So what happened at Blogout! 2009?

If you’d missed BlogOut! 2009, here’s a summary of what happened on 6 and 7 March 2009.

Last week, more than 180 gathered at 8Q SAM over two days of sharing and learning with thought leaders and community members from the local and oversea guest speakers. Despite the running around during the two days, I’d managed to attend most of the sessions and here’s what I took home with me…

From Day 1
One doesn’t have to lose sleep over social media. Melvin Yuan shared how listening is essential in brands social media effort. And in order to strive for the better in social media, businesses cannot operate in the new world with old paradigms. Start internally, build the communication right within the company and organisations. Marketing and communications people should get along with their IT Departments. Instead of paying attention to the initial hype, why not shift the attention towards the long tail. On this, someone did bring up that the long tail might not work for many products especially in the fast changing products in the market. For example, Company A releases a new mobile phone every month, and end production of a model few months later, how will the long tail have any impact on such products.

During the panel discussion on the use of social media in business, Daniel Goh recommended clients (in-house personnel) to try out some social media tools too. These knowledge may prevent being cheated by the agencies. Some of the tools I use for listening includes Google Alerts, Social Mention, Twitterfall and Splitweet for monitoring on Twitter.

Some other take-aways from Day 1 include:

• With right campaign and planning, facebook pages and groups can create an impact in publicity and PR – SG Tattoo show
• For social media to have bigger impact, it should not be focused by the PR and marketing departments, social media is very much about customer service, product development, and R&D too.
• Social media is not just about having a kick-ass engagement for bloggers, its about the relationship and the communities.
• If you have a bad product, stay away from social media engagement. Instead, use it to listen to what others are saying/ complaining and improve on the product!
• If there are already active fans for your brands and products, engage them. Equip them with more knowledge and let them fight for you in the social media territory.
• With attention span getting shorter, sites such as Twitter and 12seconds.tv are picking up.
• It still boils down to relationship building in social media. Engage and empower them so that they would want to share about your brand and products online (and offline too!).
• Its not just about the high traffic popular blogs, its the person behind the blogs that matter most.
• “Social media is like teen sex!” – find out why in the slides here
• Define your own success metrics for social media campaigns.

Here’s what others said about Day 1 of Blogout! 2009:

It was well-run and well-coordinated, so kudos to the TDM folks (e.g. Claudia) for organizing a great event from a bottom-up grassroots effort. – by Chi-Loong at Techgoondu

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Day 2
After a day of corporate and more serious talks, day 2 was a much causal affair. Blogout! 2009 team was in the event tshirts and bloggers were spotted battling all out at the Xbox Rock Band set-up!

On the second day, sharing was meant for the general public with more variety of topics. From adventures of a traveling blogger to the slightly more technical topic on WordPress as a blogging tool.

I shall let the other people who were there on day two to share more about what happened. Here are some of the quotes and links to their blog post on Blogout! 2009.

Live blogging at Day 2 by tech65 crew

Okay, so I went there and the talks were pretty interesting and woaah, people actually DO blog seriously here! by Seriously Sarah

Instead of going the usual ‘one size fits all’ route, The Digital Movement had a different way of approaching BlogOut! 2009. By focusing on two distinct themes: Corporate (targeted at enterprises who wish to learn more about engaging customers through social media) and the Open track (aimed at everyday bloggers), Blogout ensured that its appeal was broad-based but targeted at the same time, gaining more audience. by Gwen at SGentreprenuers

And here’s a group shot of some folks who stayed behind at the end of Day 2.

If you have attended Blogout! 2009, do help with this survey for TDM.

More links and reads about Blogout! 2009 below:

• Blogout! posts on Ping.sg
• Tech65’s posts on Blogout!
• Yongfook shared his experience and plans
• My First Blogout by QQ
• Behind Blogout! 2009 by Firestarter

To be kept in the loop for more events by The Digital Movement, join their facebook group or sign-up as member at their website.