I attended my first con­fer­ence last week­end! Blog­gers from all across Indi­ana (and even some Cincin­nati folk) came together to dis­cuss blog­ging and social media. I thought the over­all expe­ri­ence was great! I met some other blog­gers that I may never have known about and some I had no idea were in my own back­yard.

My main rea­son for attend­ing was to gain expo­sure to local tech com­pa­nies. ChaCha is the only Indi­ana based tech com­pany I hear about and keep tabs on, mostly because I interned with them last sum­mer. Every so often my mom will email me about some new start-up by Infor­mat­ics grads, but for the most part I don’t hear about com­pa­nies I would want to work for after I graduate.

The con­fer­ence offered three dif­fer­ent “tracks” you could fol­low (basics, busi­ness, and gen­eral) but you bounce around if a speaker or topic inter­ested you. I tended to stay away from the busi­ness track since it was mainly aimed at cor­po­ra­tions, but I did do a good bit of bounc­ing around and get­ting a taste of every­thing. It was a lot like being back in class– half pay­ing atten­tion, poor slides, mul­ti­task­ing on my phone or lap­top. The most inter­est­ing part was fol­low­ing everyone’s activ­ity on Twit­ter. I’ll sum­ma­rize the rest based on my tweets:

Swung by Dunkin Donuts on my way to the @blogin­di­ana con­fer­ence at. IUPUI

I fell in love this week with Dunkin Donuts coffee.

First talk — Legal Issues in Blog­ging. Lots of chicks turned out for this “Sili-corn Val­ley” conference

I thought the “Sili-corn Val­ley” was a nice touch in the morn­ing announce­ments. After tak­ing Legal and Social Infor­mat­ics in the Spring semes­ter, I was inter­ested to see what they might cover. It was mostly a review of copy­right law (don’t use what isn’t yours), but I was curi­ous about form­ing an LLC for legal protection. Andrew Paradies, who led the talk, made some good points on why to have one, but it was a bit much for a col­lege kid like me. 

Oops, looks like I didn’t tweet for my sec­ond talk about “Writ­ing for Blogs”. It was sim­ple stuff, but after only writ­ing col­lege papers and essays for the last few years it was good to be reminded that sim­plic­ity goes a long way.

Sit­ting patiently for the panel on How Social Media Impacts Elec­tions to begin

This would have been more inter­est­ing if it had less of a Repub­li­can tone and focused on all social media and not just blogs.

Third talk– Between the Blog Posts with Mitch Max­son. Ppl r still try­ing to get on wire­less. IU remem­bered my iPhone :)

Mitch Max­son of Medi­aSauce gave some nice tips on pro­mot­ing your blog when you’re not blog­ging. Less SEO leav­ing your URL in com­ments every­where and more explor­ing alter­na­tive out­lets like Twitter.

Fourth Talk– How to Make (More) Money From Your Blog by John Ramey, friend of @Game­Zom­bie

My first encounter with John Ramey, who I had heard a lot about from my work with Game­Zom­bie but never actu­ally met or knew much about. He was very knowl­edge­able about dif­fer­ent adver­tis­ing plans and how to attract adver­tis­ers. He threw in a sneak peak to the new iSocket and gave us all spe­cial invites for all that attended the talk since iSocket is still closed beta.

Very impressed by @isocket and pleased with the day at @blogin­di­ana ! Grab­bing Red Bulls and head­ing home to code and of course blog

That con­cluded my first day at my first con­fer­ence. I was really excited and ran home to apply all that I had absorbed.

I ALMOST felt bad for these kids being up this early to work at Dunkin Donuts until I saw two tak­ing a break by their BMWs

Wasted most of my time in the first ses­sion work­ing on the BMOC site, now web analytics

I told you I was addicted to Dunkin Donuts that week and I had to wake up some­how to get down­town by 9 a.m. Iron­i­cally I was wast­ing time in the first ses­sion that was enti­tled “Stop Wast­ing Time: Ten Things You Can Do to Make Your­self More Effi­cient”. I was pretty effi­cient, but should have taken bet­ter notes on some of the online tools Scott Abel sug­gested. To sum­ma­rize the Web Ana­lyt­ics talk — Google Ana­lyt­ics. Pat East from Hanapin Mar­ket­ing in Bloom­ing­ton have based their entire busi­ness on know­ing Google Ana­lyt­ics inside and out. I wasn’t very impressed.

Lis­ten­ing to the panel about Build­ing Com­mu­nity Around Your Blog @blogIN­DI­ANA

This panel bounced ideas around as to how to attract a crowd, but I was most impressed with the anec­dote John Ramey shared about a wine com­pany pro­mot­ing them­selves by giv­ing away their bot­tles of wine at par­ties and allow­ing them to become social objects. The social objects are what social net­works (com­mu­ni­ties) are built around. If you don’t have the social object, you can’t have the social net­work. I loved it so much I made a men­tal note to remem­ber it by tweeting:

@jpramey great exam­ple of the wine being used as social media. I’ll have to remem­ber that!

More of the enter­tain­ing Scott Abel talk­ing about Syn­di­ca­tion and Web 2.0 Tools. Seman­tic Web FTW!

Unfor­tu­nately, I was stuck in a room of newbs who didn’t really under­stand the basics of the topic so the juicy stuff I was hop­ing for was never brought up. I wouldn’t mind run­ning into Scott Abel again, though. His pre­sen­ta­tion style was very upbeat and interesting.

I ended up leav­ing early from the sec­ond day. None of the last round of talks inter­ested me. I was itch­ing to go home and share with my fam­ily all that I had learned about blog­ging and social media. It actu­ally led to me con­vinc­ing my step-mom to start a Ning site for my sister’s 8th grade.

I had a very enjoy­able time at my first con­fer­ence. The peo­ple were great, the mate­r­ial a lit­tle beneath me, but for $50 and two free lunches it was a great deal. I’m not sure if I’ll be around to par­tic­i­pate in next year’s con­fer­ence, but if I’m in the Indy area I’ll def­i­nitely be in attendance.