SocialDevCamp after-party @ The Brewer’s Art, Baltimore, MD

Saturday I participated in SocialDevCamp in Baltimore, MD, a BarCamp-styled event focused on the future of the social media and web (yes, beCamp and SocialDevCamp in successive weekends…)

Primary topics (at least the sessions I attended): Business of Social Media, Semantic and Social Web, Location-Based Services (presented by the impressive Dave Troy), and the combined VC v. Bootstrapping and Amtrak Tech Corridor sessions which turned into perhaps the best discussion of the day, “How can local Internet businesses compete against the might of the Valley?”

I’ll leave the summaries of the event to others for better reviews.

My lingering thoughts:

1) Is there a business model for social media?

Nobody even seemed to question the idea.

The predominant question appeared to be “How can I make money / promote my business / promote my content using social media?”

Therefore, most of the discussion focused on advertising, affiliate marketing (which is fundamentally just advertising) and donations and examples of success using these revenue levers.

The better question (and the one I’m interested in) is “What will people and companies pay for in the social web?”

Only a few participants stretched the conversation to think about the underlying principles, to evaluate the fundamental value that social media creates and think about relevant business models.

Social media facilitates interactions, and those interactions create content. How can social media companies make money from content developed by other people?

2) “Twitter is a protocol / technology / platform, not a business”

I heard this comment many times, but I beg to disagree. Twitter’s potential business model(s) is getting a lot of attention at the moment because:

• A lot of people use and love Twitter
• Many companies have created applications based on the conversations and information flowing through Twitter
• Twitter is down a lot, essentially due to it’s popularity and difficulty scaling to meet usage.

Those who push the idea of Twitter as a communication protocol have launched ideas about creating open-source duplicates of Twitter “for the good of the users”.

But that argument is based on a narrow view of how Twitter creates value and potential business models in the space. Ethan Bauley hits the essence of the issue:

The revolution is in reinventing what marketing actually is, not cramming in a marginally less awful version of the status quo.

Advertising is a lazy business model to apply in Twitter, a short-sighted model that will kill communication networks like Twitter:

Interstitial advertising increases interaction costs and kills Net-enabled social connections dead.

More on this later.

3) Semantic or semantic web? Why does the difference matter?

In short, how we structure the data we create matters a tremendous amount. I’ll address that in a separate post.

4) How do people want to use geographical data? How does adding the location layer of context change the way we develop web applications? How does adding geo-location information help our lives?

Not only can the ubiquity of location data change the way we use current applications, it can create completely new classes of applications, services and functionalities, delivering value in ways we have yet to imagine.

Being able to do it is one thing. But figuring out how people want to use it is different. Early days.

5) Do East Coast VC’s “get it”?

The conversation of money and finding funding definitely raised a lot of conversation about East Coast VCs and their knowledge about social media business opportunities.

But instead of deriding East Coast VCs, I would almost ask: “Do East Coast entrepreneurs get it?”

In any case, why should the East Coast want to copy Silicon Valley? Do we want the same nature of competition? Do we want the same values, the same focuses, the same goals? The Valley emerged and developed in its way because of the resources, history and experiences in the region. The East Coast has its own, particular strengths, and focusing on using the skills, experiences and knowledge in the area is a better route to success.

And I think East Coast entrepreneurs get that.

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Thank you to the University of Baltimore for the venue and to all the great organizers, volunteers, sponsors and attendees who made the event engaging, valuable and highly interesting.