Blo­gOr­lando gets bet­ter each year, I’m very glad I went. I of course enjoyed recon­nect­ing with friends who flew in from across the coun­try, see­ing the Orlando tech com­mu­nity again, and meet­ing new people.

One of the high­lights was get­ting first­hand case stud­ies from the teams that manage(d) social media at major cor­po­ra­tions: Jeff Ruben­stein and Josh Hal­lett pre­sented the Sony Playsta­tion strat­egy; Paula Berg spoke about suc­cesses and learn­ings at South­West Air­lines; and Jake McKee recapped his expe­ri­ences at Lego.

The sched­ule was full of good top­ics, mak­ing it hard to choose which track to follow:

Leah Jones of Edel­man Dig­i­tal pre­sented advanced search tech­niques, includ­ing the search engines and Boolean searches she makes. Here’s her pre­sen­ta­tion on Slideshare: “Going beyond Google”.
Nik Wilets, aka @tiburon, explained the dif­fer­ence between a pho­tog­ra­pher and a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, and had great exam­ples of his own and other’s work. He was later fol­lowed by Etan Horowitz from the Orlando Sen­tinel, who spoke about the use of Twit­ter in Jour­nal­ism.

Phil Gomes, also of Edel­man, shared his expe­ri­ences, tips, and tech­niques on giv­ing inter­nal edu­ca­tion on social media within the large PR firm.
Spike Jones and Geno Church gave excel­lent pre­sen­ta­tions on “WOM and social media” and “Move­ments, activism, and social media”, respec­tively. Most inter­est­ingly, Geno spoke about cre­at­ing and build­ing the Fiska­teers com­mu­nity, for one of the old­est com­pa­nies in the world, Finnish scis­sor maker Fiskars. Com­mu­nity is not about the scis­sors, it’s about the higher purpose.

I’ve been going up to Orlando tech events, and each time it’s reas­sur­ing to see the tech com­mu­nity grow and orga­nize itself. They’ve made great progress in the last few months since Bar­Cam­pOr­lando, which was the cat­a­lyst for many of the groups and ini­tia­tives. Pic­tured are Alex Rudloff, Ryan Price, and Gregg Pol­lack, who sum­ma­rized the his­tory and the many things going on. Here’s a video of their 30-minute preso.

I also saw David Alston from Radian6 speak about brand mon­i­tor­ing (dis­claimer: I co-founded StartPR), but unfor­tu­nately missed David Parmet’s ses­sion on edu­ca­tion and Jake’s ses­sion on identity.

Over­all, it was great to meet up with such bril­liant and engaged peo­ple, and best of all, it hap­pened in Florida ;)

Update: Some of the ses­sions are archived here on ustream.