MediaSense is a new social media conference put on by Hal Josephson, a Hawke’s Bay entrepreneur, impresario and top bloke.

For me, this was a fantastic chance to meet folk I don’t normally meet, with people from all around the country attending. The Bay was well represented and I was most impressed with the locals’ friendliness and enthusiasm. These guys have secured interesting and challenging jobs or taken the plunge and started their own businesses in an area notorious for a vibrant food and drink scene. It had me scratching my chin several times about life outside Auckland. Hmmm. Needless to say, we were well looked after eating and drinking-wise, enjoying the hospitality of the Craggy Range and Black Barn vineyards, who hosted the event itself.

I was there as the corporate perspective in the local case studies section, along with  Tim and Matt from Uprise, Jayson Bryant, Tom from Catalyst 90 and Kayla from Mini Monos.

My case study was crisis communication. I told our earthquake story, which has some solid examples of the power of using social networks, and is a neat way to outline our approach in general. I think I got points for being honest(!), and I was pleased to get some  thoughtful anecdotal and online feedback.

I throughly enjoyed the afternoon panel hosted by Nat Torkington and featuring Xero’s Rod Dury, Matthew Miller from Mogul websites and Paul Brislen from TUANZ – local examples almost always give me more takeaways than any other section of an event like this. I was hugely impressed with Matt from Mogul’s common sense approach to social – it’s easy to overthink this stuff. Like Telecom, Xero is a heavy Yammer user, interestingly. I enjoyed Paul’s war stories from his the early days of doing this at Voda – can relate!

A nervous glass of water before speaking, while wishing I’d chosen more irreverent footwear like Jayson and Paul. Photo credit: @gnat.

It was observed that Twitter was roughly 70% of the conversation, but someone did point out you need to look at it in context with all social channels available to achieve your goals, especially the lesser known ones like TradeMe forums, even databases and email! Karen Leland gave her two hot tips for PR in social media as 1. pick up the phone, and 2. go to lunch. I liked that.

Full credit, as they say, to Hal and Odette for putting on a thoroughly valuable and enjoyable event, with some fantastic hospitality and conversations the night before, during and in the bar afterwards – I hope to be involved in some capacity next year. Recommended.

PS I need to mention Tweet2Eat – if you’re in the Bay, you MUST follow for all your food and drink recommendation requirements.

OK, so it turns out I’m a Social Media conference slag. Hot on the heels of the last one, I packed my little bag and headed to Sydney for iStragegy 2010. Travelling with work is still a novelty to me, I haven’t really got that whole, jaded “Oh GOD, not Sydney AGAIN!” thing down – I was very excited to go. We stayed in the lovely Sheraton On the Park, as part of the conference, and while it was a fabulously well appointed hotel, we didn’t see much of Sydney itself at all. Next time.

The speakers were slightly more international, as you’d expect, with representatives from Microsoft and Google, as well as Australian companies like Red Balloon, Fox Sports, Commonwealth Bank, Earth Hour and Contagious Communications, to name just a few. Topics were skewed toward marketing online, as well as using social in corporates, the bit I was interested in.

I learned heaps – main points were these (your views may vary, depending on your context, etc):

No one person ‘owns’ social media in a corporate – it sits across too many disciplines. You can have people there to guide it, but it’s a team effort

Facebook and Twitter are just tactics, your approach and strategy need to be broader than just having a presence in these channels

Often social values of openness and sharing are diametrically opposed to corporate values of intellectual property and retaining information to gain commercial advantage – it’s a big leap to make to be a truly social organisation

Agencies can be hard – they’re not there every day. We need to challenge agencies to think end to end, and long term, not just by campaign; customers need the same message from us no matter what channel, ie web, social, bus shelter, mobile, video game, tv, radio, print, PR

One of the most interesting presentations was from Myspace – yes, Myspace. If you haven’t had a look at their site lately, go have a look, it’s changed loads, going from 130 logos and 170 templates to one logo and seven templates, add their agreement with Facebook mean your profile can auto-populate with your Facebook likes.They’re attempting to become first social network to turn around a huge failure. Worth a look.

Other stuff:

Check out @kellynoble’s twitter updates to find out pretty much everything that happened at the conference. Good god, this woman can tweet.

Gatorade Replay was one of the case studies – this looks awesome.

Adam Burns MC’d the conference with style and a dry wit. Give him a TV show! Hang on – he has one!

I won a totally sweet Four Square apron, for leaving the best iStrategy tip. Ahem. I am now mayor of wherever I go, pretty much.

Thoughts from Social Media Junction.

I had my first experience at *talking* at a conference in my new role as Telecom’s Online Community Comms Manager – that’s community manager in less words. The theme was “Kiwi brands and social media – differing ways to achieve ROI”, along with folk from Hell, Tui, Bullet PR and the awesome @simonemccallum. I thought I went OK – I got to say most of the things I wanted to, and tell our Online Response Team story. I worry about the wild variation in the companies involved, ie two corporates, a PR agency and beer and pizza. Different perspectives I guess.

Non-attendees were tweeting they didn’t want updates from a conference they weren’t at – and taking the piss. That was funny, because I was, ah, taking the piss last time. Ah har. To me, the most value in conference tweets comes from people adding their own commentary to what’s going on, and even having conversations with each other, not parroting what the speakers are saying. I appreciate that non-contextual tweets are annoying if you’re not involved. I guess the options are to do some kind of clever blocking thing in tweet deck, or just, like, skim over the tagged ones – aren’t we web 2.0 types meant to be information scanning ninjas?

There was a projector displaying the hashtagged tweets up in the wall, in full view of us panelists. I tell you what, I was watching that thing like a hawk for ‘@telecomnz has fliez down lol’ or the like. Distracting. Luckily it went down only a few minutes into our preso…

My top three presenters were Louise Denver from Deloitte (check out their preso), Simon Wakeman from Medway council, who has similar issues with Facebook groups to us (“Medway Council are fuckin shit” was one that caught my eye) and Darren Whitelaw, who presented on Victorian bushfire crisis comms. For me, shit hitting fan usually means it’s going to be an exciting day at work, so Darren’s presentation was very valuable. In all three, it seems these organisations were experiencing similar issues to us.

No-one’s got measurement sorted out. Felt like people were waiting for a silver bullet, but you’d be better off with this. Drawing board.

I’m crap at networking. I like talking to people, I don’t like saying ‘excuse me, I want to stop talking to you and go talk to… those people over there’. Still, I didn’t get to talk to everyone I wanted to – next time.

Fontcapture makes an honest to goodness font out of your handwriting. It’s actually quite a weird feeling to see a whole page of your writing you didn’t write.

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny’s

via B3ta

Dark Night Of The Soul, the collaboration between DangerMouse and Sparklehorse is available on teh torrents (it’s a *very* quick download).

The album will be released as a blank CD-R to Stick It To The Man – The Guardian has more.

Merlin Mann and John Gruber on Turbocharging your blogs with credibility.

When two of the smartest internet guys around talk, you should listen, really.

How to make hard drives even sexier than they already are.