Mark your calendar! CustomScoop is proud to once again be a sponsor of the Maine Public Relations Council’s Annual Conference. This year’s conference will be held on October 15, 2009 at the Wyndham Hotel in South Portland. They have a great line-up of speakers, including Peter Shankman of HARO fame!
This is a great local event and is always a lot of fun. I know I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at the event. For more information, please visit the Maine Public Relations Council website.
March 27, 2009 admin
Blog,Events
This morning I attended the 2nd Social Media Breakfast NH. It was my first Social Media Breakfast, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, it was a great event! Social Media Enabler Extraordinaire, Leslie Poston (@geechee_girl) did a fabulous job in organizing the event and bringing in high quality presenters and attendees. Nice work Leslie!
While all the presenters were good, to me the highlight was Martin Murray from Public Service of New Hampshire. He talked about how they used Twitter during the power outages in December 2008 to deliver messages and answer questions from customers while the electricity was out in New Hampshire. It was a great way for them to reach thousands of people and deliver near real time updates. Martin also shared how PSNH is using Flickr and YouTube as additional social media tools to reach their customers. Nice work PSNH!!
I was also impressed with the other attendees at the event, and the time we had to network was great. It was invigorating and exciting to hear how so many different New Hampshire companies are integrating Social Media into their businesses. It also confirms our commitment at CustomScoop to continue expanding our coverage of monitoring social media for our customers. We were proud to be the sponsor of the Social Media Breakfast NH and look forward to the next event. Hopefully, we'll see you there too!
Ps. If you want to see the slides and audio from the event, click here.
October 29, 2007 admin
Blog,Events
Podcamp Boston 2 wrapped up yesterday, and I had the great pleasure to be in attendance. Many, many thanks go to Chris Brogan and Chris Penn (and countless others) for putting together such a stellar weekend. I hope the other attendees got as much out of it as I did!
I hope to cover a number of topics from the weekend, and do a few more posts in the next couple of days (a “shout out” post in particular with lots of juicy link love for all the awesome people I met for the first time, and all the awesome people I already knew but got to spend some more time with), but let’s begin with a few simple takeaways:
This community is powerful.
See Chris Brogan’s post on one of the “products” of PodCamp, LOL Saur. Basically, some PodCampers put their heads together, and within a couple of hours (seriously) had a new site up paying tribute to those infamous LOL Cats.
The site is…well, it’s not the greatest. The jokes could be better, and the “LOL + something” meme is kind of played out in my opinion.
Chris makes an extremely valid point: it’s not whether the site “deserved” to make the front page of Digg within hours (which it did), it’s that the site was a brilliant experiment showcasing the power of the PodCamp community when they put their creative minds to work. To go from a silly joke to making the front page of a site like Digg in mere hours is pretty huge, even if the content itself isn’t exactly genius.
All about the benjamins, baby.
As I said in my PR Blog Jots this morning, “The idea of money hung in the air throughout the conference as participants wondered about the future monetization of social media, podcasting in particular.”
Nearly every in-depth discussion I participated in managed to incorporate money somehow, and there were several sessions dedicated solely to monetization issues. Podcasting was a hot topic; particularly how to monetize it when it has not yet hit the mainstream. And what was the answer?
(crickets)
That’s a bit dramatic, but I didn’t hear anything concrete, and what concerns me most is why there appears to be so much urgency surrounding the money issue. Why take something that has enriched our personal and professional lives and grow obsessed with how to commercialize it? That may sound hippie-hippie-dreamerish to some, but Mitch Joel rightly points out in his post over the weekend that for most people, podcasting is merely a hobby. Why can’t we just leave it at that? Am I naïve?
Conversations Friendships
Rooming with the lovely Christi Eubanks of Converseon, I spent a lot of time with her and her fellow presenters for Sunday’s “Reputation Management for Digital Natives” session (more on that and other sessions in a future post).
At one point, Paull Young nixed using the word “conversation” and suggested “friendship” instead. His feeling was that conversation had become too much of a PodCamp buzz word.
I’m on the fence about whether conversation is a cliché (my history in politics only reinforces the notion that when you are so sick to death of hearing something it makes you want to vomit, the general public is just starting to absorb it), but agree that highlighting the relationships we form at events like these is essential.
If one thing is certain, it’s that I left PodCamp with many, many new friends. Not “online” friends or “Facebook” friends that I never actually talk to…just friends. They are friends that may also be “contacts” beneficial to my professional life, but they are creative, thoughtful, fiercely intelligent, passionate individuals who I am just grateful to know, regardless of what I do for a living.
As much as I enjoyed every session I attended, I find that the true value of PodCamp (for me) is welcoming new friends who share my passions into my crazy, wonderful, little life.
Welcome! And if I didn’t get a chance to meet you, I’m currently trying to pick the next PodCamp I’d like to attend (seeing chatter about both Toronto and Nashville), so who knows, maybe we’ll get another chance.
Much, much more on PodCamp to come, hopefully soon!
Tags: Podcamp Boston, Chris Brogan, Chris Penn, Christi Eubanks, Paull Young, Mike Denton, podcasting, monetization, social media
January 30, 2007 Sara Adams
Events
On Friday, January 26th we attended a PRSA Boston event titled, “Tools of the Trade.” The purpose of the event was to introduce local public relations professionals to some of the products available to them.
We decided to exhibit at the event in an effort to be more active in our local PR community. The Boston chapter of PRSA was very open to having us participate in new and exciting ways in their organization, so look for CustomScoop at more upcoming chapter events.
Registration was estimated at roughly 100+ people, but I’m not sure if we saw that many cycle through the room at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel. The most likely culprit was the weather with the high for the day barely breaking into the double-digits – many visitors told us it was difficult to find a cab.
Overall, we felt it was worthwhile to attend. I always appreciate the opportunity to meet and speak with the people who currently use or could potentially use our product and hear their pain points and goals.
Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth!
