Friday 26 October 2012

WAcreative NonCon12

Yep - it's been a while since we added a blog post.  Mostly, we forget to do it.  A lot of ideas present themselves and then are forgotten.  I should absolutely start writing things down.  Anyway, this time it was quite obvious what to talk about.

I really wanted to take this opportunity to thank the speakers, staff and everyone who came down on Thursday night to NonCon12.  It was a success it's fair to say.

NonCon came about last year and did well.  It was a stress but ultimately very worth it.  We decided that would be it for "major" events... roll on July 2012 and it seemed like a good idea to take another stab at it.  It, after all, would be better planned = less stress....  Putting together events like this is fun, but is always stressful.  I should remember this.  As I'm writing this, things are getting blurry, I haven't showered for far too long and my hands feel contaminated with... well, I'm not sure.

We ended up heading over to The Palmyra for a couple of Maple Leaves... just go in and ask for one, you'll see.  Heading back over to Manchester with a couple of the speakers, we opted for pizza and whiskey and a 3am finish. Coupled with an early morning logistics run, then an (awesome!) Almost Famous burger in the Northern Quarter.  That's how NonCon ended up for some of us.

Anyway - one thing that struck me yesterday was the involvment of the BBC and I really wanted to touch on this.  As Phil Fearnley kicked-off his presentation and we saw some of the coverage of the summer's Olympics, it really hit home that MediaCity did a great job supporting this, but that the BBC rocks.  Their "product" delivery is world-class and, during a time when they're taking a lot of flak, it's important to remember this.  While there is an ongoing investigation into what happened back then, and rightly so, the support of the BBC Academy for events like this is unique and kudos is due.  Let's not forget the summer that was.

Moving on, we also managed to grab some early stats from the #NonCon12 tag to see how it performed and it's probably worth touching on this too.  Early stats are coming in with around 41,132 accounts hit with the hastag and an exposure of nearly 200,000 impressions.  This is amazing.  Not surprisingly, a lot of this was thanks to Creative Boom.

A great deal of the social activity from the room was around the hashtag, but a lot also used @ messages and resulted in a solid couple of hundred tweets.  For an event like this, that's also pretty amazing.   We saw banter in the room firing from Twitter and real-life connections made.  The conversation was varied and every speaker was well receeieved.  Photos were shared extensively and engagement with Instagram was solid.

It's an interesting world where these electronic conversations take place in real-time, mixing real life with the virtual, capturing moments quickly and accurately.  Given the number of times that the topic of social social media was mentioned by all our speakers, we thought it would be nice to share, very briefly, some early insights into what you were up to in the room.  We'll do more with this soon!

For everyone's sake, it's time to hit the shower.  Thanks for coming and we hope to see you at the next meetup!