 My Field Trip to the United Nations
Getting There
It's not often that you get to go to the United Nations building in
NYC. It's even less frequent that you get to go to the UN and speak. I
had the privilege of doing both on Tuesday and it was worth every
minute of sleep I missed (got up at 4:15 AM to catch a 6:00 AM Shuttle
from Boston.)
The occasion for visiting/speaking at the UN was the "United Nations Meets Web 2.0"
Conference (March 25-26.) Unfortunately, I had to cut my trip short
since but I packed a lot into a short period of time. I decided to
tweet the opening remarks and the first session since I wasn't really
sure how relevant the content would be to my day-to-day job. Wisely, I
tagged the tweets (#unweb20) so that finding them was easy.
SIDENOTE: When I first walked into the UN this morning, I couldn't
help but feel a little like I was stepping back in history. The UN
building reminded me a little of my first time in Russia - not in a bad
way - where the architecture and heaviness of the design reeked of a
different era. Visions of Krushchev and other well-known political
leaders continued to dance through my head as I walked around the
building.
The panel that I participated in was titled "Social Networks and ICT
Entrepreneurs" - ICT being "Information and Communications
Technologies" I knew it was going to be good following a prep phone
call we had last week with moderator, Howard Greenstein. Howard is one of the co-founders of the Social Media Club and he's a sharp cat. He's also a really good moderator which any great panel requires. I was joined by fellow panelists:
Howard wrote a nice wrap up post about his experience on his blog.
What I learned
Normally, it's difficult to take notes during one's own panel. In this
particular case, the dais and four other panelists gave me the
opportunity to jot down some of the best ideas from the panel. There
were many great things said but here were a few of my biggest
takeaways. If you were there and have something to add, please include
it in the comments:
- Jordi Duran: "I can't save a whale with a computer but I can help
the people who are saving whales do their jobs better, explain their
jobs better and get the word out more effectively." One of the funniest
but truest statements made.
- Howard mentioned that some of the non-profits hew works with
express concern over local chapters starting Facebook/Myspace groups -
Howard tells them to should encourage not discourage this behavior. Very important point for any business to note as well.
- My Luu gave a mini IBM "case study describing the "Idea Jam" they ran last year. Quick stats:
- 150,000 participants called in
- 37,000 ideas were submitted
- 35 final ideas picked
- the CEO of IBM allocated $100 million to fund the top 10 ideasInternal communities
- Howard asked me how employee communities can help ease the
transition of new workers/volunteers into an organization. I talked
about Intel's internal wiki called Intellipedia and how employees have created tens of thousands of pages of valuable content.
- Marnie Webb talked about their Net Squared Challenge - from their site...
This year's conference,
taking place May 27 and 28 in San Jose, California, will challenge
organizations to invent innovative ways to present and share their data
— and offer a share of $100,000 in funding to the projects with the
most potential. Learn more about the NetSquared Mashup Challenge.
- Howard talked about the power of Twitter (and other social
networks) to provide attendees the ability to meet prior to face to
face events, connect during the event and then continue the
conversation afterward.
One of the things I liked the most about this event was its ability to
make me look at social media/social networking through a different
lense, namely that of the non-profit world. What I loved about what I
learned was that social media/social networks are taking the world by
storm -- in the consumer space, the enterprise space AND the
non-profit/education space.
Got any great social media success stories to share?
Sat, Mar 29 2008 |
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