Making Content New

On Tuesday, I participated in my first #socialmedia “UnPanel.” It’s a weekly focused time of Twitter-based conversation on topics related to social media. Every week there’s a different moderator who initiates a number of different conversations – this past week, Liz Strauss did the honors. I’d imagine a lot of you reading may have had similar conversations a number of times in the past.

We covered a range of topics, beginning with the question “Do blogging and tweeting require different skill sets?” This morphed into a conversation on macro-blogging (i.e. – blogging) vs. microblogging, with different participants offering analogies to compare the two. I found the perceived connections between the two fascinating, and it’s affecting my approach to blogging (as in, I’m trying to do it more). When one user pointed out the difficulty in creating (via blogging) versus joining (via tweeting) an interesting conversation, another responded that Twitter can in fact help create interesting conversations for a blog.

Along those lines, my favorite conversation centered on the question of “What comes first – content, conversation or community?” Personally, I don’t think you can have conversation or community without content to stimulate it. There were of course different perspectives, and one person put it best by saying that conversations are in themselves forms of content which can stimulate further conversations and fuel community.

(You can see the full conversation here)

I should point out that I found the conversation easiest to follow using the TweetChat application. It makes following the conversation around a particular meme a snap – you can set the update time down to 5 seconds, making the conversation nearly real-time.

To the extent I’m able, I definitely plan to join the UnPanel on a weekly basis. If there are folks out there interested in similar chats on topics like mobile apps, smartphone platforms or other forms of emerging media, I’d be interested in talking about how we can set something up that would be compelling enough to draw a large audience. Heck, I’d even be willing to talk about the sputtering Minnesota Twins…

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