Social Media Week used to be so much fun – lots of little events popping up all over town for you to attend and learn. But now it’s all about buying the conference pass (which I wasn’t up for). It was good to see there were still events outside of the ‘conference’ sessions, but they have been very much a mixed bag.

The highlight of the week was the ‘Build Your Own Adventure’ workshop from FFH as part of their ‘Attack of the Big Data: Only Insights Can Save You Now‘.

The low point wasn’t so much the getting up early for a breakfast seminar that didn’t exist, but that the agency running it didn’t even bother to reply to tweets as to what was going on. Not one’s to practice what they preach I guess.

And the most informative session was definitely from Fergal Parkinson of The Citadel Group, which highlighted not only what to do for Crisis Comms best practice, but was a good reminder what a data loss, or data breach is almost inevitable for any organisation now.

I was also disappointed to see people still using vanity metrics over real engagement stats. Given that we shouldn’t be doing anything for the sake of it – that all activity must be trying achieve an objective, then we really should be figuring out what the KPIs are to demonstrate if we reached our objective or not. If you’re trying to shift perceptions, or get people to take a certain action, it’s irrelevant how many people watched your video, if ultimately perceptions remain the same and no one undertook the desired action. We need to stop bragging about big numbers and  measure our achievements!

I’ll do a full write up of my notes from the interesting sessions asap, which are considerably shorter than previous years.

Is that because I’ve been around Social Media for longer? Or because there’s not that much new stuff to learn – we’ve sort of figured out what the best practice is? Or because I didn’t fork out for a conference pass?

I guess we’ll just have to see what next year brings.