This is a guest blog post written by Mike Bonifer, author of “Game Changers” (http://www.gamechangers.com) and Social Media Week Los Angeles Advisory Board Member.
A few weeks ago, I attended the three-day LATV Festival in Century City. By far the most engaging presentation I saw was a session where Eric Schotz, the head of LMNO Productions, and his development team pitched an executive from the Oxygen Network on a reality show about three funny old ladies who run a beauty salon.
Whether people in the audience thought it was a clever strategy for coercing a buyer to commit, a disruptive routine that brands LMNO as innovators, or both, it was a very cool 90-minute session. We got to watch a successful television producer pitch a show. The audience was a fly on the wall, living vicariously through it. Everyone, including the Oxygen exec, enjoyed it. The video clips of the three old ladies were funny. The audience was 100% engaged in what was going on. There was a kind of reality series drama to it. The learning was not explicit. It was more implicit. That didn’t make it any less instructive. It was the only session I later heard LATV attendees describe as remarkable.
Good for LMNO! I hope they sold the series. (I have a call in with Shotz to find out what happened, check back for that.)
The events we’re scheduling for Social Media Week L.A. promise a lot of the same kind of creative disruption. Social media, after all, is about having the conversations in new ways, making different and more engaged connections with our audiences and with one another.
This won’t necessarily mean SMWLA presenters will ditch the panel format altogether. Panels can be great. They still have their place in the conference idiom. We will, however, better align with the meaning of social media if we are at least aware of the clichés.
Here’s a cheat sheet with some of the clichés to be avoided if possible:
-Moderator introduces panelists, who then introduce themselves. Everyone says they’re “excited to be here” but act blasé about being there.
-Moderator introduces theme and presents agenda. Spoils ending by revealing that that “the last 15 or 20 minutes will consist of Q & A from the audience.”
- Moderator asks panelists a long question designed to remind audience that moderator knows as much as panelists.
- Three of the five panelists use the question as a segue into their personal statements.
- At least once, every panelist and the moderator will say, “That’s a great question.”
- Panelists will be asked to sum up by responding to the question, “Where’s it all going?”
- Audience members will be given a microphone to ask questions. Feeling shut out of the discussion to this point, a third of those asking questions will use their question as a segue into their personal statements.
One of the biggest benefits of social media is its potential for breaking through the clichés of old media. Here are some of the ways the events of Social Media Week can invite breakthroughs:
- Streaming video (via uStream).
- Collaborate with audiences, include online audiences.
- Tweeting, texting,
- AR, ARGs, Transmedia and Pecha Kucha. (look it up)
- Live performers and professional entertainers. Artists make art.
- Teleconferencing events from multiple locations.
- Game structure, role playing and team participation.
- Expand traditional narrative forms via collaboration with audiences.
- Geography, mobility, sustainability.
Our intent is to shatter molds, subvert the status quo, avoid predictability. It will be serendipity by design. Attendees at Social Media Week L.A. will literally be crossing a media divide. On the other side will be a new way of experiencing the world.
