Keith Shirley

I went to the IIA Congress and Netvisionary Awards last Thursday and Friday. I enjoyed it a lot – it was a good opportunity to network and get some information. I don’t know if I’m spoiled by events like Bizcamp but I didn’t feel quite as inspired as I was at other events. The talks were good – containing some good insights but I couldn’t help feeling on occassion that they were slipping into sales pitchs. The organisation of the event was excellent – especially considering how small the IIA team actually is. Overall the event was very good and I hope to be able to go again next year.

On the afternoon of the first day the Social Media Working Group held three breakout sessions. Quite a bit of effort was spent in preparing for the breakout sessions and I have to admit that I missed the two practice runs. The idea on the day was to take a sample company as a case study and to form mini groups to discuss how blogging, forums and twitter could be used. The order of discussion was guided by a very good five point plan devised by Conor Lynch.  One of the things I especially liked about it was the simple fact that the first point of focus was to figure out who your target customers are. Regular readers of this blog will know that no matter how much I love tech – I’m always wary getting the tools and then going looking for where to use them.

There was two of us in each group facilitating the discussion and then after a few minutes we were moved on to the next set of people. I was doing Blogs with Conor. The feedback was great and most people seemed happy. The sessions were packed and we had people waiting in the room for 20 minutes during the break to make sure they had a spot.

While an overall success – I do feel that it didn’t really work as we had hoped. The biggest issue was that we didn’t have enough time to get an actual discussion going – and we ended up doing most of the talking ourselves. I got some very helpful feedback from FinalContext via Twitter. Next time I think we should try keeping it as one large group and having a general open discussion.

As a reminder – The working group is publishing the whitepapers on the IIA website – http://www.iia.ie/smwg

I spent all Friday morning doing the mentoring sessions on Social Media. Matt Matheson from ThinkhousePR and I spent 30 minutes with individuals from companies talking to them about their social media strategy and answering their questions. The format of these sessions is fantastic. For all my readers – book them as early as possible next year and fill up your whole morning. Do your homework to have questions ready in advance – you will never have a better opportunity to get so many experts together in such a short space of time. Your brain will be steaming afterwards but it’s worth it.

Originally Matt and I were going to split up the sessions but the day before we decided that we would do all the sessions together. This worked much better as while I’m strong on blogging – I have not been so involved with facebook (especially with fan pages).  It was a tiring but productive morning – we even managed to help three extra people during the break and in between sessions.

The Fish

And finally I have to talk about the fish. The hotel has a projector in the hall that shows images of fish on the floor. Companies can put there own graphic as the background. There is a sensor for when you walk that causes the “water” to ripple and the fish to swim away. No surprise that I want one – I’ll find a home for it later. Some gadgets are just too much fun to try and be sensible and find the requirement first. The picture below does not do it justice.

Related Links:

IIA Protecting Your Brand Slides

IIA Congress 2009

Irish Internet Association Congress 2009

Review of IIA Congress 2009

Photos are available from the IIA

Slides of the presentations are also available

Over the few weeks I will be trying out a service called Searchles Discovery. The idea for me is that is will automatically cross reference some of the previous posts that I have written and display links at the bottom of new blog posts.

Why?

It’s become clear to me that a lot of blog posts that are extremely well written and useful get lost over time as new community members seldom go back more than a few posts. I’m talking about all blogs – not just this one. If someone reads one of my posts and there is something related – I’d like them to know about it.

Initially the related content will be empty or not very good but over time I hope it can become a useful resource.

My current concern is that it might just make everything too busy.