Despite the glitches, the best Social Media Club Sydney yet
If the tweetstream from last night’s Social Media Club Sydney is anything to go by, its size is becoming an issue for some people.
Yesterday’s event at The Arthouse Hotel was the biggest yet. My very (uninformed) guess would be north of 400 people in the room. Which is pretty good going for a cold Monday night.
You can form your own impression on numbers based on my wobbly cameraphone footage from a few minutes before the formal bit got underway.
Tim, thanks for your balanced perspective, this time as a participant. There were a lot of teething problems based on moving to a new venue and the big jump in attendees too. We were not helped by random “art viewers” who kept coming in through the back door and chatting loudly. The venue appears to have double booked us and an art event, and despite reassurances that doors would be closed once and for all when the speakers started, they were letting in the art viewers the entire night.
The format, with presentations this time, wasn’t helped by the acoustics nor the small screen size. We do try and mix it up in terms of format, but it seems that the feedback is the more interactive we can make it the better.
We are continuously working to improve, and we are trying our best on a (so far) no budget event. We really appreciate your support, and look forward to having you back as moderator, and hopefully also as participant at future events.
I agree, it was a good night even some of the content was a little hard to hear
Glad you enjoyed yourself Tim, I think there were officially 450 people there. The acoustics were downright terrible, but such is life! I had a ball.
Glad you enjoyed LOTR as much as me. Had fun too. Cheers to destroying the fucking ring.
Oh, and I’ve put my presentation up at http://www.dpdialogue.com.au/z.....ial-media/ if anyone is interested.
Far too noisy, left right after Jye’s presentation. Pretty disappointed in general, looking back I can barely remember what any of the presentations about. Actually that’s not fair – Matt’s was great, exactly what was needed on a Monday night, and had me mark down Dialogix as a future reporting solution. Jye’s was OK but I couldn’t say what it was about other than making rather oblique references to Lord of the Ring that I thought got tired pretty quickly, although maybe that was me tired of trying to make out what he was saying over the noise, combined with trying to read his slides on the small projection (and I was near the front). I have no recollection of the guy in the middle, neither his name nor what his presentation was about. I remember he had way too many words on his slides – I think even if I could read them and it was quiet it still would have been unsuitable for a Monday night.
I definitely enjoyed meeting people and hanging out, as always, but I don’t think this was the best SMC. Mind you I’ve only been to this and the one before, and while the latter was definitely more crowded, it was certainly more communicative and I took more away from it than business cards.
Oh, and they desperately needed someone there to do some level of bedroom sound engineering and get the levels on the microphones somewhat even.
Ok ’cause I think I come off sounding whiny and ungrateful (and also ’cause I bothered to read the twitter stream, other people’s blogs and the above comments from Tiphereth) I just wanted to add that I think the SMC Sydney is awesome and I’d go to the next one. Just wanted to give some constructive criticism, but really I love you guys.
Plus I love Tim so I felt like bumping up his Comment to View ratio.
I want to extend a hearty thanks to Doug, Tip and everyone else who helped to put this event together. It is no small feat, especially with the number of participants SMC Sydney has now (SMC Sydney is officially the largest chapter in the SMC community of 150+ cities, I think the next closest chapter gets 150+ on average).
San Francisco has trouble finding venues for groups of 100, I can’t even imagine trying to lock a venue in for 400+. Huge accomplishment. Audio is never easy, but I am sure that will be sorted out over time. It always is. There will be kinks. Not everyone will love it every time, but you keep trying. You keep experimenting.
It also may, one day, come down to holding several gatherings per month – some meetups that are purely social, others educationally focused – so the community can continue to grow and continue to get what they need (whether social, educational or both).
I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the SMC Sydney team. All volunteer. All amazing. All deserving of praise. Keep on, keeping on.
Congrats to you all!
Yes, Monday’s SMC night was a vibrant social occasion with a buzzy atmosphere and a few logistical challenges but what about the content?
My take away was that yes every campaign needs its own metrics and goals and that these should be tied to business outcomes. Beyond that we sawa heavy reliance on quant measurement techniques – with little qual.
And most significantly no one seems to have big ideas for measuring engagement – which is the edge that social media provides over ‘traditional’ marketing, no?
This, for me, remains the industry’s biggest challenge.
I think you need to determine engagement for each campaign – I’ve noticed how much this can vary from industry to industry. Music blogs for instance run on a very different scale to say, developer blogs. So the ‘engagement’ differs for them both, and hence a engagement metric is uniquely defined.
I think there is a responsibly for the SM fanclub to work a little harder on metrics and measuring things that actually influence ROI.
Not measuring cute things like interactions and RT’s and individuals engaged and other stuff that really doesn’t matter nor fall in line with other business measures.
You can’t slam other media (traditional, digital display) for not working and being based on irrelevant metrics like reach and opportunity to see, frequency etc and being tired and unaccountable if you don’t put your own results under the same scrutiny.