I drove up on Sunday and had dinner with my parents and sisters and then crashed at their house for the night. In the morning I hooked up with an old childhood friend that I hadn’t seen in years and we drove up to Burlington together. It made the trip fly by as we caught up on everything going on in our lives and I learned a ton about raising chickens. Who knew there was so much to know?

I gave a presentation called “Social Media is Like a Small Town” because I do think there is a mentality that comes from growing up in a small town that companies need to embrace to really work and play in this space. I’m not sure if this presentation would work in a big city or not. I knew it would work in Burlington though and I was right. I was even grabbed by the local news for a quick report for their evening news.

Unlike other events of this sort, what I loved about this one was after the speeches were done all the attendees were broken out into small groups to brainstorm around Grounds For Health. This is an amazing non-profit organization helping women in coffee growing communities to get cancer scans. Remembering that I now had the ability to live stream, I fired up Qik and captured some of the ideas that were shared.

I hope more events have brainstorm sessions like this where real world advice and tactics can be developed for organizations who really need it.

Leaving the event I was energized about the community that is forming in Burlington around this space. I felt the same energy when I was in Memphis lately. I love that this is happening more and more outside of the big cities and I think we are going to continue to see it happen more and more. It is a trend I like a lot.

We were told that the audience would be hip to the market and the various tools and that the hope was to stretch their minds beyond the obvious. This sounded great to me and it was fun to see that both myself and the other presenter Adrian Ho avoided any talk of tools, sites or tweets.

My presentation is below and as is usual for my style the slides only do so much on their own without me speaking to them. One fun thing was that there were no speakers so my video of Brooklyn Hilary played without sound, but it still worked because her passion came through the silence.

The point of my presentation was that I think people need to realize that we are all passionate about a lot of different things, but when you ask people “what is your passion?” very few mention any brand or product. Companies have a huge opportunity to fuel that passion at and enable their fans to begin talking, sharing and recommending their products.

I wanted to highlight that companies that want to get into using social media as part of their marketing initiatives need to begin thinking about leveraging passion in their campaigns. After giving what I think are the key components needed for success I wanted to showcase some people that I think are doing it right. I highlighted the Fiesta Movement that is happening now as one that has gotten my attention and so far is doing things right. I also wanted to showcase an example that doesn’t have Ford’s budget so I showcased independent authors Scott Sigler and JC Hutchins and what they have done with their fans.

I got asked a lot of solid questions and hope that my answers delivered. This is a concept that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about and I have a feeling I’ll be writing a lot more about passion in the coming months.

Have you seen other good examples (big or small) of brands leveraging passions? I’d love to hear them.

Some of the tips I gave for companies thinking of using video as part of their marketing programs included:

1. The audience has changed, you need to change with it.
2. Where, when and how we watch video has changed.
3. The powerful cable has changed from coax to ethernet
4. Video does not have to cost you a lot of money
5. Forget viral videos. Focus on results.
6. Find the perfect length for your audience.
7. Work with independent video producers who are already producing great work and know the space.
8. Hyper syndicate your content to all channels you can.
9. Involve the audience.
10. Measure results and learn from your mistakes.
11. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

To everyone who I met at the event and everyone involved in making the event happen thank you for an amazing two days in the desert.

Based on the variety of presentations yesterday and the crowd it should go well. Everyone is really there to learn about practical things they can do and to learn from others like myself who are out there currently doing it.

When Chris Brogan asked me to speak he said he was having a bunch of presenters do short, quick, ten minute presentations. I thought this sounded like fun but wanted it to be informative too. So I came up with the title of “I Can’t Play With Everything” and wanted to focus on ten real world things that anyone could do to start using social media. We seem to forget that you’ve got to start somewhere so I wanted to give people little quick things they could do on a lunch break to begin playing in the space.

Here is the presentation I am giving and all of the links that people will need if they want to find out more. I’m posting this now, so that I can point everyone at the summit to it to find links in case they couldn’t write them down fast enough when I was flying through this just before lunch.

I Can’t Play With Everything

10 Things in 10 Minutes:

1. Google yourself, your brand, your competitors. See what is being said and where you rank.
2. Set up multiple Google Alerts based around anything you want to be automatically notified about when a post appears online.
3. Begin using Twitter. Even if you use it more to read what others are saying then saying much yourself. Use Twitter Search to see what you might have missed on a topic such as your brand.
4. Join a social network. The two I recommend getting started with are LinkedIn and Facebook
5. Sign up for newsletters. The three I showed are MarketingVox, WOMMA and MarketingProfs as great starters to keep you informed.
6. Get a Flickr account even if you don’t plan on sharing photos. Search for events that you know are going on to start getting to know the people and faces.
7. Read constantly. Shelfari and Goodreads can both help you see what other people are reading and get your new marketing bookshelf started.
8. Attend events because nothing beats face-to-face. I love using Upcoming to see what is going on and what my friends are attending.
9. Evernote is what I use to capture everything that gets my attention. I like to think of it as my virtual Moleskine.
10. Yelp allows you to review and discover vendors of all sorts anywhere in the world.

Of course as soon as I finished putting together this presentation I had a million more ideas of things that people could get started with. If you were in the session and had a question please leave it here and I’ll be happy to answer it or drop me an e-mail.

What other things would you tell people to try?

Update: I recorded a podcast version of this today on Managing the Gray.  (direct MP3 link)

This photo taken and shared by Daniel Alexander/FramesMedia.com. His photos from PodCamp NYC are some of my favorite ones. Especially the ones from the first night at Slate. Absolutely amazing work!