Today was a great event.
It was fun getting to connect with a lot of different people at SoCon07. Some of the most rewarding times for me is when you can translate on-line relationships into off-line conversations face-to-face. If you missed the event, check out the live blogging wrap up.
Sherry posted a brief update about how things came together. What Sherry doesn’t know is that I was planning a very similar conference to SoCon07, called BarCamp Atlanta. The timing was almost around the same date as SoCon. I met Sherry via Amber Rhea through an email introduction and Sherry invited me to attend a face-to-face meeting at James Harris‘ offices. It was apparent that it would be better for the community to join forces rather than try and have very similar conferences. That was my main goal go into the meeting that night (although others had no idea about other plans at the time).
At the meeting, it was apparent to me that there was a lot of work to do – especially since I’m a little anal about these types of events and trying to be as organized and planned as can be. After the meeting (which was the week just before Christmas week), I jumped in and designed the logo, the website and programmed the entire registration site and setup the blog. I also jumped in to start helping with organization, budgeting, pulling in sponsorships and generally helping make some of the hard decisions that needed to be made. Len and Sherry were great co-organizers and I enjoyed working with them.
While we did do a small press release and got a listing on Mike’s TechLinks, I don’t really believe they made significant impact on pulling people into the conference. This is based on where registrations were coming from and the general research I did following up with people about how they heard about the conference. (This is no slight on Techlinks, they’re a great resource for Atlanta). What I believe made the difference, and based on the composition of the attendees was the power of word of mouth marketing, blogging and the general trend that happens when people start connecting and you generate a buzz.
In our case, I sent out a short email to a small set of people in my personal network who I thought would benefit from the conference – I asked one simple question: “Would you like to attend and if you don’t or can’t, would you pass this along to someone you think would benefit?”. This was sent to about 75 people – all here in the metro Atlanta area.
I know Sherry and others did the same – although I have no idea what their message was but I would suspect it was very similar.
Of course, we had a good bit of blogging leading to the event and I think that helped as well.
What didn’t work in the planning?
Well, I think Sherry probably learned that you can’t have more than 3-4 people actively planning an event – more than that (I think Sherry had like 10-15 people listed on every organizing email she sent out) is just not worth the emotional effort of hoping more people help. Also, more than a handful of people becomes unmanageable – and people start to lose what needs to be done, since you always need a leader driving the bus. When you have a committee of people trying to make group decisions, largely you get very little done. Group think is good. Collective wisdom is good. The power of connecting with people and embracing different views is good. Ten people trying to make a decision – bad.
All in all, however, we had a core group and we made decisions, made progress and we created a success. Sherry has a lot of passion and it emanates.
What was the tipping point?
Personally, I think the tipping point was Tony Stubblebine’s CrowdVine. I tracked the numbers during registration and like most events, there is an inflection point. In our case, that tipping point was when the CrowdVine social network came online. I believe this supports my theory that micro social networks are more powerful than horizontal, generalistics networks.
We blogged about it and encouraged people to use it — and they did. What I started doing was regularly checking back to see who had joined, what they were interested in, what their personal blogs looked like and what they were blogging about – if they blogged. This was powerful, it was addictive, and I felt like I was getting to know people – even before meeting a single new person at the event.
Like any event, the more people that started to hear about it and tell others, the faster registrations came in. We went from 0 to 250 registrations in 25 calendar days; 3 calendar weeks. Our final pre-registration count was 280.
Not bad for the first social media mashup in the South.
See you at SoCon08.
technorati tags: socon07, atlanta, georgia, unconference, socon08
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