Yesterday I spent the day at a great event in Holyoke, MA called PodCamp Western Mass. The event was billed as a social media “unconference”. It was a great experience with a cool free-flowing style emphasizing a couple great rules.
- Everyone at PodCamp is a Rock Star! We are all equals.
- PodCamp has a "two foot rule". If you don't like the breakout session you're attending, use your two feet to move to another one.
The breakouts were determined by the participants, not the event hosts. This was very unique and turned out to be a great idea. We took the first 15 minutes or so for people to suggest sessions they would be interested in leading or topics they would like to learn about.
The first breakout I sat in on was about how to get started in social media, led by Morriss Partee (@mmpartee on Twitter) where I got to help those who are new to the social networking space understand how and why you might want to get involved. Both on a personal and business level.
I then sat in on a breakout session that was led by Christine Pilch (@christinepilch on Twitter) where she took the class through the process of signing up on Twitter and some of the features and benefits of TweetDeck, a popular desktop Twitter client.
After a lunch break we got back at it, and I sat in on a session that dealt with Google Analytics, led by Tom Galanis (@TGenius01). In this session we went though how to set up and insert the tracking code for Google Analytics into a website, blog template, etc. Tom then took the group through some of the reports that would be compiled. Unfortunately, there was not a projector available for this breakout, so it was difficult for some of the folks who had not worked with Analytics before.
The last breakout of the day I attended was again led by Morriss Partee and was on "advanced" social networking tools. The goal of this session was to brainstorm on the available tools beyond Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Some of the tools at site that were discussed included:
- BrightKite
- Loopt
- SitOrSquat.com (possibly my favorite of the day)
- FriendFeed
- TwitterFone
- DandyID
- 12Seconds.tv
- PitchEngine.com
- Where.com
- Geocaching.com
- and many more...
As to be expected when attending a event on social networking, just about everyone was tweeting, updating their Facebook status, live blogging… we even had somone doing a live video stream on UStream.tv! You can get a participant's eye view by searching Twitter for the hashtag #pcwm and seeing what was talked about all day!
With all this talk about social networking, you may be interested in following me on Twitter as well. You can find me under the handle @jasonturcotte
