A Month of Conferences and Confabs

November has been a month of conferences for AO. First, there was GLSEC (Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference), an event put on by SoftwareGR (formerly XP West Michigan) dedicated to improving the competitiveness of Michigan’s software development community. In addition to our involvement with GLSEC, the two weeks leading up to Thanksgiving have seen six atoms attend five different conferences, from JRubyConf in San Francisco to the World Bank conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

I count myself among those 6 atoms. Last week Thursday I attended the Social Media Confab put on by aimWest. Topics included social media policy, tracking and analytics, personal branding, and many other takes on social media and business. The keynote speaker for the conference was Laura Fitton, Twitter-user extraordinaire and principal of Pistachio Consulting, a Twitter-for-business consulting firm. Other speakers included Jen Stone from Google, Tom Chisholm of Facebook, and some local social media talents, like Jeff Hill of Rapid Growth Media and Josh Depenbrok of grnow.com. See a complete list here.

The conference was an interesting experiment in what can happen when you gather a group of social media enthusiasts together and allow them to interact face to face. While some hid behind laptops, silently tweeting their observations, many embraced the chance to put a larger-than-avatar face on their Twitter followers. The conference brought all kinds – veteran 2004 Facebook users and brand new tweeple with four registered tweets – but the general atmosphere was one of anticipation. Can this really work for my business? Is this my chance to achieve “grassroot success on a shoestring budget?”

Using social media for business is a relatively new idea in marketing, and I was glad to see Grand Rapids host a conference addressing it. I hope that it is indicative of a strong future for West Michigan’s economy and technological innovation.