Triangle Tech Week Wrap-Up

This past week was Triangle Tech Week (search #tritech), where we had social media or technology events every day this week in the Triangle region (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) of North Carolina. It was a long week, and considering that me and my OurHashtag partners planned several of them, I have been resting and recovering today. The following tweet from @theRab lists all the events. He worked very hard to get six events listed in 140 characters. He was very proud of the tweet and other retweeted it.

Monday: Triangle Tweetup

While the last Triangle Tweetup (search #triangletweetup) had over 250 people, we had a “flash” Triangle Tweetup to kick off the week at Edge Office in Glenwood South in Downtown Raleigh. We announced it Monday morning.

We started by congratulating Jazzy Chad on his new gig with Twitter. Don’t worry, he’s staying in Raleigh, and will be helping them out part-time. According to this blog post, Chad was such an integral part of the Twitter community in both his creation of Tweetgrid and his customer support, that Twitter took notice.

We talked about the use of professional tools for Twitter. We discussed the features and benefits of CoTweet, HootSuite, TweetGrid and Seismic. We talked about how these different tools allow organizations to manage incoming and outgoing tweets for customer service, and how to implement that into a business workflow.

Tuesday: Westend Tweetup

On Tuesday, we gathered at Carrboro Creative Coworking for the first Westend Tweetup (search #westendtweetup). This gathering of Chapel Hill/Carrboro Twitter users and those looking to learn more about Twitter was organized by Greg deLima. Wayne Sutton led a discussion based on a Twitter presentation he gave 2 years ago. It was interesting to see that much about the Twitter world had not changed. An awful lot of the infrastructure of the platform and core users were in place at that time. Sure, some logos had changed, many more tools are available to interface with Twitter, but the principles of building a following and engaging have not changed.

Wednesday: Ignite Raleigh

Our big event for the week was Ignite Raleigh, and we had approximately 500 people join us at the Lincoln Theatre in downtown Raleigh. Ignite events happen all over the world and they are about sharing ideas in a simple format. The tag line is “Enlighten us, but make it quick.” Each presenter gets 5 minutes and 20 slides to share their ideas. And the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. 10 speakers were chosen by the community through an open voting process, and 5 speakers were selected by the organizers. We asked Zach Ward of DSI Comedy Theater in Carrboro to MC, and he did a fabulous job.

The event also included internet comic musicians Rhett and Link and DJ Rosseau spinning tunes throughout the event.

The Carolina Rollergirls helped us out by introducing the sponsor commercials and announcing the door prize winners. They did not skate around, but they did chase a few people around.

Here is a link to the presenters and their presentations, and here’s a link to the list of blog posts and other online coverage of the event. As organizers, there are certainly some things we could have done better, as there always are, but overall the event was a great success. Everyone seemed leave entertained, inspired and in an upbeat mood. Sounds like a success to me. We are already planning the next Ignite.

Thursday: Triangle Social Media Club

Photo by Wayne Sutton

On Thursday we hosted a Triangle Social Club at iContact in Durham which featured a demo of Google Wave by Jay Cuthrell. Jay attended the Google Wave announcement event and has been using the Dev Preview of Google’s new development platform that will bring email, documents and collaboration together. An ongoing thread or conversation is called a wave, and new information is tracked as it is added to the wave, so someone can view later everything that was contributed in the order it was added. We also heard about bots that can be added to waves with stupid names like spelly and linky. There are also annoying bots that convert a wave to pirate speak or show everything in comic speech balloons. Here’s Jay’s presentation, but the real interest of the meeting was in seeing wave in action.

Friday: BarcampRDU Pre-party

The night before BarcampRDU there is a traditional gathering for beer. This year was no exception and it occurred at Raleigh’s Flying Saucer.

Saturday: BarcampRDU

This was my first year attending BarcampRDU. My schedule had never worked out previously, but I also always thought it was too technical. There was a big development crowd there, but I attended sessions on marketing, startups, Google Wave (presented by a guy from Google who is based in Chapel Hill), and a Geek Dad one. I also lead a session titled “Potpourri for $500,” which I will discuss in a separate post. A big shoutout to Dave Johnson and all the other organizers and volunteers for a great unconference.

The crowd learning about Google Wave

The session grid

The last men standing. Wayne and I were the only ones who attended all 6 events of Triangle Tech Week and we were exhausted. If anyone else had joined us at all 6 events and appeared in this photo, they would have received a prize. Since we would be the ones presenting the prize, we did not bother giving it to ourselves.

If you attended any of the events of Triangle Tech Week, or even just followed them online, we hope you met some new people, learned some new things and were inspired by the community here in North Carolina’s Triangle.

Opening a Box of Chocolate from Mars

The Triangle Social Media Club recently received a box of chocolate, as part of the Real Chocolate Relief Act, from the Mars company to share at an upcoming meeting. The above video shows us opening the box and diving into the candy.

Triangle Social Media Club: Listening and Engaging with Social Media

Last week’s Social Media Club featured a discussion about using tools to monitor conversations about yourself, your company or your brand on the social web. Listening is the first step of any social media campaign. It is also known as conversation tracking or reputation management.

Every day your customers prospects are using online forums, social networks, blogs, chat rooms and leaving comments across various platforms. While using these services people are having thousands of conversations online daily. By listening to these conversations and engaging, you can build valuable relationships which lead to new business and sales. We heard several examples of listening to competitors online to gain inside information about website updates, potential product releases and out of town sales calls.

Thanks to Nathan Gilliatt who jumped in and led the discussion on the benefits of using paid monitoring tools, rather than the free tools. It is mainly an issue of scale, and the amount of web chatter surrounding your company or brand. He suggested using a free tool like Blogpulse or getting a free trial on paid tool like Techrigy to determine the level of monitoring required. Rather than post a long list of links as promised, here’s a link to Nathan’s post about monitoring tools and here’s a post from Social Media Today with an even longer list of tools.

Whether you’re a startup or Fortune 500 company, as you begin to explore or implement a social media strategy for your company, you should include an engagement policy. By having an engagement policy in place, you’ll establish how you will communicate with customers and prospects online. We shared good and bad examples of customer service using social media. Companies’ use ranges from active customer service like Dell to active listeners like @OmniHotels (ask @JeffTippett about his new robe), all the way to non-responsive companies like now Cisco-owned Pure Digital, makers of Kipp’s faulty Flip Camera.

We talked about finding thought leaders in your industry using LinkedIn, blogs, and human connections. Twitter is a noisy channel to follow the thoughts of thought leaders, but may be an easy way to find them.

It is also important to have an overall social media policy, and many cited IBM as a good example that many people use as a starting point for their own policies. It should be noted that this is a living, online document that is updated as changes happen in the social web space, and not a printed document sitting in a binder on someone’s shelf.

Thanks again to everyone who came out and participated in our discussion. Triangle Social Media Club meetings are all about sharing your thoughts and ideas about Social Media with others, whether you are a veteran or just starting out.