Liz Azyan

As some of you might already know, I’ve long been a local government online engagement researcher and have been concentrating alot of my research energy in that sector. But now I’m branching out into other sectors and I’m happy to say that #imwm2009 was my first HEI gig! I even accidently ended up conducting my own barcamp on social media! Ah, it seems the only way to get me to talk at unconferences nowadays is to ambush me LOL. Same thing happened to me at another unconference for #localgovcamp, which you can check out here.

Please take a few mins to complete this survey on Social media Usage in HEIs.

I’ll be writing other blog posts about the event in separate posts so you won’t have to keep scrolling down a long post. Stay tuned to those posts that will be tweeted on my twitter feed @Liz_Azyan. To get updates, you have to start following me  :-)

Feedback, feedback, feedback….

The good stuff…

Let’s talk a bit about some of the stuff I liked about the conference…

There were alot of things that this conference did get right in terms of using social media to fully aggregate the workshops content effectively online. Check out how #iwmw2009 came alive online and created real-time conversations and feedback …

1. Slideshare of all presentation slides (Excellent!) – I always find myself needing to ask for these at events and often take a long time to become available. So, well done!
2. The Twitter Feed @IWMW used to push out general content throughout the workshop.
3. The CoverItLive! live blogging at IWMWlive (twitter feed specifically for this live event) was made available to allow people to follow the event live as its happening and also works well as a documented version of all tweets throughout the event.
4. The IWMWBlog was a great central point to catch all the video interviews, summaries of presentations, as well as other relevant stuff.
5. The live streaming of the event! Brilliant! First time I’ve seen 2 camera ladies actually instead of camera men! Did anyone else notice this???
6. The tag for the event. Now there are some things I like about the tag and some things I don’t like. I like the fact that you can distinguish the talks by adding either #p1, #p2 etc to the #iwmw2009 tag. But I really feel that the tag should have been shorter i.e. #iwmw09 or even #iwmw. Everyone knows when tweeting, chars are really valuable. Even taking off 2 chars can help people to retweet (RT) easily without cutting or shortening any tweets.
7. The IWMW2009 Netvibes page. I really like the use of Netvibes, it allows you to see all the content and media stuff on one page and you can configure it according to your own preference.
8. The IWMW2009 official blogger – I know there was an official blogger (which I regretfully forgot the name of ). I tried to find her name on the UKOLN website and blog but failed to find it. Please let me know if anyone else finds it! I thought it was a brilliant idea to get a designated person to cover the event. This is becoming more and more of an essential ingredient for any event. I think in the near future, events management everywhere will have to invite in official bloggers just like conferences have press boxes, events like this will have blogger boxes! Its not an easy task and is often more tiring than one might think. But I feel the official blogger for this event did a spectacular job and she definitely deserves alot of praise for what she’s done. Well done!

Other stuff I liked…

1. The marque where we had all our meals… felt like we were at a wedding the way the table and marque was setup with chandeliers hanging everywhere.
2. The food was good too, a great variety for meat eaters as well as vegetarians. There was also BBQ for one of the evenings which was sponsored by Jadu. Thanks @surajkika (CEO of Jadu)!
3. The social activites organized throughout the event… the outings and barcamps were all designed so we could actually do some networking. This is absolutely essential for any event because often when people come a long way to attend events, they are not only there for the content but mostly so for the people they meet there. And with social media making contents from events available in real-time, surely the only thing setting the delegates apart from the online event followers is the networking and face-to-face interaction.

Things I didn’t like…

1. The fact that I couldn’t connect to the internet in accommodation. Why wasn’t the setup instructions included in the  accommodation welcome pack or found in the room? Why couldn’t it be made available through all the social media channels i.e. Twitter, blog, main event website? If it was made available, it was not clearly stated. Being at an event where it was highly likely to be attended by ‘geeks’, it was disappointing that most of us couldn’t get onto the internet whilst staying in the accommodation. Plus what made things worst was, even my 3G dongle didn’t have coverage at times inside the accommodation and in the main lecture hall. The fact that you couldn’t use the phone in the room also caused a hassle to get direct connection to IT support who’s phone number was not provided meaning you had to go down to their offices to get help… which is usually after office hours after our talks/activities are finished.
2. No power plugs/extension for laptops in main lecture hall. I think this is a new thing event organizers have to pay attention to now that more people are tweeting during events. My laptop died a couple of hours into the event which really made me lose interest in tweeting….
3. Difficulty trying to find out what talk is up next. There should be an easy way to look up where to go and what talk is next up in the schedule without having to look through pieces of paper. Like having the schedule behind name tags, like it was done at another event I attended in NYC that you can see here.

So those are my first impressions of the IWMW2009 event, look out for more blog posts to come!

In the meantime, don’t forget to check out…

1. The HEIs Social Media usage research survey (it’ll only take 10 mins for your time and you have the opportunity to win an iPod Touch, thanks to Jadu!)
2. My UK Universities Twitterleague (currently being updated manually by myself -hoping to create a database with some help of volunteers? – so please bare with me regarding updates)
3. My UK Universities Facebook Fan Pages list
4. My UK Universities Twitter Accounts list

Hope you’ve found this useful!

Follow me on Twitter @Liz_Azyan