This week the Geek Whisperers are freshly back from attending the VMware Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas, and we’re tackling the topic of conferences and events.
- The power of social media and how it has changed conferences
- What do you really need for a tweetup, anyway?
- Activities & Promotions
- We call it lead generation
- Plus-One Culture
- How big can we scale?
- Getting ready for hosting a conference like VMworld
Mentioned in this podcast:
The Virtual Community by Howard Rheingold. This 1993 book covers the early Internet communities like The WELL, USENET, IRC, MUDs, BBSes, and the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The same interpersonal dynamics that were happening then still happen today because, well, we’re still people. I like this quote that Howard includes as an epigraph:
“When you think of a title for a book, you are forced to think of something short and evocative, like, well, ‘The Virtual Community,’ even though a more accurate title might be: ‘People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community.'” – HLR
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Another great show I have to listen to again while taking notes.
How do you guys deal with corporate governance? You all work for very large corporates, you have all discussed the various communities you have created and tend to. How do you have spontaneity (especially at events) while balanced with command and control? Is it just trust? How do you avoid a HMV situation but keep it real?
Thanks for the kind words, Stephen! We’ll probably cover governance in a future podcast.
All of our companies have lightweight training/certification, but in reality there’s rarely an issue — it’s a matter of trust. The HMV situation was an example of bad process for a layoff — most of us go through a management layer like HootSuite that could be turned off rather than getting direct access to the Twitter passwords.
I was recently listening to this podcast with a good discussion on Governance — you might want to check it out: http://socializedbusiness.com/podcast/episode-3-social-media-governance