Media09 – The Highlights

Since this was the first one I’ve even been to, I wasn’t sure what to expect at this year’s Media09 gathering. Aside from Nic Newman and Francisco Cordera, I hadn’t come across any of the other speakers but thought that having a look was probably worthwhile based on my boss’ recommendation.

I’m glad I did go– the diverse plethora of talks from head honchos across USA and UK were insightful, entertaining and more importantly, localized to the Australian media audience. If I was to wrap up the key takeouts from the day, this are:

• Context is now king (and so is engagement)
• Consumers of media are now effective ‘curators’ of content
• Social media doesn’t need to be sociable, yet social experience revolves around the content experience
• Media is now richer than ever, it’s global yet personal and it involves the community – the social element

For more details from the day, see below!

Media09 Wrap up p3 - Context & Widgets

Obama: Grassroots Campaign at its Best

From here onwards, Tweets were flying left right and centre for #media09. Ben Self from Blue State Digital led Obama’s grassroots campaign which reached the scales of 15m views for the 1,800 videos created and achieved $US770m worth of funding, 65% of which was raised online by 3.2 donors.

Secret to success? Lower your barrier to entry by:

• Getting the community involved (participation and engagement). The campaign effectively recruited the audience to target the voter. Supporters also had the tools, a ‘MyCampaign’ like site that helped them manage activities and funding, including a prospect list containing which should be targeted by geography and demograghy
• Mobilisation of grassroots, making it personal by allowing people to blog about Obama on a regular basis (100K individuals involved)

The essence of the campaign focused on creating passion first before applying any technologies to the mix – raise interest before you think about making the experience an awesome one.

Content is so 80’s: context is now King

Meg Pickard, the head of Communities and User Experience then took stage with her gems on social media. Great succinct statements and useful engagement models made up this talk:
Social media doesn’t need to be sociable
Embrace things that already exist – recreation is not always necessary, drawing on Guardian’s recent compilation of ‘Message for Obama’ pics across the globe using Flickr & Blurb.com).
Generating goodwill comes about from collaboration

The content flowchart: consume --> react --> curate (eg. Delicious) --> create

‘Do what you do best and link with the rest’ and ‘find things people are interested in and get them to talk about it in your media’ are great mantras to go by.


Widgetbox – connecting users to their ‘third place’

The last speaker I heard was Will Price – started off a bit dry with definitions around the existence of a third place, an informal gathering venue outside of work and home – for Will, social media was asserted as this new neighbourhood pub that fosters human relationships, with Twitter being a great example of this.

The turning point though was when he localized his widget demo to suck in feeds from SMH, You Tube, RSS and Twitter’s #media09 feed that the true value of his widgets came to being.