As always, some of the best outcomes from an event are a result of the interaction with other delegates. There is something special about a group of actively engaged, newly informed individuals. Going into PodCamp Ohio, I hadn’t been sure about the people I would meet. I wasn’t a podcaster, would I have things to share with my fellow attendees?

As it turned out, I was incredibly engaged and impressed with the folks I met. There were folks from a wide background, all united by their passion for social media. The entire conference was very engaging and social, including the automated podOhioCheckIn twitter feed. As I mentioned, the first session I attended was incredibly interactive, with the attendees offering their own best practices and advice. I enjoyed putting faces to screen names, and realized that there is an entire community of like-minded individuals here in town I should get to know!

As someone who has worked on fostering online community for a long time, I have weathered all the comments about how technology throws up walls between people. Rather than interacting directly, we’re sitting in rooms on our laptops or mobile phones. However, how we do we explain the coming together of this group of technophiles? One fellow had driven from Nashville, another is based in Berlin and D.C. The Internet is the communication medium that allowed these individuals to find this information, and brought us together to share and network.

While the day passed quickly and I know I didn’t meet as many people as I could have, I have confidence that we will all leverage these online tools to continue to communicate and share our thoughts and insights from PodCamp Ohio moving forward.

The final session of the day that I attended was on strategies for blogging and social networking marketing. Some of the content was similar to the viral campaign session I’d attended earlier, I liked the use of the one specific case study to frame their work.

Right away speaker Bill Balderaz of Webbed Marketing laid out the three things you need for success:

1. a compelling hook
2. the right channels
3. identify client goals

In the case study he shared with us (Shizuka New York), the compelling hook was “bird poop facials”.

A good litmus test to whether or not your idea is compelling- would you talk about it at dinner? a new CEO hired from a competitor? Nah. But bird poop facials? Sure!

Bill mentioned four specific channels to consider:

1. SEO Press release
2. Blogger outreach
3. video
4. Social networks

I wasn’t really familiar with the terms “SEO Press release”, but it was quite interesting. Bill mentioned that they will search for specific phrases on search engines to ensure the uniqueness of their phrasing. That way they can be sure that when monitoring buzz or search queries, all the results are directly tied to their efforts. He did acknowledge that the most newsworthy your story, the more likely a journalist will snap up the idea and write about it in their own words. In this case, your carefully chosen phrasing is lost.

Through the presentation, Bill was very diligent at showing us the “before and after”, highlighting the importance of analytics and establishing your measures for success. We looked at google news, which had 2 links to the company in May, and roughly 50 post-campaign.

Blogger outreach is refers yet again to really figuring out the type of influentials to tap.

As for social networking, Bill said that they did not try to build for or leverage all the social networks. He said they actually received the most traffic from StumbleUpon, which was a surprise to me. I didn’t realize it was such a bg player. He also acknowledged that like it or not, you can’t ignore mySpace.

Supposedly CNN ran this story on the front page one day, but still 46% of the traffic came from social networks. While CNN gave a one-day spike in traffic, the networks were overall more significant.

Someone asked about the time this campaign took, and he said the video shoot was the biggest task, coming in at about 10 hours. The rest of the campaign and marketing was about 40 hours. In the end, the company saw traffic increases from all sources, not just referring sites. People weren’t just clicking on links they had presented to them; bird poop facials at Shizuka had reached a point where people were talking or thinking about them, and motivated to seek them out.

He talked some more about some compelling ideas and hooks, including the work they did for Hatteras networks (the cash cow), or the scantily clad etymologist at HotForWords.com

While I don’t know that this session really offered me many “strategies” for blogging and social media marketing, I did find the session interesting. I appreciated the focus on the results achieved, and how they were managed. I still feel in many ways that analytics is still in its infancy, and I appreciated the approach that was taken to demonstrate the campaign’s success.

The second session I attended was “Igniting Viral Campaigns”, by Jennifer Laycock. Her session was in such high demand that we had to change rooms to accomodate the number of attendees!

Jennifer presented an incredibly comprehensive slide deck on the topic. She started with an introduction to viral marketing itself, the premise being:

1. people distrust ads
2. people trust friends
3. people trust strangers
4. the web connects us

Initially I wasn’t sure I agreed with her “people trust strangers” comment, but as she explained it more, it made sense. She considered strangers to people we don’t know in real life, whereas for me, it’s people with whom we have no relationship at all.

She clearly called out the benefits and challenges related to viral marketing. While for many companies it may seem an obvious tactic given the low budget, but the challenge is in coming up with an idea that is genuinely buzz-worthy. The consumer needs to have some motivation to share it. Once again I’m struck with the idea that good marketing (as well as good design, good client relations, good anything) is just what I’d consider user-centered design. What consumer needs (realized or unrealized) are being met? Indeed, Jennifer referred to the customer reaction effect. That is, by empowering ordinary individuals to share and promote a brand, you are offering them some sense of celebrity and giving people a chance to talk about your product. In turn, the brand benefits from a level of increased credibility, as it is being ‘blessed’ with personal recommendations.
The potential downfall, however, is that you lose control over your brand messaging.

