Vancouver Blogger Meetup

I had a chance to go to this month's Vancouver Blogger meet-up this past Thursday, at the St. Regis Grill and Bar in downtown Vancouver. This month's topic was "Rules, Norms and Web 2.0: Etiquette in an Era of Evolutionary Social [Dis]Organization" and was moderated by local well-known bloggers, Hummingbird604 (Raul Pacheco), Shane Gibson, Raincoaster and Colleen Coplick.

It was definitely a great turnout (50 bloggers) and was a fun way to network with other bloggers and learn something along the way. It was also certainly an eye-opening experience for me. I've only been using social media for a short time and like most people, am still trying to figure it out.

It was interesting to hear about the concept of etiquette and social media. I always instinctively new there were proper ways to communicate online but it was interesting to hear it quantified and now I make sure I try to follow or at least inform myself of what is acceptable and what is not.

WHO CREATES THE ETIQUETTE?

The panel used an analogy of being first to a party – whoever arrives first usually sets the tone for any kind of social event. If the partiers arrive first, you can bet the party will be pretty wild, but if you're 'vicar' is the first one to show up things will be certainly tamer. In another words, the early adopters usually set the rules of etiquette on any given social media platform.

I was surprised to learn that different sites, from DIGG to TECHNORATI, had different kinds of users and vastly different sets of norms. I'm sure I've inadvertantly broken a few rules on those sites when I first started using them.

STRATIFICATION

Raincoaster made an interesting comment about the city of Vancouver – that it is a "friendly city … along as you're within your own little group. People tend to put up walls … and don't let other people in …"

The same thing might be happening within social media – people are building walls and staying in their own groups. An example is the UNFOLLOW ALL MOVEMENT where people only follow the people they truly care about. I actually follow everyone who follows me because I like to come into contact with a varied group of people … although, the spammers can be annoying.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND BLOGS

I've been using social media mainly to promote my blog and meet other people. The questions becomes, 'how effective is social media for blogs?' I think it depends.

I had a conversation with another blogger and we agreed that while social media brought some decent traffic to our blogs, most of this traffic didn't mean an increase in comments, subscriptions or advertising revenue.

Anyways, I'll keep using social media and will probably focus more on the fun social side and meeting new people.  It will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next year.

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