Photo courtesy of NetSquared Vancouver Camp MeetUp page

As I’ve written previously, I spent most of my Saturday at NetSquared Vancouver Camp, an unconference that took place at SFU Harbour Centre. It was my first time to attend an unconference, and it turned out to be a pretty good day.

While there, I got to meet individuals who are either working for non-profits or who are in the tech/communication/marketing industry. In the process, lots of great information were exchanged.

The day began with a quick explanation of what how the day would unfold; this was important because most of us have never been to an unconference.
The “schedule wrangling” that followed was pretty interesting as it allowed pretty much anyone to suggest (and eventually lead) a session.

Here’s a rundown of the sessions I’ve attended:

1. “Ninja School – Kicking Ass in Social Media” - This session was so popular than organizers had to switch up the location from a room to a theatre.  Moderated by Cecilia Lu of Kiwano Marketing, this session provided a good overview of social media.  A friend of mine called the session “Twitter 101″ because of the frequent references to the microblogging site.
2. “Measuring Social Media Success” – Another popular session, but perhaps not really that surprising, given that everyone wants to make sure they can somehow quantify their social media efforts. The session was moderated by Darren Barefoot, who brought some good insights based on his real-life experience. Here’s a copy of his presentation:
   Social Media Measurement (from MyCharityConnects)
3. “The Trials and Tribulations of a Community Manager” – Andy Baryer is the Community Manager at Blink Media Works. The session started off as a discussion of his day to day activities, but it eventually turned out to be a session about general best practices.
4. Email Marketing – What started as a discussion about MailChimp eventually lead to the sharing of best practices. Elijah, one of the organizers of the event,  shared some tests he has done with email marketing while working for the David Suzuki Foundation. There was a huge emphasis on permission-based marketing: everyone agreed that having people opt-in to email newsletters is the right thing to do for strategic as well as legal purposes.Edited to add: The discussion about email marketing was lead by Ariane Colenbrander of ariane c design.

There were many lessons I’ve learned from the NetSquared camp, but here are the main ones:

• Keep your audience in mind. While it was obvious that everyone in the event pretty much listed Twitter as their social medium of choice, one person made the good point that most people probably don’t feel the same way. Facebook and email, for instance, are still widely popular and may offer better solutions when it comes to reaching relevant target audiences.
• Less is more. With Twitter, we need to be more concise. If possible, tweets need to be less than 120 characters to allow for some insights when others re-tweet the content. For email, having less links may be beneficial.  Just put in the more important links so readers don’t feel overwhelmed.
• Test, test, test! A huge benefit of social media is that we can test stuff without much costs. Always have A/B tests. Some ideas:
  • Run some tests on how many tweets per day you can send before people start unfollowing you.
  • Similarly, test how many updates you can do on Facebook before it affects your fans.
  • Test how many links per email your readers can handle by sending at least two versions of the email to different groups.
  • Run tests on at least two versions of your website or webpages to determine optimal placement of important links such as the “Donate Us” link.
• Provide Value – that is, don’t sell. If you provide relevant information on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll earn a following. You don’t necessarily have to produce this content. The Internet already provides a big bank of great articles, so as long as the information is relevant to your audience, share this information. You can sell once in a while, but just keep in mind that people aren’t following you so you can sell to them.

Overall, it was a great event because I’ve learned a lot of things I can bring to my new position as the Volunteer Services Associate for SFU Volunteer Services this fall.  I was astonished to see how much non-profits have already embraced social media, but I was even more surprised at everyone’s willingness to share information.

If you didn’t attend NetSquared Camp Vancouver, you can head over to the event’s wiki page to see some of notes. If you attended the event,  let me know what you thought of it. I’d love to hear from you!

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