to PodCamp, you’ll find enough on the schedule to make you comfortable (or justify the expense to a boss who isn’t coming!) while letting you experience the unconference format at your own pace.

U-Mass-Boston, Harborside Campus Center

The venue itself, in this case UMass Boston’s spacious Harborside Campus Center, is part of the PodCamp approach, as the organizers deliberately promote ”the Law of Null Space”:

We do our best to pick venues that have lots of open space, flexible seating, and opportunities for ad hoc discussions and conversations. The formal programmed sessions exist only as support for people not already engaged in great conversations of their own. If you and a few like minded folks want to talk about something, broadcast it on Twitter, yell it in a hallway, and gather people to the nearest convenient space to have the discussion you want to have.

Learning and Sharing 

I can vouch for how comfortable the whole PodCamp experience felt to me—somehow being in a university setting made the event feel like learning and sharing, for learning and sharing’s sake…The weekend time-frame also gave the event a very relaxed, personal feel, making even the most high-profile speakers seem approachable.  

In between scheduled discussions, I was able to ask a more experienced blogger for some free advice on my approach to blogging and do a bit of job networking with other attendees. It was also great to chat with other first-time PodCampers, who are also just coming up to speed in social media and to hear about the almost universal challenge of introducing these new technologies to their organizations. The most recurrent themes from these off-the-cuff conversations was just trying to figure out what social media means, learning how to convince the boss about the benefits of social media (despite the potential liabilities), and wanting more information on how to monetize.

Unscheduled Discussions (including “Gender Issues in Social Media”)

Harbor Walk UMass Boston

The sunny, clear weather, especially inviting on Sat., made it easy for anyone interested to join together on the lawn outside the Campus Center, in a sea-side, outdoor classroom that tops any “classroom” or traditional conference setting I’ve attended. Cooler and slightly overcast on Sun., I still noted other impromptu lawn-side and indoor “open space” discussions in progress. (One impromptu discussion, which I didn’t hear about until after PodCamp, has spilled over this week into various lively blog posts, concerning gender issues in social media.)

New to the “unconference” format, I realize in hindsight that I should have been checking the white board or wiki web page to keep better tabs on the unplanned discussions, which according to the organizers are the heart of the PodCamp experience (that serves me right, for arriving late and missing any possible orientation information provided during the opening session). As Twitter-savvy as I am, I also didn’t realize the organizers were tweeting information specifically to @pcb4, which may have helped me better keep my ear to the PodCamp wall, find more like-minded folks, and join more unscheduled conversations.

I almost think there needs to be a scheduled orientation session on PodCamp, on both Sat. and Sun. mornings, just for newbies, that would help reinforce ways to get the most out of the ”unconference” approach. Perhaps, too, the white board/s where information was being centralized could be more prominently displayed at the Registration table (it’s possible I missed it somewhere), or some other more visible location.

An experienced PodCamper I talked to, who has attended all the previous PodCamps in Boston, agreed that it would also be helpful if there were  “tracks” in the scheduled discussions, from beginner to advanced, which might help people at the same experience and engagement level, better identify each other. 

Scheduled Discussions - Excellent, Highly Recommend

Despite these suggestions, PodCamp was of great value, for the scheduled discussions alone…If you were able to attend even a few of those informative sessions, then your small $50 investment was reimbursed many-times-over. Here is a sampling of the sessions I attended:

• How do you Start This Podcasting Thing? (Guido Stein)
• What Should You Do Now to Prepare for Next? (Christopher Penn)
• How do you Start with SEO? (Sri Nagubundi)
• Will the Kindle Save Reading? (Len Edgerly)
• How Do I Turn My Dining Room into a Recording Studio? (Matthew Ebel)
• What Equipment is Best for a Video Podcast? (Mike Volpe, Karen Rubin & Steve Garfield)
• How Can you Use Video Podcasting for B2B Marketing? (Mike Volpe and Karen Rubin)

Social Media Has Gone Mainstream

There was really something for everyone at PodCamp, and a way to engage in any way, or to whatever degree you were comfortable. And there was such a rich cross-section of attendees. I met folks from insurance, telephony, public relations, geography, science, education, and civic settings. I met men and women from all parts of the country, young to older, new to social media, to more advanced. According to event organizer Michelle Wolverton, a hand count estimated that 75% of attendees were first time PodCampers like myself. Most of us were eager to explore and define the direction of new media. We were all communicators that weekend, excited about collaborating and moving toward the future together.

