2 The Next Level

This past weekend I went to my second SoCon event. This years theme was “In Search of the Southeast’s Social Media Niche.”  I was so impressed with last years event that I signed up early for this years event because they only allow 300 people to attend. The SoCon conference is a two day event starting with a Friday networking dinner followed by Saturday’s main forum of keynote speakers followed by afternoon breakout sessions.

The highlight of the morning session was culminated by a video conference call with Ruth Ann Harnisch, President of the Harnisch Foundation announcing a 1.5 million dollar gift to Kennesaw State College to establish the Center for Sustainable Journalism. Lenard Witt one of the founders of SoCon will oversee this generous gift. The center’s mission is to discover innovative ways to produce financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism.

Mr. Witt made mention that he was encouraged by a professor at MIT to share his idea with the world on his blog and not keep it as a secret hoping that one day he will have to chance implement his idea of  Representative Journalism.  He was then contacted by Ms. Harnisch who read his blog post and was inspired to act on helping him bring this idea to its full reality.

The morning session was then followed by and networking luncheon that really got the afternoon going. I met so many like minded people during this luncheon that I really didn’t want to leave my table to attend the afternoon breakout sessions.

After reluctantly leaving networking luncheon I then attended a breakout session lead by James Andrews, Director at Ketchum Interactive. His topic was Social Media in Public Relations. I then attended the late afternoon session lead by Josh Hallet. His topic was Return on Investment in Social Media.

All in all I thought the whole unconference was well worth the small price paid to attend. The keynote speakers of the morning session were not as good as last years but all of that was made up for with the networking luncheon and the afternoon breakout sessions.

I look forward to attending SoCon again in 2010.

All the best

JB

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