If You’re Reading This, Then Have I Got a Tip for YOU…

By Tim Wilson, Bulldog Solutions

I’ll be moderating the “Social Media: Getting the Word Out in the New Information Age” panel from 3:30 to 4:45 at the 2008 Crossroads Conference. I’m looking forward to it!

Are you already using social media in your work? That’s a trick question. You’re reading this entry, so you’ve already engaged in one form of social media — reading blogs falls under the broad range of web-based activities that make up the domain of social media. Of course, so does commenting on blogs, authoring blog content, or jumping into Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life, Twitter, friendfeed, Idendti.ca, del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg, Pownce, Plurk, MySpace, Squidoo, Technorati, Utterz, Brightkite, Digsby, or any of dozens hundreds of other sites/tools/technologies.

But, this session isn’t going to be about rattling off and explaining all of the social media sites and technologies. Rather, it’s going to be a panel focused (we hope…but it’s a panel, so you will have a lot of control as to what we cover) on hearing real-world stories from experts about what, why, and how they started using social media and what they’ve learned from the experience. I, of course, am hoping that we get a few good, juicy blunders out of the panel as well, as those can often be more useful (and more entertaining!) than the successes.

The blunders might be a bit hard to come by, though, as we’ve got a maven-filled panel that spans the full spectrum of experiences in this new and ever-morphing world of social media:

• David Neff — Director of Web, Film and Interactive Strategy for the American Cancer Society; you can get a sense of David, his take on social media, and his personality through the videos on his blog, or you can check him out on Twitter.
• Heidi Adams — Founder and Executive Director of Planet Cancer; she’s got a blog, too…but, more importantly, her organization is a social network, and it’s an example of social media at its absolute best
• Connie Reece — Founder of Every Dot Connects, a consortium of independent social media practitioners and consultants…who also just so happened to have founded the Frozen Pea Fund, which is a heckuva story of social media in action (and it’s a story where Connie’s Twitter activity played a pivotal role)

Not really by design, but we wound up with a panel that can talk about cancer and cancer-oriented nonprofits in depth and at length. More interestingly, though, they’ve all applied social media in a variety of ways to both be more effective in their professional lives and to make the world a better place. What I hope you will take away from the panel is that there are myriad ways to use social media in your work and in your life, as well as how easy it is to get started, regardless of your organization’s focus.

A Final Word: Social Media Can Make Crossroads 2008 and Your Experience BETTER

Social media is all about engaging in meaningful conversations. This blog, it turns out, is a potentially great example. Given the title, description, and panelists in this post, what suggestions do you have for this session? Are there burning questions you would like answered? Make a comment and let us and other readers know. Or, if you’re already on Twitter or want to join, send me a tweet or a direct message. Or e-mail me at: tim at gilliganondata.com. Whatever is fastest and easiest for you. We’ll listen and we’ll respond. And the session will be better for it.

Other sessions will have blog entries here, too, and you can do the same thing to engage those presenters and panelists prior to September 25th. Subscribe to this blog, at least from now until the conference (that link will let you subscribe through RSS as well as give you the option to get blog updates via e-mail), and chime in if you see anything of interest.

I’m looking forward to the session. I hope to see you there!