As I watch all the great presentations at Bucketworks this morning for NAKED|bizgrowth I do so from home, thanks to the friendly WikiBot streaming the presentations to Ustream. Thanks also to a pervasive attitude of openness and sharing at Bucketworks and the willingness of SOHO|biztube to utilize this space and make this knowledge freely available to those of us who couldn’t make it to the conference.
Watching a conference on “social stuff” (thanks @krianbalma) remotely, I can’t help but feel like a participant, not a spectator. When presenters and attendees are using social tools and I can converse with people “in the room” so to speak, it is unavoidable to recognize how social stuff becomes a tangible space.
Sure the experience is not exactly the same (I’m currently in the market for this kind of job and would be there networking out of necessity if possible. Does that worry me, no not really, networks are networks and a business card can’t tell you as much as my linkedin profile anyhow.) but as the adoption rate of social stuff increases, the experience of these spaces will inevitably expand to more arenas than conferences on social media.
I have seen this phenomenon manifest itself first in behaviors of players of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) and other virtual spaces like SecondLife first hand, and through excellent academic analysis by Edward Castronova, T.L Taylor, and others. It is somewhat easier to conceptualize these virtual spaces since they have a tangible visual representation but the social “spaces” that communities of interest do and will increasingly occupy are no less real. If the previous research remains relevant, these spaces are no less “real” than the room that the speakers stand in.
Many presentations about social media inherently recognize this out of necessity to measure ROI through tangible action as it relates to their efforts using different tools and reaching different audiences. There may or may not be a tangible ROI for my time spent participating remotely, but in the same respect, the metric value to measuring ROI for an education is always fuzzy math. As it relates to knowledge I’ll refer to a great quote by @augieray this morning “There’s ROI in putting on pants in the morning. Can’t prove how much but it’s better than not.”
