Conferences for Community Practitioners

[#1]

For an emerging practice like online community building, the most useful and practical knowledge isn't found in books or whitepapers or articles or blog posts.   Instead, it is widely distributed among the growing number of practitioners, spread among hundreds or thousand of companies, who are doing the work of community building every day.    

I meet lots of community practitioners in my work at Lithium, but I still value the peer interaction I get at some key conferences every year.  Here are a few I'm attending this fall: 

Online Community Summit, October 9-10, Sonoma California

Since the demise of the International Conference on Virtual Communities (and yes, I miss those annual trips to London), the Summit is now the granddaddy of all community conferences, running annually since 2002.  One of the unique things about this event is that it attracts experienced folks from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay, but also community builders from large non-commercial organizations like the World Bank and the Gates Foundation.  If you're responsible for communities in your organization, click on the link about and ask Jim to add you to the invitation list. 

The Communities Exchange Summit, October 14-15, San Jose

This is a new event this year so I don't know much about it, but the agenda features some real pros from organizations like Intuit, EMC, Dell (again) and Intel.  Given that, as well as the location, I know this will attract a large group of knowledgeable practitioners.  I'll be there too. 

SSPA Services Leadership, October 20-22, Las Vegas, Nevada

As you may have heard, "support is the new marketing" -- or, as Sean O'Driscoll likes to say, "post-sale is pre-sale."   The Service & Support Professionals Association is on the leading edge of the transformation of support and services organizations and, by extension, the transformation of companies as a whole into customer-centric organizations.  SSPA's Spring Best Practices event usually has an entire track devoted to communities -- this year it featured Cisco, Salesforce.com, and David Kay.  The fall event is somewhat lighter on community content, but our customer Dell is keynoting and I'll be there presenting on 10/21. 

Marketing and Online Communities, November 5, New York

Like the Online Community Summit in Sonoma, this event is run by Forum One Communications.  Unlike the Summit, this conference focuses on a marketing audience.   Here you'll find a good representation of community practitioners from the East Coast as well as agencies that are most active in helping companies create effective marketing programs using online communities and social media. 

Defrag, November 3-4, Las Vegas

Defrag focuses on the data side of communities, social media, and other emerging technologies.   As a SaaS provider, we're way into data here at Lithium, and I expect to come away with a good reading on the state of the art in this still-new area.   The agenda's a little scattershot -- there are some speakers I'd like to hear from on other topics, some topics I'd like to hear about from other speakers -- but I don't doubt it will be a useful two days.  

Looking into next year, Community 2.0 in May is a must-attend -- and it's in the Bay Area this year, so there should be quite a turnout.  On the academic side, the bi-annual Communities & Technologies conference is at Penn State in June 2009.  No doubt we'll also see more Community Next events in 2009 too.

Message Edited by JoeC on 09-12-2008 06:32 AM

[#2]

Joe:

That's a good list of upcoming conferences for community practitioners. I'll be attending the Online Community Summit in Sonoma and the Marketing and Online Communities event in New York City. I look forward to learning plenty at both events -- and to meeting and catching up with my colleagues. I hope to meet you there, Joe!

[#3]

Hi Joe: I only have the budget to attend one of the upcoming Community Conferences in San Jose or Sonoma. Which one would you suggest?  Also does anyone know why they would host two conferences on such a similar topic in october?