Attended PUBCON Conference

For the last three days, I’ve been attending the PUBCON conference in Las Vegas.  It’s been a great conference with much information on social media, social networking and emerging technologies.

The first eye-opener for me was Twitter.  I have a much better knowledge and understanding of it, and the importance of it’s usage in today’s business world.  Previously, I  believed that it was primarily something that techies did, but this shows me that Twitter is actively being used for many, many areas of peoples lives that are certainly not tech related.

It was quite apparent that Twitter users were in abundance at this conference.  The PUBCON welcome poster included how to keep updated on Twitter while you’re in the meetings.

Using the Twitter search feature at search.twitter.com, I searched the term “pubcon” and found recent posts by other twitter users in attendance.  But what surprised me is a few seconds latter, the page updated and said that there were four new posts and to click ‘refresh’ to see them.  (There were about 1,000 people attending this event.)  I waited another 30 seconds and noticed there were 24 new posts to see.

People were posting to Twitter before, during and after the seminars.  Some would post what they liked about the seminar, or if the room was too cold or maybe if there were not any seats left.  Other posts were about upcoming events and some would offer more insights on what the speaker was talking about. 

I couldn’t watch the Twitters for long because they would come very fast and it was distracting me from listing to the speaker myself.

So, back to the conference.  One speaker today made this quote: “Remember, social media is all about communication and engagement”.   Its not about your product that you’re trying to sell.  Another speaker said “If you’re doing any type of online marketing, you need to be engaging social media”.  And use social media to let people know who you are and to get noticed.

I found it interesting when one speaker gave an example about how useful social media is when a business needs to combat negative publicity.  Might need to give this some more thought.

Also, made some other observations on the use of technology in use by attendees, but I’ll save that for another blog.