socially marketing

Well, both Interesting NY and SoCap08 are behind us now, and I am happy to report that both conferences were phenomenal successes - in general, and especially for socialmarkets!

The Interesting NY conference definitely lived up to its name.  The topics were all over the place, and the speakers had all kinds of backgrounds, but the end product was a full day of genuinely interesting presentations.  Since this was a general audience, our presentation was socialmarkets 101 - including a primer defining the “social capital markets”.

This was not necessary at the later conference with that exact name: “Social Capital Markets - 2008″.  Naturally, this crowd was already up the social capital learning curve, so we were able to get much deeper into the belly of the socialmarkets beast.

We had the luxury of a full hour of conference time to ourselves, and made the most of it.  The SoCap peeps were pushing hard to make this conference an interactive experience instead of just a lecture, so we left plenty of time for audience participation.

Here’s a pic of me speaking at SoCap… Allan is behind the camera:

Me addressing my fellow social capitalists

We spent about half the time explaining the whys, whats and hows of socialmarkets, and then opened up the floor for Q&A.  I was actually a little nervous about this part, since you never know if people are going to be interested enough to join the conversation (especially since we were the last talk before the lunch break…)

Turns out there was nothing to worry about.  The Q&A turned into an energetic discussion of social markets and the metrics which drive it (e.g. SROI) and for most of the time we did little more than referee!

That conversation spilled over into lunch, dinner, the rest of the conference, and in fact are still going on now - over one week and 3,000 miles later.  We learned a lot in these discussions, and perhaps even more importantly, made a lot of critical contacts with others in the social capital space.

I’ll save the details on the long-term impacts of SoCap08 for another post.  For now, I’ll just say that socialmarkets made not just new friends, but new strategic partners there.  I think these relationships will help see not just our venture succeed, but also the complementary ventures that will form the ecosystem to support the entire social capital marketplace.

We were really looking forward to the SoCap08 conference (see previous post) so we were thoroughly thrilled to be asked by the SoCap folks to not just attend, but to present socialmarkets there!

That event is still a few weeks away, but our conference cup runneth over: we will also be presenting socialmarkets (more specifically the ideas behind it) at a conference called “Interesting New York“, next Saturday right here in NYC.

Interesting New York is just one in a group of “commercial and greed-free” globally dispersed conferences organized by The Open Intelligence Agency (OIA).  These conferences all share one simple premise: a forum for presenting ideas which are, well… interesting.

Here’s how it works: you submit a brief overview of your (allegedly) interesting idea, and if the folks at OIA find it of sufficient interest, you’re in.  Allan heard about the conference and made the submission… and happily, socialmarkets passed interesting muster - we’re in!

There are absolutely no subject constraints for candidates, so conference offerings cover an almost comically broad range of topics.  A few samplings from earlier conferences hit on the art of storytelling, why some people are better swimmers than others, and the myths vs. realities of quicksand.  I’m confident socialmarkets will fit quite neatly in there somewhere.

So… two opportunities to see socialmarkets strut its stuff live: next week in New York, and next month in San Francisco.  Of course, we will be posting links to both talks on our site as soon as possible, so even if not in real-time, we hope you’ll join us…