Social Media Day

Today was a day full of social media discussions with several strong take-aways. I started the day out at the Ohio Digital Government Summit held at the Greater Columbus Convention Center.

The event opened with speaker Woody Norris – woodynorris.com giving a fantastic view of new technologies spanning the gambit from sound to medtech that we can expect to see in the very near future. Futurist speakers such as Mr. Norris may not be giving you a specific solution for your current situation but hopefully they open your mind; giving you the opportunity to think more strategically about your situation with an eye to more innovative solutions.

Hillary Hartley with NIC, Inc hillaryhartley.com gave a wonderful primer about Web 2.0 and how government should consider using the tools we all use in our personal lives to make things easier, more enjoyable and just better. An interesting use of twitter that she made mention of was the use of the tool by fire and police to announce situations they were responding to. I attended this workshop primarily to learn how to give a high level discussion that may help convince management that these tools should be considered (a struggle I’ve been having at the office). I really appreciated the tactic she took of using the basic WHO, WHAT, WHERE and WHY method of discussing Web 2.0 strategy. At the end of this session I was given the opportunity to invite all of the other attendees to the Columbus Social Media Cafe meetup that also occurred today.

The afternoon at the Digital Government Summit was much more subdued and provided fewer examples that resonated with me. Interestingly though was just the fact that social media tools and mashups continued to come up throughout the day which seems to mean that government, a decade late, may be almost ready to embrace Web 2.0 as we start entering a Web 3.0 or Semantic Web world.

This evening was the September Columbus Social Media Cafe meetup. Once again we had a room full of new faces with a strong showing of us regulars as well. We met at the Upper Arlington Public Library and the focus of the discussion was the Ohio State University’s social media and web strategy. Shaun Halloway recently joined the Fisher College of Business in a Web Management role. Shaun has been a member of the CSMC since its inception and it was great to have him lead a discussion about his day gig and the effect it has on our community at large. Ted Hattimer, also a member of OSU’s web strategy and development team provided a glimpse at some of the schools new and traditional media marketting tactics. All in all I think the discussion was very useful, particularly in gaining a better understanding of where large organizations stand in regards to their comfort level with these online communities and how they may utilize these communities to work in conjunction with the local community.

Some things on the horizon that need to be noted are the upcoming blog the debate event at WOSU@COSI next week, Neil Cohen will be on hand to help facilitate the discussion both online and off. The Columbus Social Media Cafe will be posting its schedule for the next few months as we have setup some fantastic guest speakers. Take a look at socialmediacafe.wordpress.com for more information. A new website is on the way and a fantastic new logo was created by our friends at WOSU.