The NextMedia08 conference ended yesterday and I’m continuing on in Banff to spend the next few days at the Banff Television festival so the fun isn’t over. But I’m sad that Next is over. I really enjoyed it.
#nm08 has been the best new media conference I’ve been to this year. The panels were great and the environment was warm and enthusiastic. A lot of people with experience were spending lots of time advising anyone who asked. It was easy to make great contacts.
But what I really want to talk about is the Nokia n95 phone give-away because it illustrates many of the things we talk about when we talk about using the web’s social spaces.
For those of you who weren’t there, Deborah Day stood up during lunch on Saturday partly to promote Just Comedy and partly to announce that Nokia was giving away four really great phones over the course of the conference. One of the guys at my table Riel Roussopoulos got really excited. He’d been lusting after that phone for months and hadn’t been able to get his hands on one. Deb told us that the first phone would be given away right now to the owner of the oldest, grungiest phone.
Now, at the time we were in a huge booming room filled with dozens of big round tables – the ones that are so big that talking to the person across from you is hopeless. You have to content yourself with the people on either side. But suddenly everyone was pulling out phones and comparing them. Somehow the gulf across the table didn’t seem so big. And that’s because we had something in common, something to talk about. And that is how this little four part contest helped turn the nm08 participants into a community.
It was kind of cool because this little phone give-away was suddenly resembling what we do try to do with our digital projects: create community by starting conversations. And like much of what we want to do with new media, it was built around a brand. And in a pretty ideal way, I think.
Nokia was central to the experience but there was no need for Deb or Gavin McGarry or their fellow NextMedia ambassadors to do a sales job. The community took care of that. I had barely exchanged names with the people across from me at the beginning of lunch, but by the end Riel’s love affair with that phone had made us into friends and he did a better job selling the phone than any ad could, which is another one of those big social networking ideas: You don’t need to sell the product once you’ve built community. The community will do the job for you.
And here’s another classic new media lesson brought to life by the phone give-away: you can’t control community. The nm08 participants got to vote on how two of the phones were given away and their/our choices were unexpected. We were told that one phone would go to the person who offered the five NextMedia ambassadors the best bribe. Riel was so mad for the phone that he went far. He offered all the judges a free web site design, free web hosting for a year and -- courtesy of his lawyer wife, Juliet Smith, of Fraser Milner Casgrain -- an hour of time with an entertainment lawyer. For each of the five ambassadors. A sure win, right?
It would have been if I was deciding and probably if the five judges had kept the decision to themselves. But instead they turned to the community, introducing what they called the top bribes: Riel’s, an offer of an hour of free hypnotherapy and an offer to make a poster for each judge turning them into superheroes from Matt Toner of Zeroes 2 Heroes. I forget the fourth choice but you get the idea.
The contest was supposed to be for the best bribe, but the community for whatever reason, chose to go another way. They gave the phone to Matt Toner.
But these things happen when the community is involved, you give up control and maybe if you’re one of the ambassadors you have to give up your shot at a free web site design. But you do get something back in return. You get community which is an awesome and powerful force.
If I were Nokia, I’d be over the moon about that give-away. If I were Deb Day and the rest of the organizers, I’d be pretty chuffed about creating such an effective low-tech event at a high tech conference. And as one member of the newly created community, I’m delighted by the lesson and totally engaged.
The only real loser in all this was Riel and if Nokia is smart they'll find a phone for him and give it to him because frankly he's the best salesman for that phone they could ever find.
