The great thing about the unconference format – specifically PodCamp – is that as much learning and insight can happen in the hallways or the social settings as can take place in the sessions themselves. Getting such a pile of people together in one spot makes for some super interesting and diverse perspectives. Here’s a few things I took away from the event:

Challenges We’re Still Facing

We need to keep thinking outside our own backyards. Unless your business model hinges on local for a reason, realize that the social and new media – and business – landscape extends far beyond your geographic limitations.

We’ve gotta stop using ourselves as the benchmark. I’m still hearing lots of “this is how I do things” instead of “this is how other people are doing things.” The former is relevant to share with others and help them learn. The latter is relevant if you’re actually trying to do business in the business world with the media you’re making.

If you want to create revenue from new and/or social media, you have to know what the people with the money are willing to pay for. The media has to support something larger than itself. Cool is not a business or revenue model.

Tough love: still lots of excuses about why measuring social media is hard. Or why being solo limits your capacity to scale. Or why our media is brilliant but we can’t sell it to a paying client. The hard truth is that this stuff takes work. Get out there and start executing. Build stuff. Form coalitions. Act. Make mistakes, learn, and execute again. Nothing has ever gotten done by talking about it for the 30th time. See below for the upside of this one.

Happy Truths

Generosity and curiosity abound. People are willing to share amazing amounts of knowledge and information, and there are lots of people still seeking even the most basic of answers. If you don’t have the answer to something, ask. Someone does. Or there are people willing to help you find it.

The discussion is moving forward on important things like the right metrics for new media, ethics and transparency, treating our practices like businesses, and the potential issues and risks that come with online omnipresence. They’re not easy discussions, but these are the things that will take social media from cute to enterprise-viable.

There *are* people doing the doing, making things happen in this space, even quietly. See also Dave Fleet, Jeremy Wright, Bob Goyetche, Angela Misri, Sean Power, Julien Smith, Whitney Hoffman, Hugh McGuire, Sue Murphy, Dave Delaney. (Do I need to list Chris Brogan here? Okay. Him too.) You can learn from them. I am.

Meeting people in person still kick’s Twitter’s ass. And Canada still has great beer.

Special thanks to the great PCTO organizing team for putting on an event worth freezing for. 🙂

Connect?

I’m going to be at a whole pile of events this coming year, including the Main Street National Conference, SXSW Interactive, SES NYC, the Module Midwest Digital Conference, SCIP International, Inbound Marketing Summit San Francisco, and SOBCon 2009 just to name the next eight weeks. If you’re headed to any of these or are in the area, let’s be sure and link up somehow.

So what do you get out of these events? If you were at PCTO, what did you learn and observe? I’d love to hear more about your experiences.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]