by Michelle Lentz

If a Podcamp pops up in your area, I recommend you attend it. Among other reasons, Podcamps are free and you can’t argue with free networking and knowledge.

Podcamp Ohio was a total success! I’m not sure of the numbers yet, but I believe they may have surpassed 200 attendees. Not bad for an unconference that ran a basically viral marketing campaign, depending on Twitter and word of mouth.

The sessions were great. I enjoyed the first session I attended – Podcasting in Plain English by David Jackson. It covered all the basics you need for podcasting. Sometimes I think these podcasting experts forget that if you’re just experimenting with the idea, you shouldn’t go out and buy expensive equipment. Jackson made sure to mention that. Make sure it’s something you like and enjoy before investing.

I also attended What Not to Do: Social Media Anti-Tips by Paull Young and Luke Armour. It was probably my favorite session of the day, although I didn’t attend too many. In this session they covered all sorts of social media mistakes, particularly pertaining to marketing. They interspersed their presentation with Great Moments in Twitter, which showcased some more embarrassing tweets. Remember folks, Twitter is forever.

My session on Twitter went quite well – or so I’ve heard. I’m trying to get a full presentation together for some upcoming conferences and this was sort of a practice run for me. I got enough feedback that I’ve already started “upgrading” my presentation, although many have told me it’s fine as is. I had a complicated mix in the room of Twitter skeptics and Twitter diehards. It’s hard to gear a presentation to both, but hopefully I carried it off.

For me, the best part of Podcamp was the time I spent networking. Perhaps I’m a bad camper, but I missed about two sessions because I was getting to know people in the cafe and hallway. I particularly enjoyed conversations with Shawn Morton of Profilactic and Doug Petch. In fact, Podcamp drove home a point for me about social networking. In my various speaking engagements, I always try to push the fact that while we’re all making friends online, our real goal is face to face networking. For a lot of people, myself included, it’s easier to network semi-anonymously online and then meet someone in person. Meeting so many of my Twitter friends “in real life” at Podcamp was fantastic.

There were several folks video/audio recording each of the sessions. (I’m camera shy, so I found this unnerving). The sessions should be online sometime soon.

And to the organizers, congratulations on a successful event!

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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.

Tagged as: networking, podcamp, podcamp ohio