Last week’s BlogWorld & New Media Expo was one of the best social media gatherings I’ve attended in some time, and not just because of the Las Vegas nightlife. The conference is attracting an increasingly robust set of tracks that highlight leading thinkers from sectors like social health, nonprofits, travel, mobile and social media business. Plus, the networking was awesome.
I conducted a few video interviews, which I’ll post here and on our sister site, Socialbrite.org, in the next couple of weeks. Meantime, here are some of my takeaways and highlights from BlogWorld.
Social health, politics, case studies & photos
• Here’s my roundup of BlogWorld’s Social Health track, which I wrote over at our new site, Time for Nurses. I also wrote about the Registered Nurses Breakfast I attended.
• I didn’t bring my Nikon because I had way too much stuff to lug around, but managed to capture these 45 images with my Panasonic camcorder and a point-and-shoot digital camera. Here’s Mark Burnett, creator-producer of CBS’s “Survivor,” with Brian Solis:
• Democratic pollster Mark Penn: We are now approaching 40% of voters not affiliated with either major political party — the biggest change in politics over the past generation. “It busts the myth that this is a blue-red country.” Not sure I agree.
• More Penn: 54% of people in swing districts say the United States would be better off with a third party, according to a recent poll. My take: We have plenty of third parties but the way our elections are conducted is stacked against them.
• Karen Hughes, former adviser to President George W. Bush: In 2000 “we thought Al Gore was a little weird for using a BlackBerry and texting Tipper.” By 2004 “we couldn’t run a presidential election without” mobile devices.
• Hughes said she was concerned the brute force of anonymity on the Internet, saying it can debase political culture, make discussions more coarse, dehumanize people and lead to more misinformation. Completely agree.
• Panelist: “Twitter.com represents only 18% of all tweets” because majority of users use a Twitter app and referrals through those apps aren’t counted. But Twitter itself said last month that 78% of Twitter users use the website, not apps — see chart above. So can it really be that this minority of power users (less than 22%) account for 82% of all tweets? I’ve never seen any stats on that.
• The mobile search engine ChaCha now has 500,000 users. If you search using a mobile device and want real humans to help with your search, check out ChaCha.
• I was surprised in one of the sessions to see that only a handful of the 200 people in the room were using Klout, a cool service that tracks social media influence. Klout announced at the conference that it will soon be adding your LinkedIn presence to your Klout Score.
• I sat down for a TechZulu Law interview with the fabulous hosts Christina Gagnier and Lisa Borodkin and hope to do a separate post on that here soon.
• Dave Peck and David Griner offered a compelling session on social media case studies. I thought their presentation was worth a separate post, so working on that now.
• I met the founder of FeedBlitz, which my colleague Christopher S. Rollyson uses and I’ll be checking out.
• Great to see or meet Mera Szendro Bok, Renee Alexander Hamilton, Katrina Florence, Brooks Thomas, Tessa Horeled, Elaine Norton, Martin DeAgostino, Nancy Andersen, Holly Hoffman, Jim Tobin (interviewed above), Michael Terpin, Jacquelyn Clair, Kaitlin Fender, Lisa Borodkin, Linda Sherman, Dave Angulo, Dave Link, Blake Landau, Phil Hollows, Adria Richards, David Spinks, Marc Duquette, George Weiner, Claire Williams Diaz, Giselle Diaz Campagna, Jessica Kirkwood, Allyson Burns, Josh Tabb, Dave deBronkart, Sandy Brazier, C. Douglas Plank, Jamie Davis, Amy Tenderich, Jessica Pearson, Kim McAllister, Rebecca K. Stazi, Cora Vizcarra, Lorry Schoenly, Kelly Hoag and Christina McMenemy, among many others.
Related articles
- Slides from Blog World Expo Talk on Mobile Social Media (marketersstudio.com)
- The Faces of BlogWorld Expo 2010 (blogworld.com)
- Social Health, Silos and Blog World Expo (33charts.com)
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Leave a Reply