ProductCamp Atlanta Recap: The UnConference Experience

We came…we saw…we survived our first unconference AND more importantly our first speaking-at-a-conference experience. This past Saturday, we attended ProductCamp Atlanta and, along with our good friend Mami2Mommy, Jennifer Hutcheson, we conducted a panel/roundtable discussion on social media marketing.

As you may remember, we’ve been doing a bit of research on the unconference concept. Well, reading about it and actually doing it are two completely different things to say the least. But we have to say, it was pretty cool.

Upon entering the event, we received three blue stickers with our registration badges. The blue stickers were “votes” to select which sessions we were interested in attending. Yes, there was voting done ahead of time (and thank you all for voting and helping to spread the word about our topic) but that was merely to spark interest. We wouldn’t know until we got there if we actually would have a session or not. On the wall in the lobby area were sheets of paper –one for each session and that’s where you put your little blue sticker. The room was buzzing with a New York Stock Exchange type frenzy as presenters lobbied their topics and participants debated the best use of their blue stickers. To say we were shocked when we looked up to see our sheet completely covered in blue dots would be an understatement! From there, the votes were tallied and the popular sessions were assigned time slots and meeting rooms.

Though our initial thought was to have a formal presentation for our session, we realized that our final decision to be more interactive and have more of a “conversation” was definitely the better choice.  Sure, slides may have helped a bit but as we got to know our audience we were able to focus more on what the majority of the group wanted to know.  To put it simply, our forty-five minute discussion was mostly about making a business/corporate blog useful and engaging with your audience.  Truthfully, forty-five minutes is really not enough time…another reason to be glad we didn’t have slides.  Several post-session side conversations later and a check of the twitter stream showed that our first time out of the gate was not too shabby.

Meeting the folks on the product management, product development/design, and internal product marketing side of the house was an invaluable experience and opened doors to new possibilities for our business.  Many of the people in our session represented products that were not “mainstream” consumer goods which was a vastly different “audience” for us as we are used to communicating with Public Relations professionals and fellow blogger-marketers.  Most of them did not know that blogger-marketers existed.  Just as our eyes were opened to their world, their eyes were opened to ours and a mutual respect was gained.

The ChatterBox:
1 – The format for this unconference was really cool.  The informal style is very conducive to networking and collaboration.  I left there feeling that I learned something and made an accomplishment (I wrote the final session schedules).  I also left with more ideas… so get ready!
2 – Never brand yourself as “The ChatterBox” because you’ll always be the one picked to do the impromptu (and completely unexpected) 30 second pitch to the entire conference for your intended session.
3 – Humor always works when you’re nervous…and so does strong deodorant.
4 – Thank goodness we got ProductCamp t-shirts! Perfect for when you spill coffee down your sweater right before your session. Unless you’re me and you spill coffee on the t-shirt too.
5 – I’m glad I had my girls with me.  There’s no way in the world I would have been able to do this with out you two!

AskWifey: 

1 – There are still a tremendous amount of people that are still not involved in social media, mainly because they don’t fully understand it’s capabilities 
2 – Atlanta has a lot of entrepreneurs! 
3 – Not to fear speaking at an “unconference”.  It’s a lot less intimidating than a regular conference atmosphere. 
4 – To speak up when on a panel! Hello, can you say deer in headlights?   (Um, don’t let her fool you, she did fine!)  
5 – The BlogRollers know there stuff and I walked away from this admiring them even more. (Aw, shucks…thanks)  

ProductCamp Atlanta will be back again this August.  Taking cues from this experience and knowing there is so much more we will have learned and accomplished by then, we hope to bring even more to this awesome group of people the next go round.