A few thoughts on academic conferences and social media.

Academic conferences are the bread and butter of our profession. We work on papers to present to peers, prepare witty comments to dazzle fellow panelists and audience members and get out our suits and related convention attire. We get a chance to think about ideas and discuss them with our colleagues, share research results and network, network, network. As a department head, it’s pretty much dress as usual but for many of my colleagues it’s a chance for them to get that formal attire (a nice dress or jacket and tie) out of the closet for the first time in a while… it’s all about self presentation, in about every respect.

There are many venues of course and attire is varied from the causual to the more formal. In some cases it might be a small informal conference in a warm climate (don’t be surprised if it’s still a “suit environment” since some places and countries it’s just that way). And why do the Europeans always dress better than us? Oh, well that’s another question. Other times it’s a large somewhat stuffy national meeting with self presentation and self preservation skills at high levels. That tie… is it the right color for this year? Or in some cases, who cares.

I’ve been thinking a bit about conference venues lately and while I’ve not undertaken a systematic study I’ve started to do some sorting. First, we have the big national conferences… they are so big that it’s really a bunch of small conferences under the same umbrella. For us it’s a “big tent” meeting, lots of folks with lots of agendas. Big hotels and big cities. More often than not, there is a job fair, a recruiting fair, multiple social affairs sponsored by universities, book sellers, not-for-profits, etc… sometimes by invitation-only… sometimes open to all. There are panels of all kinds and attendance varies depending on the topic and time of day…

At the other extreme it’s the small intimate focused meetings. Maybe on a college campus or a retreat in the woods with various types of attendees and selection criteria… my favorite, the beach. A number of years ago I attended meetings at Nags Head… “Social Science by the Seashore” was how it was billed. Dress was very casual but the topics were focused.

Last week I was in DC at Georgetown University for an Edelman sponsored PR "Academic Summit" that focused on “New Media”. About 60-80 academics (at any given time), corporate “new media/social media” folks, not-for-profit types, a few traditional journalists, a new media guru or two and Edelman employees talked candidly about how corporations, government and others are using social media to connect with diverse audiences, how we measure these connections and how we as academics could work this into our classrooms and research. Yes, there was lots of twittering going on.

What were some of my favorite notions? “Every company is a media company,” “We are in a stakeholder society… not a shareholder society”, “Twitter is increasingly a reading and not a writing environment.”

This was a great venue… just the right size to make it possible to connect with people and just enough time to meaningfully discuss important topics. It was a high quality "ubernetworking" opportunity.

A few days after the conference ended the election results poured in from Iran and the power of social media was demonstrated in a very vivid way. This is yet to play out in Iran, but “Twitter”, “YouTube” and “Facebook” are now in the lead stories of all the “traditional” media… timing is everything and this conference was timely and relevant… something that is not always the case.

One of my favorite twits from the meeting was from miketempleton “If you can't convert your social media contacts into people taking action, the numbers don't matter“. This week in Iran, we didn’t need a more vivid demonstration of the real world utility of social networks.