A Much Delayed Summary Of The OTA Sessions

This post is a long time in coming. So much so that there might be an unusually high expectation of quality regarding this post. One would be led to believe that, perhaps, this post took over four months to write, and it should therefore contain four months of chiseled, refined thought and insight.

One would be wrong. I wrote this last night.

The Conference

Back on March 26th, Hugh Weber introduced Sioux Falls to The OTA Sessions. I’m hard pressed to define what the conference was. I can’t just define it as a marketing conference, or even a social media conference. On the other hand, “a conference” seems just too broad. I think, above all, the OTA sessions were a chance to have a Coast-level conference right here in Sioux Falls. The conference boasted big names, big thoughts, and big attendance.

I went as one of two L&S employees. Representing a web perspective, I was hoping to come away with something that could benefit my team in particular. The topics were generally much broader than that, so I didn’t quite go home with that “big web idea” that I could excitedly share with my fellow WebWorkers. Maybe that’s why this post has floundered away on my laptop for so long…

The conference was held in the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Sioux Falls, an architecturally and artistically interesting building not well suited for a conference with a room full of WiFi-hungry laptop users (more on that later). The day was broken in two: the first half was the (separately branded) Trust Summit, and the second half was the actual OTA sessions. Speakers for the first half were: Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, and Julien Smith; speakers for the second half were: Spike Jones, Tim Brunelle, and Jonathan Harris. Each speaker talked for about an hour about whatever topic they wanted. There seemed to be a general theme of community building, but that certainly wasn’t the focus of every talk.

My Favorite Speakers

My second-favorite speaker was Jonathan Harris. I was very excited to see him, based on the work I’ve seen him do. His talk, however, was probably the least useful for me. He’s certainly a fascinating and inspiring individual, but his talk was really more of a re-telling of his life up to that point. It borrowed heavily from what he said at TED, which was what interested me in him in the first place. I did come away with this note:

• Humans love to find meaning

Simple, but true. Our creative works are filled equally with stories of great, epic meaning, and tragic, empty meaning. Still, it’s hard to conceive grand web strategies on that thought which don’t devolve into cryptic messages and nonsense stream-of-consciousness image mosaics.

My favorite speaker was Spike Jones. His talk was on movements (the Civil Right Movement kind of movement, that is). In particular, he talked about building movements instead of campaigns. I found his talk really fascinating. It was full of the kind of stuff that makes total sense when you hear it, yet you know you couldn’t come up with it on your own. He gave these ten characteristics of movements:

1. Movements are about passions, not product, conversation
2. Movements begin with the first conversation
3. Movements have inspirational leadership
4. Movements have barriers to entry, to weed out the “Me, too!”s
5. Movements empower people with knowledge – show how your company is not perfect
6. Movements have powerful identities
7. Movements encourage shared ownership; build it like it’ll last forever but go out of money tomorrow
8. Movements make advocates feel like rock stars – ask what they think
9. Movements live online and offline; online should drive offline and vice versa
10. Movements fight an injustice; injustice is the foundation of your movement

He gave some great examples of communities, including those behind WD-40, Fiskars, and Save SURGE (a URL I wrote down immediately). These communities all followed the rules above, and all had really passionate members. Now, I don’t think you can just follow these ten rules and suddenly have a passionate community, nor are all the answers self-evident, but he does give really good points (and he’s made a living helping build movements).

The Other Speakers

Of course, there were more than two speakers. I mean, you saw the list. All the speakers had great points to make, and I did my best to collect them.

• Burn the ships to go farther
• No other media is as CREATE-centric as online media
• A negative review converts more accurately than a positive one
• 20% of searches on Google.com are unique
• “I came. I sighed. I left.” Every page on your website is a homepage.
• Content channels build gradually; hype builds suddenly, then fades away
• Build your community before you need it
• Always say “Yes” to what makes you uncomfortable
• Web is “I see you”, not “Hi”
• You don’t own the community
• Be helpful to your potential client base
• Can’t get followers? You suck.
• Content is still king
• Find someone who is passionate about your industry, not just your company, and is good at expressing his or her self. Then let that person express for your company in the way they are best at.

These are great nuggets. They should be memorized and internalized. They should be second-nature and instinctual. That said, I should probably memorize and internalize these.

In Summary

The conference was a good experience for me. I think it made the valuable point that plenty of good talent and great thinkers live in the Midwest, and we don’t deserve to be overlooked any longer. I think it was worth the cost simply to send the message that we are just as interested in this stuff as either Coast is. I do, however, have two complaints. First, I thought the venue was awkward. My laptop required a battery source and good Internet, and I found neither. I heard a rumor that there was Internet available, but I never saw any indication of it. That made it hard to expand the conversation to Twitter, Facebook, or personal blogs during the conference. It also meant I had to hand write my notes, which have taken four months to decode. My second complaint is that there weren’t enough Midwest people actually talking at the conference. Hopefully the next OTA sessions can have a larger showing of “local folks” as speakers.

All-in-all, I thought the conference was great. It proves that the Internet puts everyone on equal footing. It no longer takes years for an idea to float from New York or Los Angeles to Sioux Falls; we can hear it and act on it in the same instance as someone from Vancouver or Mexico City or Paris. It’s only a matter of time before those ideas start coming from here, and this conference will only help.