Wow – this is extraordinarily insightful and practical advice. Thanks for taking the time to create the lists – I couldn’t have said it better!

These are great suggestions! I saw on another site that maybe IABC should think about providing more than one drink ticket for the opening reception. I think that one is plenty (but make free water available). What I would prefer to see is more snacks such as fruit and veggies for breaks. After a decent breakfast but an early start, I tend to feel a little hollow mid morning and then again mid afternoon!

Great ideas, Linda! I would especially like to see sessions recorded for later viewing. So many times, I was forced to choose between two or more speakers/topics. Sure, you can get a copy of the presentation, but it’s just not the same. And what happened to the traditional video promoting the sights and sounds of the following year’s conference, to get people jazzed up about it?

Congrats – what a great honour!

Say hi to Scarborough for me.

Mike

Some great comments from all of you. Thanks for taking the time to provide them. This is exactly what I mean by creating conversations. We don’t have to agree on all points. In fact, the conversation is better when we don’t. Everyone is entitled to their opinion and I’m happy to continue this discussion, here, over twitter or in person.
I’m just glad we have so many options to share them these days.

Yeah I was there too and I have to say I left very unimpressed with the whole iconic experience. Actually, I think it would be more accurate to say that left really surprised that so many others were appearing to be so impressed with what I thought was a pretty mundane experience.

There was little in the talk that night that I found insightful or even that useful. Iconic seemed like a nice bloke and all, but the lack of true depth in the way the Twitter medium was being used was striking to me. It felt very unauthentic and contrived to me.

I read the comments from Iconic above, and I have to say that when I saw the mention about getting up at 5am and staying up late after 11pm, in order to write tweets and then saying that it somehow matched the efforts of his hardworking parents… that’s just so pretentious I don’t even know where to start with it. My own parents were hardworking people who knew what it meant to make sacrifices for the family, but to even suggest that getting up early to send tweets is in any way comparable to their hard work is just plain insulting.

Twitter is a great tool. It’s revolutionised the way people connect and network and communicate, but for someone to start seeing it as a mission of some sort, and thinking that tweeting has some sort of perceived importance that puts it on a level with having a real job or producing real work… that’s just delusional.

And the mention about overtweeting, no you’re right, I don’t think iconic actually mentioned the word overtweeting at all. He didn’t have to. A few simple searches using a service like http://followcost.com/iconic88 shows that his average number of tweets is 182.95 per day (or 174.68 per day for the past 100 days). This gets a “nuclear” follow cost warning. So, no, Iconic didn’t utter the words overtweeting, but the facts make it clear that he does. Do the math… allowing 6 hours for sleep, that’s a tweet every 5.9 minutes. Yeah, that’s overtweeting, and it treats Twitter as broadcast medium, not a communication medium. That’s fine… Twitter can be whatever you want it to be, but let’s call it for what it is, and not be deluded into believing that sending 182 tweets a day – with only 27% of those being @replies – is in any way a “conversation”. It’s not.

The thing is, after following the guy for a while just to see what all the fuss was about, all I saw were a series of tweets and retweets containing glib, hackneyed self-help phrases that tried to pass themselves off as genuinely worthy content.

I know all this sounds really negative, so I’m sorry about that. But I’m so tired of hearing people attributing some sort of almost mystic religious importance to social tools. A lot of what I heard that night was just a whole lot of BS that attempted to elevate Twitter to some sort of instrument of social redemption. Like I said, iconic was a nice enough bloke and all, but I didn’t feel there was much real substance in the content of what he had to say, and I was surprised by how much his message was fawned over by those in attendance.

Chris