Polymer Studios :: Web Consulting

An un-agenda. Uploaded by Meg Canada

Before my memory begins to fail, I wanted to offer some observations about yesterday’s UnSummit08 conference. For those of you who were out of the loop, UnSummit was an impromptu conference that a few of us put together when we heard that the Summit conference, put on by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), was sold out.

It’s always a gamble when you put out the call for a new, unproven event. Who will show? Will they have something to say? But that’s the beauty of the “unconference” format. It’s unproven by definition, which – if Wednesday was any evidence – tends to attract people who are up for participation and improvisation.

As people filtered in Wednesday morning, it quickly became clear that we had lured a diverse crowd of thinkers and doers. Some were consultants. Some were writers. Some were designers. A couple were students. A couple were agency owners. At least one PR guy dared to show up. A librarian led one our most popular sessions on community management. And we had a customer loyalty consultant who had lots to contribute. But I don’t think we had too many developers, as there wasn’t a single soul who knew how to set up a repeater. As a result, we hobbled by on intermittent wifi service.

Still, things went fairly smoothly. Especially after Jake Nyberg of Three Volts bought the first round of Guinness before 11 a.m. Lovely. Now, where were we? Yes, smoothness. The schedule which Mykl Roventine had worked out ahead of time seemed to work well. It called for two to three simultaneous sessions, each held in different areas of the same room. So, over the course of the day, folks camped and de-camped according to the session they wanted to attend.

Lunch consisted good, Irish bar food, which I think is perfect in its unfussiness. And in true barcamp style, we spent lunch conversing and continuing discussions from prior sessions.

One of our experiments was to offer a track that was entirely hands-on. When we were setting up the event, we talked to Whitney Gale, the group sales person at Kieran’s/The Local, and asked her if she’d consent to being our guinea pig. Foolishly (or maybe she thought it would help the sale?), she agreed. So, we set out to use the conference not to set up and implemeent a social media strategy for her business. All with the goal of trying to move from theory to practice and see for ourselves how effectively we could put social media to work for a real business in a real, local market (pardon the pun). As I understand, the group made a lot of progress, but wasn’t quite finished by days end. And maybe we were a little ambitious. But better overreaching than underachieving! Anyway, Mykl will be finalizing and reporting on the group’s work in a day or two. We also hope to get some reports down the line on Whitney’s experience/success with social media.

Another experiment was to let anyone sign up to lead a session, no questions asked. For instance, that’s how I got to lead the Marketing Heresies session. Phil Wilson conducted Social Media Reality Check, in which he presented some admittedly non-scientific research that pretty much confirms that the other parents on your kid’s soccer team might have heard about Facebook and Twitter but aren’t using it yet. And later in the day, when he realized that we had touched on the ROI question in nearly every session, Cory Hendrickson offered to host an impromptu session on Social Media ROI.

Tony Saucier presented some provocative ideas in his well-attended session on the Future of PR. The big revelation for lots of us was that PR is still essentially the same game: encouraging credible 3rd parties to make credible endorsements. Only now those third parties aren’t just mass media types. They can be bloggers, friends, family members — basically anyone. Hence Tony’s suggestion of a new moniker for his profession: “public relationships.”

Critiques? I don’t have too many, except that I’d lengthen sessions to 1.5 hours each to allow for more discussion. It seemed that we always ran out of time before a given topic was exhausted. Better wifi? Yes. Definitely. Did you go to UnSummit? If so, please let us know how it worked for you, what you’d want to keep and what you’d want to see improved.

I think the biggest question in my mind is this: If we host UnSummit next year, should it be on a different day than the day MIMA hosts their Summit? I’m guessing that next year they’ll find a way to let more people in. And maybe more affordable (hint, hint). So, getting a ticket probably won’t be an issue for procrastinators and tightwads like me. And if we did host UnSummit on a separate day, I’m sure we’d pull in more people, including those who want to attend both events.

On the other hand, I wonder if there is a positive energy in hosting both events on the same day and offering a distinct alternative to the MIMA conference? It allows for a little inter-tribal rivalry. I have to admit, we had fun tweeting back and forth with attendees at the Summit and also watching Summize to see what people were reporting from both conferences. And at the end of the day, we got to meet up at MIMA’s happy hour. So, all’s well…

Update:

• Phil Wilson (@philson) has a much more concise review of the day’s events at the Minnov8 blog.
• Notes from the sessions are available at the official UnSummit blog