Junkets and other related boondoggles have a long history – probably the first one was a rich Babylonian who invited some scribes out to brunch at his hanging gardens so they’d say good things about him. And we all know about junkets for doctors and journalists and politicians, and the rules many organizations have to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Everyone in social media is obviously watching the new FTC guidelines (I like these comments from Steve Hershberger of ComBlu), and most of us have heard stories about all the good stuff that can get sent to bloggers.

So let’s just take as a given that this kind of thing can go very wrong indeed in the wrong hands. This event was in very right hands, however. I’m somebody who often gives things to people in my job role, so I’m very interested in clear guidelines and disclosures, which will be a topic for another day.

The funny thing is that when we think of a junket, we think of a Mai Tai by the pool in Hawaii. Tech Field Day was not that kind of experience, but it was geek heaven, just the same.

Let’s turn over this introduction to organizer Stephen Foskett:

from Rod Haywood’s post: Gestalt IT Tech Field Days 2009.

Note what Stephen says – although it was sponsored by a set of vendors, this event was not controlled by the vendors. Sunshine Mugrabi helped organize the event and talks about how it rapidly came together. Attendee Rick Vanover describes the schedule and answers the vacation question:

Q: Is this industrial tourism?

A: To an extent, but it is not a vacation. Our day on Thursday started at 7:00 AM and went until 9:00 PM. Friday started at 7:30 AM and we didn’t get back from dinner until around 8:30 PM. Yes, we had fun – but we were busy giving the sponsors our full attention.

The event was a huge success for all the participants. 1,274+ tweets and dozens of well-disclaimed blog posts later, the vendors felt like they were able to communicate very intimately to a set of influencers. The attendees, all top-notch independent technologists, were stuffed full of information about new technologies, which was a plus for their jobs, and they were also able to convey what their perspectives to their readers, which was a plus for their blogs. A second Tech Field Day is now being planned.

An important part of the event was the quality of the presentations. You’ve got to bring smart technologists to talk technology with these guys. No marketing fluff, although you can talk benefits, as long as they’re real. Everybody loves a good benefit. Attendee Rich Brambley wrote about the experience in  Thoughts About Presenting to Engineers. Ed Saipetch, another attendee, also wrote The Five Rules of Tech Day Club:

The genesis of this list comes from the question I asked myself and other attendees constantly which was, “What can we do to get deeper than a standard technical presentation or trade show booth demo.” …

2. Cover the basics and then get into the weeds – We love the weeds. Some of us do anyway. It shows us you know what you’re talking about. It separates you from your competition. Tell us your strengths and weaknesses. We are more effective when we are armed with more information.

What were the success factors of this kind of event – new to our corner of the blogosphere?

• Strong commitment from the organizers of no quid pro quo. What the bloggers wrote was up to them. Even when there is a vendor as a sponsor, like HP, this has to be the case. (Disclaimer: I’m pitching this kind of event to several groups inside VMware. I think it’d be a blast.)
  
• Independent technologists who have their reputation at stake. I respect all these guys, and their reputations are based on being good communicators about their honest technical opinions.
  
• Full disclosure. Disclose, disclose. When the topic comes up again in a few months, disclose some more.
• Deep technical mind melds. The most successful vendors (the ones that generated the most love) had some of the coolest products, yes, but they also sent in top-notch technologists to have a deep dive with the visitors. This is critical; spewing marketing bs at a bunch of technologists is deadly – even if they don’t like your product, technologists like talking to other smart technologists.
  
• A grueling schedule (14 hour days on and off the bus probably qualifies) that no sane person would mistake for a vacation.
• Invite the right people: don’t aim for super-connected influencers whose greatest claim to fame is how often they get retweeted. In this kind of event, you want people with authority and respect in the communities you want to reach. Their opinion counts where it matters.
  

Obviously, we’re just catching up to the MommyBloggers here. Have you participated in an event like this? What ethical obligations do we all have going forward with these kind of events? What are other ways that we can get the opportunity to communicate deeply with people who specialize in our domains?

[Updated with more on presentation tips from Ed, and a final bullet point on inviting the right people with authority.]

We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Broaster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. … If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent.

But let’s talk about Twitter influence for a second. There are a number of tools that threaten to measure influence, Twitter or otherwise. Edelman just launched a new fancy one, and from Brian Solis this morning I saw that Klout measures influence over a topic.