Thanks to PodCamp Volunteers: The Democratization of Media

Many thanks to the volunteer PodCamp organizers and discussion moderators who made such a community-building and informative event available to so many, at such an affordable cost. In particular, co-founder Christopher Penn set the tone of the “unconference,” offering that we all have a window of opportunity in social media to make connections which would otherwise be closed to us, or at the least, a lot more challenging to make. In the ballroom, at some of the more highly-attended discussions, CEOs were rubbing elbows with more rank and file attendees, and people from all disciplines and fields were engaging, debating, and willing to share their passions and concerns about new media. What Penn refers to as “the democratization of media” —a leveled playing field for information exchange— is, more than anything else, the beauty of the PodCamp ideal, and something to strive toward, while social media is still in its infancy. Penn encouraged attendees to seize the opportunity to engage, while there’s still room to more easily stand-out, based on ability. 

Related Links

Did you attend PodCamp 4 Boston? How did you like the “unconference” format? Do you have any impressions, take-aways, suggestions, or links to share? Here are some helpful links I’d like to review more closely:

• Invasion of the Pod Tweeple #pcb4
• Where are the Women in Tech and Social Media?
• PodCamp Foundation
• PodCamp Boston 4: Organizers: Michelle Wolverton, Christopher S. Penn, Whitney Hoffman, Chris Brogan, Stephen Sherlock, Doug Haslam, Guido Stein, Adam Weiss, Lance Gomez, John Eckman, and Sara N. Streeter
• PodCamp Boston 4: Attendee List

I’ve been doing a deep dive into the integrated marketing management segment over the past few months. My goal has been to unravel the complex vendor landscape; to help marketers discern the capabilities of distinct vendor segments; and to help figure out what is a ‘best fit’ for their marketing organizations. (While we’re on this topic, as an update for those following this series, I DO plan to publish the final installment of my three-part series on the ‘Top 20′ platform vendors in this segment – i.e., the final ‘list’ – at some point over the next few weeks. So stay tuned.)

I have primarily focused on three ‘camps’ – demand generation, marketing automation/enterprise marketing management (EMM) and advanced customer relationship management (CRM) in my research and writing to date. My hypothesis with these camps has been that despite “… different roots, aims, legacies and constituencies, [they] are both converging on and vying for this core integration and management layer,” as I wrote in February.

Source: iStockphoto

Enter the fourth camp – the ‘inbound marketing’/marketing content management crowd – examples of which include new inbound marketing pure plays such as Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army, as well as content management stalwarts such as Crown Peak, which are evolving toward inbound marketing.

I’ll admit that when I first heard the phrase, inbound marketing, I said, ‘I don’t get it.’ In fact, I thought, ‘Wow, more confusing buzzwords.’ But I wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, so I dug in, did some research, sat down a few weeks ago with Hubspot marketing VP Mike Volpe and more recently had a call with Vazt co-founder Seamus Walsh.

Now I think I get it, but I’m not sure that the phenomenon around this fourth camp is purely about inbound marketing. Dynamic and search-optimized marketing content management is a critical component and key value-add in a broader, integrated marketing context and for companies that deploy both inbound and outbound marketing. That’s why I describe this space as a dual helix of inbound marketing and marketing content management that is bound to eventually intertwine with the other camps. In fact, my conversations with Hubspot and Vazt made me think of the evolution of Marketbright, which started as a marketing content management system but has evolved into a demand generation system.

