Web 2.0 Expo: Day One
- Posted November 18th, 2009
- Filed under: Events/Presentation
I thought I’d share some quicklights from yesterday’s sessions at Web 2.0 Expo. I started at Kristina Halvorson’s “Content First: Why Content Strategy Will Save the Web” (view her presentation here), where she talked about how crucially important your content is and how often it’s the last thing companies plan for or think about especially when coming up with a “social media strategy”.
We’re guilty of this ourselves when we make site changes: often I’ll get a design to review that includes placeholder text “words go here” or “blah blah blah”, which as a writer I’ve always found kind of funny. But words matter and should absolutely be part of your planning and design process and even your usability testing.
Halvorson also talked about how things like Facebook and Twitter and blogs are only tools, that what’s important are the words you’re putting out there, reflecting your brand. If you put something up in a social media space, she notes, you become a publisher. Halvorson should a couple examples of old YouTube sites for forgotten corporate contests and mentioned how, if you don’t maintain your content in all the places you rush out to add it, it lives on out there without you, reflecting your brand.
A key takeaway from this session for me was the importance of creating a content inventory, which simply lists all the places where your content lives so none of it gets forgotten and languishes. She suggested looking on Google for guidance on getting a content inventory set up.
The next session was Tara Hunt’s “The Whuffie Factor”, which is based on her book of the same name about using social networks to build your business. She switched it up, though and gave a slightly different presentation. She did talk a lot about engaging customers, but was more focused on what’s next in this space. It’s not enough, she said, for a brand to simply be on Twitter, nor is it scalable to think that you can support a growing customer base there. She mentioned how people in social media are quick to hold up examples like Comcast as being wildly successful with using social media, but that if you dig a little deeper there are issues there (customers only using Twitter to vent, companies not responding to every issue etc.)
My favorite part of yesterday’s sessions though was hearing Chris Brogan’s talk “They Shall Know Us by Our Dialtone”. Chris is a great speaker and almost everything he says is tweet-worthy. But I was especially excited when he mentioned that he uses BatchBook to manage his contact database. Chris has been a customer for a while and he mentions us often, but it was really fun to be in the same room when someone’s advocating using your product you’ve worked so hard on building.
Tonight is our Small Business Web-up, so I’ll have pictures from that and more to report. I’m tweeting from @mriggen and the hashtag from the session is #w2e if you want to follow along!
Thanks for the great write-up Michelle. I’ve been thinking a lot about the content factor for our company as well. Carving out the time to craft it is a constant challenge, but it is so necessary.
Thank you Bryan! Glad you found it useful. I went to an AWESOME session today from Adaptive Path but don’t have time to get notes up. Will work on it tomorrow on the train