February 9, 2009

SoCon09 Thoughts and Comments

This weekend I had the opportunity to attend the SoCon09 Conference at Kennesaw State University. To be fair, they called this an "Un-Conference" versus conference to distinguish it from other Social Web conferences. As far as a social event, I would give it an "A+" for getting folks to network and providing the setting to encourage communication. The majority of folks seemed to have small businesses or worked for themselves which allowed the ability to use this conference to establish and expand their network. The conference started with Jeff Haynie from Appcelerator discussing entrepreneurship. This was a very good session where we had someone who is actually living the topic and sharing his knowledge with the rest of us. I ended up with two pages of notes and lots of good ideas to take back with me. His last tip was telling; Ideas are worthless, it's all about execution. Amen!

Unfortunately, the conference went down hill from there. The next speaker, well... I am still not sure why he was there and other than having a discussion with 200 people on, well... nothing, it made little sense. It was like a Jerry Seinfeld episode; much to do about nothing. I can't say that I took one single note other than the speaker's name. The next speaker started out strong but then followed suit in basically having a pointless discussion with 200 people that usually went like this.

Hi, I am John Doe, and I have a company called something and you can find me at something.com. I wrote an e-book that is also available on something.com. I am an expert on XYZ and you can contact me by my email, me@something.com or follow my twitter account which is something. Now for my question…. Ummm, I forgot what we were talking about

Ok, it wasn't that bad but close. This speaker had some great points that I wished he could have taken a deeper dive into to help folks understand how to apply them. Those first 10-15 minutes could have easily been extended into a full hour of education.

The first session of the afternoon started strong but once again fell into useless self promotional banter by the attendees. The final session (Hosted by David S. Cohen) of the afternoon was on building a personal brand and we needed another hour. Not sure if folks attending were tired of the self-promotion but everyone in the room was clearly trying to learn and get better at the concepts of building a personal brand. One gentleman from CNN actually took to the board to write down the tips and techniques that everyone provided. If I had not been doing this stuff for 10 years, this would have been a great session to attend and learn from a few folks that have actually done it. I would say that the first and last sessions were the best but overall I would have to give the educational value of the conference a "C-". Again, if the idea of an un-conference is to allow folks to network and create social connections then this conference was spot on. As far as an educational conference, they have some work to do.

Posted by Todd at February 9, 2009 7:38 AM

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