So what is inbound marketing, how is it tied to marketing content management and what does this all mean for marketers? Moreover, is this a real ecosystem of solutions, or is it merely a Hubspot phenomenon?

Before we go too far, it’s worth level-setting what I mean when I talk about this camp. The common thread you’ll see emerge: a dual set of capabilities of managing dynamic marketing content and of optimizing this content for search engines. Walsh at Vazt summed up this positioning: “We actually use content to drive business to [the] site.”

What is inbound marketing, and what are its plusses and minuses?

Inbound marketing seems to be everywhere. Now it even has its own event – the Inbound Marketing Summit – which attracted more than 300 marketers at the first one this past September, according to a press release. The Web site for this event frames up the challenges facing marketers today and how inbound marketing plays in:

The Internet has transformed the nature of shopping and the sales and marketing funnel. In order to remain competitive, your business needs to be found on the Web and leverage inbound marketing techniques to reach customers with targeted messages that customers seek out, not ignore.

What is interesting to note, though, is that inbound marketing as a concept is not new. Companies for years have strategized about how to better seize on opportunities when customers reach out to them. A quick search of the destinationCRM site, for example, found this reference to inbound marketing as a technique for turning customer inquiries into sales scenarios: “In an inbound marketing model every agent in the call center changes roles, from customer service representative to a salesperson,” noted a September 2004 article. But in this scenario we are talking about existing customers.

What is different about the new approach to inbound marketing is its focus on capturing new leads, which are ideally not existing customers, as well as on increasing the likelihood of those new leads finding your company. Moreover, the new inbound marketing crowd is focused on optimizing inbound leads via Web 2.0 mechanisms, versus via the simple one-on-one telephone conversation at a call center.

Let’s turn to the most vocal advocate of inbound marketing for a modern definition. Hubspot’s founder and CEO, Brian Halligan explains what he means by this term in a post on his company’s blog:

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

I think outbound marketing techniques are getting less and less effective over time …

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.

Clay Schossow expands on this point of view in a post on his New Media Campaigns blog. He explains (almost as though outbound is somehow, suddenly a ‘thing of the past’) that outbound marketing “… was largely a numbers game – you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method was inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.”

Sounds interesting, but we should provide some context around this ‘pro-inbound’ point of view:

• First, it’s important to clarify that ‘pure play’ inbound marketing is largely about ‘passive’ lead generation and not so much about lead nurturing or lead conversion – differentiating it from the demand generation and marketing automation camps and pointing to gaps in this mindset.
• Second, it’s important to point out that advocates of inbound marketing suddenly do not put much faith in the ‘active’ communication that salespeople and marketers engage in to connect with customers – i.e., the majority of the current practice of marketing today. In fact, it’s a bit of a marketing ‘counter culture.’ “We’re 100% organic,” ironically commented Vazt’s Walsh to me. But do customers always know what they want or how to find it? Can you be 100% organic in your marketing?
• Third, it’s also worth mentioning that marketplace interest in inbound marketing is largely being driven by the folks at Hubspot – a company that may have even invented the term (although I can’t verify this) and that are the lead sponsors of the Inbound Marketing Summit.

Not everyone buys the argument that outbound marketing is a thing of the past or that inbound is much more than a shiny new thing.

Christopher S. Penn takes on inbound marketing on his Awaken Your Superhero blog in a piece strongly-titled “Falsehood as Truth: The Lie of Inbound Marketing.” Penn comments:

There is more than just “make a cool video on YouTube” or “optimize your web site for Google” to marketing. Do these things matter? Absolutely. Search and content that rocks are vital components of any marketing program, and it’s just as insane to dismiss them as it is to dismiss outbound efforts like direct mail and cold calling.

The truth of the matter is that inbound and outbound marketing are both vitally important to your company, your products, your services, your ideas, and they complement each other. They are equally important, and they balance each other.