Just what does influence over a topic mean? Let’s stay grounded in the reality of the topic I know: VMware. We have a great conversation around the enterprise use of VMware on Twitter. It started around VMworld 2008 and took off from there. The conversation consists of a few thousand IT professionals hanging out, swapping links and advice with some grace notes about our personal lives. Most of the virtualization bloggers hang out there. If you want to join our conversation, a good place to start is this hand-curated list by @ericsiebert, Top 100 VMware & Virtualization People to follow.  If you really want to have a deep technical conversation about VMware, though, I don’t recommend starting at Twitter at all — go over to the VMware Communities and ask away.

From the vantage point of my personal involvement, Eric’s list contains some of the most influential people on Twitter talking about enterprise virtualization. Those people set the current “conventional wisdom” and have “authority” in our community. The part of the enterprise virtualization community that’s active on Twitter is small compared to some – it’s not MomBloggers or the Social Media Ouroboros – but I can assure you it’s a community that is of extreme interest if your company wants to participate in the virtualization revolution.

OK, you’re a marketing professional and you’d like to start talking to these people, because you have something they’d be interested in. (Exactly how to approach a community of technologists is a topic for another time.) You might start by searching for influencers on the topic “VMware” at Klout. Let’s look at the Klout list for VMware and compare it to Eric’s hand-curated list. At the current time, there are a few overlaps, with @CXI, @daniel_eason, and @Mike_Laverick being the most notable. Certainly, if you were a PR professional and used this list of tweeters to start talking to people about enterprise virtualization, or to introduce a product that was destined for the data center, you’d be very off-track, and I’m not saying that just because I’m not included on the list! What’s gone wrong?

1. Keywords are not conversations. With Twitter’s 140 characters, often the general subject of your post is omitted.  Sometimes people will stick a #vmware in there, but we really don’t use hashtags outside of some events or special conversations. We are usually talking about VMware’s products rather than mentioning the name of the company in our tweets. Looking for tweets with VMware in them, which is what I assume that Klout is doing, catches only a fragment of the actual conversation. Compare that with a Topsy search for VMware, which looks at tweeted link destinations, and is dead on.

This observation was driven home to me as we looked at the results of one of our corporate announcements a while back. I watched a lot of conversations that morning in my normal twitterstream — actually quite a bit of back and forth considering how hard it is to keep a dialog going on Twitter. Point, counterpoint, argument, counterargument, predictions, reactions, positioning, counter-positioning — and a few poison pen letters. Our agency also did a search for a few keywords (company names in this case) – which showed a few hundred tweets and some mostly-positive pronouncements about the industry. The keyword search had missed much of the dialog in the community that day, because most of that dialog had moved past the keywords we were searching for.

2. Influence is not communty. The beauty and frustration of Twitter compared to forums or IRC channels is that, instead of having separate places to discuss separate topics, Twitter is a mess of overlapping conversations and overlapping communities. I think by relying on keywords, Klout has netted fish from several fishing holes.

In the current Klout list, there are actually quite a few people participating in the conversation on cloud computing, like @samj, @jamesurquart, and my new colleague @wattersjames. The Klout Score has a Network component, which transfers the influence of your followers and retweeters. Evidently the cloud conversation has a lot of influential mavens who have lifted the influence of people participating in the cloud computing community.

Another group of tweeters in the Klout list are people that work with VMware Fusion on the Mac. Mac users are obviously another community with lots of heavy hitters in the social media space. The Mac conversation is usually very separate from the enterprise data center conversation that I’m involved in.

3. Influence is not authority. From the explanation of the Klout Score, it looks like the score also considers reach and some cultural factors (how often people are retweeting & using lists). Nobody in our little enterprise virtualization community has hundreds of thousands of followers – I’ve got about 2K and @vmware about 6K, so I’d say those are the upper limits right now of our active community. I’ll speculate that our community is more close-knit and less self-promotional than some others I know — I’m aware of other communities that do a lot more logrolling and self-backpatting than ours does. That may affect our influence scores.

So for all these reasons and probably some others, a Twitter-wide influence score doesn’t adequately reflect authority within our community, nor can the participants even be found with a simple keyword search.  (Hmm. Sounds like a job for lists?)

tl;dr Keyword searches don’t identify communities on Twitter. Influence scores don’t correlate with authority.