I enjoyed attending the Web 2.0 Expo last week, despite missing several sessions due to work-related commitments. Here’s a high level summary of what I thought was memorable, along with a link to the official expo page, where you can find comments and ratings for the session, and a link to the session-specific Twitter tag, where you can get the just-in-time tweets by attendees. I highly recommend you to also search Twitter for the speaker name or the tag #w2e as not everybody included the session-specific tag in their tweets.
1. Dion Hinchcliffe
Economics 2.0: Highly Effective Strategies for Putting Your Business on a Recession Diet
Twitter tag: #econ2
This is my recollection of something really bold Dion said. It may be more of a misquote than a quote, so just take it with a grain of salt:
The first wave of IT companies was about hardware. The second wave was about software. The next generation of IT companies will be about data. Google may one day become the first trillion dollar company in terms of market cap.
Here are Hinchcliffe’s slides, courtesy of Slideshare:
2. Nancy Duarte – Tools for Visual Storytelling
Twitter tag: #w2e_story
This was by far the best session I attended among the electives. I bought Nancy’s slide:ology book last year, and found it to be very good but not extraordinary. Having her conducting a workshop in person is a totally different matter. She’s an excellent story teller and brought interesting and relevant examples on how to go from mundane and ineffective slides to compelling and informative ones. Here are some pics from the session:
Designing a presentation as if you are plotting a movie or a play
Combining multiple diagram types in one visually informative combo
Time to go back to the drawing board and redo all those complex slides
Great use of Meebo to brainstorm with the audience in real time
3. Peter Kim, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang – Why Social Media Marketing Fails – and How to Fix It
Twitter tag: #smfail
I had high expectations for this one, but felt a bit disappointed – maybe because the expectations were unfairly high to start with. I’m a big fan of the Groundswell book, and I follow both Jeremiah and Peter in Twitter, and I know they have a lot to knowledge to share. I’ve been in panels in the past, so I know that they are often hit-or-miss, depending a lot on the chemistry among the participants or the questions from the audience. The major reason for this one not realizing its full potential was that the panel was not diverse enough in terms of opinions. It would probably be good to have panelists with radically different points of view for the discussions to get interesting. Despite all that, I was really pleased with listening to Charlene for the first time and seeing how balanced her positions are toward the business value of Social Media Marketing. Talking to her after the session was great too, as she’s very approachable and addresses all questions very directly.
Part 2 will come some time soon 
Update: Embedded Hinchcliffe’s presentation from Slideshare.
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