…

If someone tells you that any marketing methods, inbound, outbound, direct, fax, whatever, is the only thing you need, you know two things to be true – they are either lying or clueless, and they probably have something to sell you.

And that would be the ‘response’ to the counter-culture.

What type of marketing organization can benefit from inbound marketing?

I must say that I agree, in part, with Penn’s comments. There is no either/or, zero-sum choice ever to be made in marketing. Inbound marketing should be something every company deploys … as one part of a balanced marketing program. It’s not the whole game, and no company should rely 100% on an inbound marketing pure-play without other marketing systems or tools.

That said, there are clearly certain types of marketing situations where companies are better positioned to benefit from pure-play inbound marketing than others. This is something I’ve been thinking through following my recent conversation with Volpe.

There seem to be two marketing situations in which a company would want to really focus heavily on inbound marketing. These are:

• Relying on word-of-mouth or being sought out: companies that are typically based on personal networks and that provide consumer-focused professional services, such as accounting firms and law firms, or that people call only when their services are needed, such as a plumber
• Early stage and/or facing a massive lead deficit: companies that really don’t have processes sufficient for delivering leads, that don’t have complete insight into who they might want to target and/or that are focused on a niche area

Volpe explained to me that their target customer is a small business, often without a formal marketing organization. “We serve anywhere from 5 to 500 employees,” said Volpe. “A huge portion of our customers don’t have a full-time marketing person,” he explained later. “They’re not a classically-trained marketer.” He went on to explain that when his team does work with companies that actually do have internal marketing teams, they typically have 1-3 marketing people on staff, maximum, and have their hands full.

Looking at the two situations I’ve posed above, I get the first one. And I doubt that any amount of active outbound marketing will cause people to need plumbers when their pipes aren’t bursting. But I have a question about the second situation: Doesn’t this point to a company with a bigger marketing problem? Basic marketing 101 starts first with knowing your company, customer and competition and second with assessing segmentation, targeting and positioning. All of this should occur before you launch full-scale outreach – i.e., you need to know your audience before spending on lead generation and marketing communication. Is a lack of leads the result of inefficient outbound marketing or of a more-basic and fundamental business-positioning issue? Who is to blame? It’s worth asking the question.

Volpe differentiated his solution from the demand generation vendors by commenting that needing a demand generation platform “… almost assumes you have too many leads.” He went on to argue: “The truth of the matter, for [most] companies, is that’s not the problem.” But I go back to my question about whether that is more a comment on marketing tools or on businesses that have found resonance in the marketplace versus those that have not – whether they are large or small. Again, it’s worth asking the question.

What do inbound marketing vendors really do, and how is this linked to marketing content management?

I mentioned earlier that the common thread between vendors in this segment is ‘managing dynamic marketing content and optimizing this content for search engines.’ Here’s how this translates into what inbound marketing vendors really do:

> Managing dynamic marketing content to drive customer engagement: The core of the software services provided by companies in this segment are marketing content management systems. (Crown Peak may be the most advanced of this set.) That is why I have referred to this segment as the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd, and it differentiates this segment from the firms that merely do search engine optimization. In fact, the marketing content management engines of vendors in this segment are robust and blur the lines between traditional Websites, social media and other communication channels. This is particularly critical as a way to drive greater customer engagement. Walsh at Vazt described it to me as “… aligning content with sales lifecycle.” Such an intelligent system also supports more-timely and resonant content – a step away from traditional marketing content that was focused strictly on features and functions and typically content that is more likely to hit home with a potential customer.

> Optimizing this content for search engines to connect interested customers with relevant brand-companies: Given that inbound marketing requires robust content – i.e., it is more thought leadership and customer dialogue than traditional static information on products and services – it must be constantly optimized for search-ability. This is where these vendors lend a hand – helping marketing organizations develop timely content in a way that makes it more likely to be found.

