Finally Liveblogging the Final BlogPotomac

Written by: Mahdi Gharavi

Well folks, here it is. We are in the lovely State Theatre in Falls Church, VA, and BlogPotomac has officially started. Keep up with what’s going on here, and search the hashtag #blogpotomac on Twitter.

Our event emcees are Shonali Burke, Principal of Shonali Burke Consulting, and DC Hughes, Photojournalist/Multimedia Producer for Lemur News Images and Lemur News Audio.

Shonali Burke & DC Hughes

Beth Kanter

Our first speaker is Beth Kanter, Scholar in Residence, The Packard Foundation. Beth’s first foray into social media included her own blog, and the Cambodia4Kids.Org blog.

Throughout her time in the field, Beth noted four themes in Social media:

• Working in a networked way
• Art of Network Weaving
• Transparency
• Creating a social culture in the organization (behind the firewall)

My favorite of those is network weaving! What is Network-weaving? It is working through a network in a way that makes every node within that network stronger by way of each other node. A sort of Rhizomatic growth, that is, growth where every bud within the organism receives nourishment from the other buds.

Key takeaways from her talk:

• We need to work within our network so it can spread and grow.
• We need to learn and play within transparency.
• We need to work with our clients and our organizations as change agents within the firewall.
• Management should become comfortable with being uncomfortable.

Shel Israel

Next, it’s our keynote speaker: Shel Israel (@shelIsrael). Shel worked for years as a journalist at the Daily Reporter. When he ran into tougher times, he worked into Social Media and blogging. It was his way of doing what he loved, and to do it independently. When he decided to write a book, he was offered just $2,000 for 6 months. It wasn’t until he teamed up with Robert Scoble that he was able to finish Naked Conversations.

He reluctantly joined, then a new social network, Twitter. He was taken by its rapidness and effectiveness in connecting with people. It was finally the James Buck incident (of getting himself out of Egyptian jail using Twitter) that drew Shel to write his next book, Twitterville.

He’s pleased to see the growth of Twitter. Politicians are finally realizing that it is a two-way street. School systems are using it to alert students of closings and events.

“What Social Media allows any institution to do is listen and respond in ways that they could not previously do. And this hits the nerve that we all have. We don’t hate large institutions because they’re large institutions. We hate them because they’d rather spend 50 years [broadcasting and] reducing us to eyeballs…Twitter allows us to see that there are real people in government, in Microsoft…and they start listening and try to do better.”

“Social Media is just a bunch of tools. You could use a tool to build a house or to kill your spouse. It’s really up to you; but the guy who invented the hammer doesn’t have a say.”

“The newspaper industry was not clueless. They saw ‘this’ coming before we did.”

Shel on the future:

• We are entering the normalization phase of Social Media
• We are looking at a slower but steadier growth
• They said about the telephone that businesses would be crazy to let such a device in. But the truth is, “Whoever starts the stuff doesn’t have a lot of say on how the stuff is used.”

Natalia Luckyanova

Next up: Natalia Luckyanova (@nattylux), co-founder of Imangi Studios. Imangi Studios is a two-person operation that builds Mobile games (mainly for the iPhone). They use social media extensively to promote their brand, listen to their gamers, and interact with them.

Beyond just their own marketing, they get plenty of attention from other businesses who wish to create mobile apps for their brands. Being such a saturated market, it is imperative for mobile app developers (especially those associated with the iPhone and AppStore) to generate adequate buzz and excitement pre-launch, and early on. Mobile apps have very short shelf-lives.

Another change in the mobile app world is in the realm of mobile gaming: the realization (finally!) on behalf of game developers and their organizations that they should be marketing  more to women and girls. There are more women in the gaming audience as well as on the development side. One thing Natalia’s team has done is include a very large pool of women in their focus groups.

A great question posed was regarding mobile apps geared toward nonprofits. Beth Kanter pointed out a great resource on this subject: http://gamesforchange.org

Andy Carvin

A very welcome late edition to the speaker list is Andy Carvin (@acarvin), social media strategist at NPR.

Andy worked across the street of the FBI building in Oklahoma City when it was infamous bombing incident took place. He recalled asking the question: “What can the internet do?” And at the time, the answer was simply “Nothing.” There simply wasn’t enough traction, nor sufficient architecture in place. Several years later, in September of 2001, Andy was working in DC. The proximity, the incident, the desire to do something all culminated in Andy building a Yahoo group. This only grew from there. After Hurricane Katrina, Andy built Katrina Aftermath, which describes itself as “A public gallery of thoughts, images and sounds in response to Hurricane Katrina.”

