OpenCamp and Open Sky!

Aug 30, 2010 | by Frederick | Read | 1 Comment

A while back I was invited by none other than Cali Lewis (GeekBeat.tv) and John P. (OneMansBlog.com) to attend OpenCamp 2010 in Addison Texas (near Dallas). Being the conference organizers, they thought it’d be good if I did a talk on social media. I was very honored that they asked me and of course I accepted.

We kicked off OpenCamp Thursday afternoon with a speaker tandem skydive courtesy the United States Army’s Golden Knights! This was my first time jumping out of a plane… and technically, I didn’t even have a parachute strapped to me, though @GKMikeTT did. Check out more photos of the jump here.

I was invited to do a talk on Social Media and was scheduled to take the stage day 2 of the conference at 9:30 am, so I had plenty of time to spy the other presentations and adjust mine for the audience. And man, were there some good presentations during this event.

My talk was entitled “Avoiding Social Mediocrity” and was centered around how to best use social media, and goal definition to attain your marketing goals. If you’re interested, you can see the slide deck here. Though the This Week in Photo podcast and blog audiences are huge, I always get a little nervous in front of “real” people. But folks seemed to dig the preso as evidenced by the number of requests I received afterwards for copies of the slide deck.

OpenCamp was kind of a perspective changing event for me. And not just the obvious shift of perspective that people say you get after first skydiving. I’m talking about the volumes of information I soaked up, catching up with old friends and making some new ones.

I’m really looking forward to next year’s OpenCamp—and am seriously planning to make a habit of skydiving.