As I mentioned earlier, some prime examples of companies converging on this fourth camp include: Crown Peak, Hubspot, Magicomm, Vazt and Video Army (linked earlier).

What is the significance to marketers of the inbound marketing/marketing content management ecosystem, and how does it relate to the integrated marketing management space?

The value of the inbound marketing/marketing content management crowd extends beyond merely optimizing content to be reached via search engines. What this fourth camp brings to the table is complementary to the core capabilities of firms in the demand generation, marketing automation/EMM and advanced CRM camps, and it is strategic to the evolution of the integrated marketing management space. Moreover, as with the other camps, pure-plays in this segment are increasingly extending the capabilities so that they increasingly look like the other camps vying for the integrated marketing management prize.

Some additional thoughts on what this fourth camp brings to the table:

> Dialogue vs. drip: The world of automation and demand generation platforms are built on fostering interest in products and services, but this type of a ‘drip’ marketing and lead nurturing is not really true customer-brand dialogue … today. Systems from vendors in the inbound marketing/marketing content management camp are increasingly built around customer-interactive content, such as social media – enabling real dialogue around substantive issues. These capabilities are value-added to the other camps, especially in a B2B context. Following up my earlier note on Marketbright, sales VP Mike Pilcher recently explained to me why he believes it’s valuable for a demand generation vendor to be built on a robust content management system: “The transfer of information between supplier and buyer is at the core of business to business selling. What we also believe is that this information is not just white papers and brochures.”

> Authenticity: This type of dialogue also leads to increasing authenticity – especially as companies are forced to produce content that is less an encapsulation of features/functions and that is more about timely issues customers are grappling with. This is the same type of ‘small talk’ salespeople used to leverage in customer meetings but that is increasingly migrating to the Web. It also speaks to the topic of social CRM, which has been a key area of discussion over the last few months, most recently by CRM guru Paul Greenberg.

> Pervasive search optimization: Bringing the fourth camp together with other camps in the integrated marketing management segment has the potential to make search optimization a more-pervasive aspect of marketing systems. This is critical as the ball swings and marketers increasingly embrace neither inbound nor outbound exclusively, but rather embrace an integrated blend of the two.

We are starting to see firms in the inbound marketing/marketing content management space integrate with the other camps. For example, Hubspot syncs with Salesforce.com, enabling closed-loop analysis of program effectiveness.

There is much evolution that needs to occur among this fourth camp for it to offer more-sophisticated marketers the type of enterprise-grade capabilities they demand, but it is interesting to watch the progress and to recognize that this camp will certainly play a role in the long-term evolution of integrated marketing management platforms.

Computer, coffee cup holder, and community provider

When you think of blogging, what comes to mind?  For me, blogging brings to mind community and coffee.  Let me explain.  As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan of Joffrey’s coffee.  What started off as a Java Beta Test turned into a free coffee sample for this new blogger and about 1,500 others to try their product (by the way – the test is over in the event you try to still find it).  The Web 2.0 strategy behind it all was a great example of how the web can be used to entertain while reward AND not be a bother.  It was permission based; pull and not push.  A few months later the outcome of Joffrey’s Beta Test led to a new flavor, Coffee 2.0.  Clever idea – AND a great product.
At basically 5 cents a cup, this varietal will kick your morning into high gear and has a very smooth flavor.

REACHING OUT

OK, so in that promotion, not only did I learn about a great product I would have never been exposed to, I was also welcomed into the Blogosphere because any blogger who signed up on the Beta Test was sent a free sample.  I was reinforced that blogging has a few perks aside from a few kind comments.  I was exposed to community.
I was also exposed to Adam Singer, the digital marketer behind Joffrey’s promotion.  Well…not exposed literally.  I took advantage of the community feel that blogging gives you and I reached out to Adam and commended him for a great promotion.  He emailed me back in about 10 minutes and a friendship was formed.  Later I found out that Adam has a blog of his own and is an accomplished musician as well.  I now read his blog, The Future Buzz and I enjoy his music.  And from time to time we’ll Twitter or email each other.  Coffee brought community.