As tools grew, Andy stepped up his efforts to grow and keep active with providing different communities the support they needed, whatever it may have been. His next endeavor came during the election: http://blog.twittervotereport.com/

When the terrorist attacks in Mumbai took place, Andy learned a valuable lesson. Twitter, as a tool for getting news out, was effective only for the first few minutes/hours. From then, the information reached saturation, and most of what was coming out was unreliable or downright wrong. His methods for combating the false information was to track down the only person he knew in Mumbai, and to see whom she was listening to and whom she was re-tweeting.

A similar issue happened in the aftermath of the recent election in Iran. Many people throughout the world changed their Twitter locations to Tehran, Iran, in a very “I’m Spartacus!” moment (his words) to protect the people in Iran posting news no Twitter from being tracked down. But that also threw off the geo-mapping information and accuracy.

“We’ve now reached what you may call in some ways a hashtag crisis.”

So, the key question here becomes: How do you triage trust?

Though he stopped short of answering this question in full, he offered this valuable tidbit. A new project called TrustMap, where people could go and list the names of those that they trust.

–Now, in the Q&A, a great conversation that has come about is the question of ethics in Citizen journalism. Is it ethical for us to broadcast events that are intimate to other people? Legally, what happens in public space can be considered public, but what ethical ramifications are we dealing with when we post information that becomes the means by which relatives may hear about a disaster? Do we want to be the ones breaking that news? Do we want to be the people photographing parents of a deceased child?

–Yet another discussion: How effective are we when we seek to help? Where do we draw the line between meaningful change and slacktivism? Does it make a real impact when we turn our avatar green and change our location setting? Beth Kanter mentioned a guest post she has on her blog the issue of slacktivism.

* * *

Here at BlogPotomac, we just got back from lunch. A quick note: Debbie Weil came on to offer BlogPotomac cofounder, Geoff Livingston some well-deserved recognition. As she pointed out, Geoff has shown an undying dedication to promoting women in the social media and tech space. In all the BlogPotomacs, much care and attention was payed to making sure women were well represented among the speakers lists. Geoff, kudos!!

* * *

Jane Quigley

We are now listening to Jane Quigley, (@jquig99), Vice President of Client Relations at Crayon. As Jane puts it, she’s “the only capitalist here.” She is talking to us about making money on the web.

And the main trend that has been taking over in this regard is the localization of the web. Sites like Group On and CitySource are making a big splash by focusing in on a localized, specific geographic niche.

She also discussed the future of localization, particularly as it relates to Google Wave. Her point was that right now, it’s so easy to get lost in the many “waves,” but what’s effective in this system is when smaller groups break out into collaborative spaces.

Another point of growth for businesses on the web is the creation of APIs. This is another twist on the principle of localization, not so much in a geographical sense in this case, but a topical sense.

Sean Gorman

Our next speaker is Sean Gorman, CEO of FortiusOne. His discussion is on location-based technologies and mapping on the web. Sean is a trained geographer and cartographer. Around 2005, with the simultaneous growth of Web 2.0 and web mapping (and applications such as Google Earth), Sean joined the action and became heavily involved with these emerging technologies.

FortiusOne has been aggregating geographic databases from all around the world. This includes information from where Tweeters are talking about a certain product, to best windsurfing spots, to visual displays of economic growth areas.

A very effective implementation of mapping that Sean was involved with recently was the recent Afghan election, where data coming in about votes were geo-tagged. So as they realized inconsistencies, such as votes being made in one area but the overall numbers that those votes would reflect decreasing, they could spot voter fraud in real time.

–From the Q&A:

Among of the issues location-based services are facing are security and privacy issues. One way some services are standing out and gaining favor is allowing users to customize the granularity of the information they wish to be shown (i.e. location down to city-level, neighborhood-level, or exact location).

Peter Slutsky

And, finally, our final speaker of the final BlogPotomac (I’ll stop redunding now) is Peter Slutsky, Director of Strategic Partnerships of Ning and Co-Founder and CEO of Double Speak Media.

Ning not only provides a platform for niche social communities, but also a way to monetize the platform, whether from ad revenue, or from custom gifts.

He makes a strong case for niche communities: “There’s a less than 50% overlap between people you know and your interests and passions.”

Note: Ning Apps (API) has been launched. They will be holding the Ning Appathon on November 5th, in Palo Alto, CA.

* * *

Well, the event is now officially over. I’m going to mingle and say my goodbyes, but do check back here later for my recap of the event!

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