As for any project, it is important to establish goals to be able to measure the success of the project.

There are three questions to be answered when coming up with this idea:

1. what sparks passion?
2. what hasn’t been done before?
3. will they risk their reputation?

For an idea to catch on, it has to address the above questions. The last refers to the idea that a forwarder is basically offering his personal recommendation to whatever he is forwarding, and will need to believe in the message or cause.

Jennifer then did a great job at walking us through specific strategies to developing a campaign. She shared tangible examples to really drive her points home.

I was impressed with her specifics related to the delivery of the campaign. She warned us to be sure to watch out for scalability, inventory, sustainable ROI and backup servers. I suppose the idea is that you should always plan for the worst case (which in this case is the best: your viral campaign takes off!). This actually reminds me of when we helped out Wal-Mart with their holiday campagns last year. Evidently there had been some question about our use of Akamai, and someone had questioned “what if akamai goes down?” At the time, we all laughed. Our thoughts were that if akamai went down, the Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
Guess what, at the height of the campaign, Akamai went down.

She offered us a list of different campaign types: humour, debate, attack and fear. Along with examples, she listed out pros and cons for each campaign type. It was a wonderful overview while also offering us the benefit of her expertise.

The next part of the presentation specifically dealt with pitching bloggers, which is an arena where I’ve only ever been on the other side of the screen. As Jennifer went through her pitching checklist, I reflected on how I’ve been pitched to myself, and determined that I am way too easy-going I guess I don’t yet have any reason to be too picky!

Jennifer’s biggest rule was “respect the blogger’s time”, and many of her recommendations were based on this (for example, read at least 5 posts, write a few contextual comments). I also felt that this was simply good practice to ensure you’re on the right track. If you have identified this blogger as an influential, prove it by opening yourself up to be influenced

At some point during the presentation, Jennifer noticed that we were running behind, and offered to cut the presentation short. The room was unified in their desire to hear her entire presentation. It was truly an incredible session, well worth the price of admission

Jennifer walked us through a project they’d done, through using brainstorming worksheets to assessing capabilities and the actual execution of the plan. It was a great way to really understand their methodology and gave a lot of credibility to their process. While she was great in not using her presentation to pimp out her company, I was definitely interested in learning more about them, as it is obvious they shine in this area.

Afterwards I was following on twitter as Jennifer and the session attendee that was sitting next to me talked about #SBMU and despite the fact I don’t actually have a small business, I’m tempted to attend!

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows, today I attended PodCamp Ohio. PodCamps are “usually free BarCamp-style community UnConferences for new media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media.”

The first session I attended was “Managing Multiple Online Identities”, by Daniel Johnson Jr.. To start off the session, we went around the room and introduced ourselves, and shared what we wanted to get out of the session. This really set the tone for this most interactive of the sessions I attended. I hadn’t been sure what the backgrounds of the other attendees would be, and this gave me some good background. The first person to introduce herself was Lara Kretler, who’d just visited my blog and commented a few days ago!

My own interest in the session was the fact that I do consider myself to have two distinct brands online: my running self and my tech self. Two blogs, two twitter accounts.

The presenter gave us a little background on himself, I thought it was great that he commutes 60 miles one way from Cincy to Dayton, and therefore “has plenty of time to consume new media”. I was doing about 95 miles one way from Columbus to Dayton, so I knew exactly what he meant. I do miss my audiobooks..

As I mentioned, the session was very interactive. After a brief overview of the definitions of marketing vs PR vs advertising and branding, we had a discussion on the personal brand. In this room of early adopters, we discussed strategies about snapping up screen names on new services to ensure the integrity of the brand, versus only signing up for services you would be actively engaging with. (with the announcement today that the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine“, the challenges of retaining a firm hold on a specific word/brand may get a lot harder). I think it’s a personal ‘brand strategy’ decision that individuals must make.

We talked a bit about eliminating old brands or labels, and one individual pointed out that sometimes having a stale account was really just more time-consuming than it was worth. That wasn’t anything I’d really considered before. Thinking about ROI does help to drive home the fact that we really are branding and marketing ourselves online, and it may be worth figuring out the best use of our efforts.

Daniel shared some of his own techniques for managing these various elements. For each service he joins, he uses an email account specifically associated with that service: {servicename}@{domainname}. I thought that was a neat way to assess where traffic is coming from. When I signed up for utterz, I started receiving spammy messages right away, and it soured me on the service immediately. He also showed how he used Netvibes to have a dashboard for multiple twitter accounts. (A funny “small world” moment: he showed a screen capture of his Netvibes page, and some guy in the audience said “that’s my wife!”.) He also mentioned twhirl and digsby. Hurrah!