GREAT PEOPLE IN WEB 2.0

Had I never taken the initiative to start my own blog I would have never come across a great new marketing tool(s) in social media.  I would also be lacking from a great community I’ve come to really enjoy and from knowing the many individuals who have been kind to me and many others.  I’m talking about people like John Wall and Christopher Penn from Marketing Over Coffee; CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (thanks for the card); Lisa Johnson from Reach Group, Albert Maruggi from Marketing Edge; Chris Brogan – Social Media Extraordinaire; Jim Tome of eHealthcare Marketing, Mark McGuinness now of Lateral Action, Whitney Hoffman of LDPodcast, Zena Weist of Nothin’ But SocNet, Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog, and of course, Adam Singer, who I mentioned earlier, with The Future Buzz.  Now, I could have mentioned a few more (and I deeply apologize if I left anyone out), but these individuals I expressly mention because they typify SOCIAL media.  They preach it.  They live it.  They help it.  They advocate it.  And I know this personally because I’ve gotten a comment(s) or email(s) back from each. What kind of cool world is this!  Between blogs, podcasts and the social networks, these are the best of the best.

It will be a long time, perhaps never, that I would ever aspire to the level of prowess these individuals exhibit.  But as a role model to me, I hope I can return the favor and help those with what I have learned (which is a lot more than I knew a year ago).

MAKE THE COMMUNITY WHAT YOU WANT IT TO BE

A Community Connected to Many

We are a community.  Whether blogger or blog reader, there are millions of us who write or read and pass on our thoughts, opinions and expertise to benefit mankind.  Now more than ever we need this kindness that is exhibited online and make it a reality offline.  Akoha looks to lead this charge of making the world a better place and I eagerly anticipate the public release of their “pay it forward” mission cards.  But each of us must participate in that charge as well.  Just remember that when the guy in the lane next to you cuts you off – don’t allow his actions to cause you to do the same.  With the same good intentions you have when you blog or comment, take those same intentions and put them in the real world.

Our current economic situation is forcing us to take a good hard look at the mess that’s been made.  Because checks and balances were not correctly in place, a new level of accountability will undoubtedly be put in place.  As we look to the future, we must rely on each other, just as our 2.0 Community already does, and start being more accountable to how we treat each other in the real world as well.  Start tomorrow and make the world a friendler place – it all starts with a cup of coffee.

In an excellent article, Christopher S. Penn shares strong thoughts about getting through the upcoming economic downturn. It’s part of his Awaken Your Superhero series; a read I highly recommend.

A strong focus of this particular article is about networking. Here’s a great excerpt.

Having a strong personal network is more important than ever. Not just a strong network, but a large one, one in which you participate and try to help as many people as you can and ask them to do the same. With so many social networks and digital communities, this is easier than ever. A strong network will provide you with information you’ll need to make decisions, and will also provide you with leads if you need a job, etc. as long as you bring as much or more value to the people in your network. The key is to get building as fast as possible. Reconnect with old friends, establish new friends. Attend conferences and other meetups, such as PodCamp, BarCamp, MacCamp, etc. that are free or low cost. Look for opportunities to help others.

I definitely agree with him. My current and growing network of online contacts has brought me not only casual friends, but folks that have actually helped me deal with personal issues as well as technical. They’ve provided me off the cuff advice as well as the practical kind. Most powerfully, they came together recently to raise over $8000 dollars for the family of a young lady who died in a car accident. She was a contact of many of us.

Do you just have to network online? No! You can begin your networking with your next door neighbor, or the guys and gals at church, and even, yes, with people at work. One way to network at work is to honestly listen and be interested in projects and people even if they can’t contribute to your work or projects. They’ll remember that.

Do go and check out Christopher’s full article here, and after that, get out and network!