BlogPotomac Recap

BlogPotomac was a rousing success.  I think we should all first take the opportunity to thank Geoff Livinsgton and his whole team for putting on such a great event for the local DC area.  This week was quite the conferences here, with Graphing Social Patterns held earlier in the week and then BlogPotomac wrapping it up on Friday.

I think one of the nice things that stood out to many of us, was the crowd of new faces in the audience.  It was really nice to get outside of our little echo chamber and meet other markeing and PR professionals in the area.  I think this was a great primer for many of them to understand the nuiances and needs to learn this social media phenomena.  The speakers list was increadible, creating a lot of audience participatin and communication around all of the topics.

The day started with a great talk from Lionel Menchaca, cheif blogger at Direct2Dell.  He chatted about Dell’s foray into this mediumsome years back and the benefits it has provided.  He told the audience that creating that engagement with the customers is so important these days and also for the company to try be be as transparent as possible with the consumer base.

Next up was a good talk by Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post.  he talk about the challenges traditional medai outlets are having in this shift in the ladnscape towards new media.  There was a lot of good questions from the audience as to how the Post can try to work better to cover the local tech scene a bit more and how there is some space for more collaboration.

Maggie Fox and Jeremy Pepper rounded out the morning talks with their expertise and advice on the PR challenges and necessities of using this new media forum.  The afternoon session started out with a great keynote by Frank Gruber explaining to the audience what he called, “bright shiny things”.  These are the tools he uses as aproduct development manager for the myAol.com product at AOL.  KD Paine gave a fascinating talk on metrics and measurement tools we can use to track engagement, et all.  And finally, one of the most active talks was given by  Kami Huyse on ethics.  Maybe it was active cuz the bar just opened … naaah, it was a great cap to a great day.  We look forward to BlogPotomac II next June !

UPDATE:  Nicholas Tolson had a great idea.  he has created a Google Spreadsheet everyone can go put in their info to stay in contact post BlogPotomac.  Here is the LINK