This weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to travel up to Boston to attend the 4^th annual Podcamp Boston.  Podcamp is a series of Un-conferences, held worldwide by individually operated collections of volunteers.  Boston happens to be the original one, started by Christopher Penn and Chris Brogan, both well-known figures in the world of Social Media Marketing, and both have blogs that are well worth reading.

The conference was held at UMass Amhert’s Harbor campus, a beautiful building located right by the harbor, with breathtaking views of the water.

The content of the various panels and speakers was focused on community, collaboration and conversation, with ‘official’ topics ranging from “What Social Media ISNT” to “What's wrong with the A List?” (initially focused on the issues surrounding ‘internet celebrity’ but ending up being a more of a discussion about additional challenges in the SM space on a personal and professional level, to a live recording of the MarketingOverCoffee podcast, which I highly recommend checking out.  The tone was highly conversational, with many more lively discussions than ‘lecture-style’ presentations.  You can check out the official schedule via Google docs.

The introductory gathering of people included a suggestion that throughout the course of the two days, we all ‘tag’ our media with #PCB4.  This allows us to have a common unifying keywords for Google searches, Flickr photo searches, and twitter searches to identify content related to the conference, which is a great idea that anyone could be using moving forward to enable this kind of behavior.  This morning, I have a new column in my TweetDeck specifically for the aforementioned #pcb4 search term, which is showing me all the discussions that happened and are happening at and as a result of the experience.

The discussion I decided to lead was titled “How do you craft a compelling story through podcasting?”.  In my 3 years at Sony Music, I produced (with my partner Joe Vella) over 250 episodes of original storytelling content, including a 28-episode series about Michael Jackson for the 25^th anniversary of Thriller, listened to over 3 million times (feel free to check out some of the other stuff we did)   The room was pretty full and conversation was lively, as we discussed the uniquely intimate nature of the podcast format due to it being consumed most commonly via portable media players, and the opportunities that relationship created to tell an emotionally compelling story in this medium.  We also touched on metrics, deciding on an appropriate length for an episode (we’ve found that anywhere between 5-8 minutes is a good balance between depth of story and the end-users attention span), interview styles, and the portability of the concept of storytelling to other areas of the online and offline experience.

I truly believe that a well crafted podcast series, with both individual episode arcs as well as an overall series arc can be one of the most powerful ways to connect with an audience, regardless of the product.  The recap post on my blog summarizes some of the discussion: The Story Is The Results, and how anecdotal testimonials that come from a place of authentic passion are more powerful than any advertising campaign or press release when it comes to evangelizing your product, service or yourself.

There are a lot of great photos on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=%23pcb4&s=int&m=tags)  blog posts from attendees (http://smalldots.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/exhibit-a/  http://sbexperiment.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/podcamp-boston-pcb4-review/  and one from Chris Penn http://www.christopherspenn.com/2009/08/10/breaking-the-shackles-on-your-potential-at-podcamp-boston-4/

All in all, I had a great time, met some interesting new people, and hopefully was able to share some of the ‘gospel’ of the story as the message, utilizing new formats.

[Updated to add three key takeaways, as per @jhouston89]

• The ‘new and shiny’ phase of social media is evolving, and the next part is the hardest (actually doing the work of engaging, measuring, providing value, and not slipping back into old broadcast habits of not purely telling people that they need to buy what we’re selling)
• We’re beginning to be able to measure ROI, but customer engagement is fundamentally different than pure marketing campaigns and therefore have different criteria for measuring value (e.g. brand reputation, savings in customer service areas, an increase in actionable customer preferences as opposed to pure revenue)
•  If you’re not listening, you’re dead in the water.  So many tools make it so easy to listen to what’s out there (Google Alerts, Twitter searches/trends, forums) that there’s really no excuse to not know what’s going on.  The best strategy is to listen first before even attempting to engage with your audience.