Now that we’ve had a few days to reflect on the madness of #wtfpdx, it’s time for a few lingering thoughts. Let us first say that we couldn’t be happier with the overall outcome. On a warm and sunny Wednesday evening, more than 200 Portlanders packed the seats and we had as many as 118 viewers of the UStream live video feed Swan Lake (Schwanensee) dvdrip . Much gratitude goes out to 52 Limited
, Tavola Catering The Hangover move and Straub Collaborative
Good Dick movies for pitching in to pull it off.
So, almost a week later, here’s what we’re still thinking about:
1. When it comes to social media, we all want something different.
Some people want metrics and ROI indexes and consumer research. Some people want case studies. Some people want feel-good anecdotes. Some people just want to stalk their old high school boyfriend. The list goes on, but this much is certain—it’s impossible to talk to all of those disparate audiences at once. And that’s kind of the point of this whole thing. We’re still trying to work out what social media is, what it isn’t, what it can be and what it should be. The crazy part is that we all seem to be arriving at different conclusions. And that’s okay, too.
2. People really, really care about social media.
Perhaps it’s the fact that Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have become the core of our personal lives, but it was surprising to see how serious some attendees (and panelists) were about what’s happening in these arenas. For every person who signs up on Facebook as a lark… there are probably three or four who earnestly embrace the network and the potential it offers as a tool to enhance relationships of all shapes and sizes.
3. Talking still beats Tweeting.
The #wtfpdx hashtag resulted in 34 pages of Twitter Search results Final Destination 2 rip
. Some of them were good, some of them were not-so-good and some of them spurred discussions that went back and forth for a few hours. After all of those 140-character diatribes, it was refreshing to talk (face-to-face) with a couple attendees at Old Town Pizza here in Portland. I asked what they thought of the event and they gave honest answers. Answers that didn’t have to fit a character limit, that didn’t have to win me over with their wit, and that didn’t contain sneaky shortened URLs leading to pyramid schemes. Don’t chalk this up as an anti-Twitter argument; it’s just the plain, honest truth. I learned more in five minutes with @brandedbyhuys and @embarkcreative Batman Forever
buy Heavy Petting buy Blondie of the Follies than I could have gleaned from 34 pages of wtfpdx hashtags.
4. We’re going to keep at it. Session 9 psp
We chose a tough topic for our first community event. Was it too broad? Probably. Was it too emotional? Possibly. Was it too aggressive? I’m not sure. But this much is certain: We’re going to do it again. We’re going to keep talking about things that can’t be figured out in 20 minutes. Sure, there’s a part of me that wishes we had hosted an event about the benefits of a Django/Python CMS when constructing sites that employ both Flash and HTML (and who knows, we’ll probably host a discussion of that nature at some point), but where’s the danger in that?
If nothing else, we met a lot of great people. Those great people had a beer or a glass of wine and a handful of those rice-paper wraps. And it was free (you really can’t underestimate the awesomeness of “free” these days). We hope you made a couple new friends. We hope we sparked a few intriguing conversations. And we really really really hope to see you next time.
Thank You for a great event. Rehashing the tags has been an interesting exercise and I think the expectation for the WTF panel was about was so varied that in 8 hours we could not have covered what people expected. The people upset by “blue” language had to make me laugh, the title kind of implied a frank and potentially “blue” conversation.
Note for future:
perhaps start with a 30 min 101 social media in a crowd of that size or at least poll the audience to see who needs one.
Then take 3-5 questions from the audience and answer them mixed with real world examples of analytic, ROI etc.
Move to twitter in front of panel not behind. I was asked prior and was wrong it was hard to track that many conversations. Maybe pull topic related “live” tweets and pull them out for moderator and panel.
I wanted to personally thank all the sponsors, attendees and panelists.
I hope we can continue the conversation.