I will admit that I think I wanted a bit more of a philosophical discussion on why people would have and maintain multiple identities, and how to remain authentic while creating what is essentially a fragmented brand. But I suppose that is something that each ‘personal brand advocate’ needs to figure out for himself.

I’ve noticed that @podcampohio has been following me on twitter for awhile, but hadn’t thought too much of it. Today, however, a colleague at work asked if I was attending this weekend. While I hadn’t really thought about it (and already have plans mid-day), I checked out the line-up, and made a quick decision to attend at least part of the event!

So Saturday will be a busy day for me, but there are a few sessions that certainly peaked my interest. Namely:

Managing Multiple Online Identities:
As if managing a single web presence (blog, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) wasn’t hard enough, some of us have more than one. In this session the group will explore reasons why some of us have multiple web presences as well as some strategies for managing them. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that the group will definitely have some great insights to share.

Strategies for blogging, podcasting and social network marketing
Wait a minute.

There is a form of marketing that involves consumers creating videos, podcasts and blog posts about your brand and distributing that content freely? And they don’t have to go through rounds of lawyers, executives and brand police when they are creating this content? And they do it without getting paid, on their own time and show genuine passion and interest in doing so?

And these programs enhance my search engine optimization, pay-per-click, online public relations and traditional marketing campaigns?

To top it all off, this form marketing is viewed as credible by consumers and has a measurable impact on my business?

Sign me up.

Social Media Marketing…working with consumers to create and distribute content about your brand is a powerful tool that smart marketers can’t ignore. In this session attendees will learn:

- How to build and execute a great social media campaign

- How blogging, and working with bloggers, can help a marketing program “go viral”

- The role podcasts and video play in online marketing campaigns

Orchestrating a Viral Explosion
Everyone wants the benefits of a viral campaign, but few people really understand how to put the pieces together to create the best chance for success. Find out the most common mistakes companies make when aiming to go viral and how a little bit of brainstorming can set you up for success. Jennifer Laycock will walk you through the actual brainstorming process she uses with clients to help you gather information needed to put things together. She’ll also help you learn to identify “key influencers” within your industry and will offer concrete tips on the best way to approach them with your campaign.

Can you make $ with facebook pages?
My Frank Sinatra and Stevie Ray Vaughan fan pages are growing at over 25% a week.

How are fan pages different from groups?
How do facebook page fans differ from group members?
How do you deal with an International fan base?
What does facebook give you in terms trends and stats?
Can you innovate a business model from inside facebook?
Find out the detailed results of a month long contest?

Here are the slides from my second presentation from Spring <br />. Coming into this presentation, I was less nervous than about the first, which in some ways I believe contributed to a weaker presentation.
I had asked the conference organizers if I would have the same audience in the two sessions, and it was generally believed I would. As a result, I had expectations about a certain level of background information. When I started the presentation, I realized quickly that other than a few familiar faces from the morning, I was speaking to an entirely different group.

I did try to engage the audience a little, and learned a bit from them. Almost everyone in the room had done some flash, but only one or two had ever heard of the accessibility properties available. And whereas a few people in the morning session had indepth knowledge of specific screen readers, that was not the experience in this session. I asked if anyone had ever seen anyone use a screen reader, to little to no response. I got to joke “great, that means you’ll believe anything I say!” In retrospect, I think a session on how users use assistive technologies would probably be very eye-opening and interesting.

So here is the slide deck - as I said, it’s rather weaker than the one from the morning. I had weathered numerous questions in the morning, and had expected the afternoon to run similiarly. However, I think I only had a single question, so we breezed through it.

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As promised, here are the slides I presented at the Spring <br /> conference on Tuesday.

Web Accessibility Acronyms was the first presentation of the breakout sessions, right after the morning keynote. I felt a bit nervous as I set up, but the proctor helping out was very nice and we chatted away before I started, which lightened the mood.

Overall I think it went quite well - the night before I’d rearranged my slides and things didn’t flow well, so I did some shuffling back and forth mid-stream. As well, I was asked if I could increase the contrast on the slides - the template we’d been given was black on blue and was difficult to see. Even the little technical glitch almost seemed to fit, as I later could talk about the color contrast ratios that are in WCAG2.0. Foreground and background colors can be analyzed to ensure there is sufficient contrast. Whoops, guess I would have failed!

It was good to have folks in the audience asking questions. Someone did have a comment about flash being inaccessible, and I hedged a little, since that was a major point in my presentation to come later in the day. I think I lost him after that, at one point he looked to be reading a book!
Even though it certainly wasn’t to a group of 75 (as I had been warned about), I was happy with how the speech went. Through the rest of the day, I had a few people stopping me to ask questions, which I was glad to answer. I felt it was pretty well received.

I do feel bad for the rough nature of these slides, in particular the lack of citations. Mea culpa.

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