OMMA Global NY: A Social Media Conference with No Social Media tools?

I am planning to be at the OMMA Global Event in NY next week. The theme for this year is

The New Socialism: welcome to a world where social networks, social media applications and microblogging services become our central means of engaging online. Many industry watchers believe the answer to online advertising’s oldest problem lies inside social media’s walled gardens: that is, how to bring the estimated $500 billion spent annually on offline brand advertising to the Web.

Given that OMMA is giving so much importance to social media, I was surprised that OMMA has not used any of the social media tools on the conference website. The website’s main purpose is to give participants information on the conference agenda, program schedule and speakers bio. And that’s where it stops.

The challenge with most conferences is that you don’t know the other participants, their background, their areas of interest. Won’t networking be easier and you get more value from your investment of time and money if OMMA had done some of the following?

• Create communities of interest: the conference has 11 different themes or track sessions including Mobile, Search, Metrics, Gaming, Video, Behavioral etc. It could have easily created participant communities based for each of these sessions to encourage interaction and networking.
• Ability to interact with speakers: Along with the speaker bios, it would have been helpful if I also knew the link to their blog and/or twitter handle.
• Ability to interact with the sponsors: Sponsors often complain that the breaks during sessions aren’t enough to interact with participants and share with them the value proposition of their tools/products. OMMA could have created more value for the sponsors by allowing participants to interact directly with them. That way, they could have used the breaks for follow-up sessions and shortened the sales cycle.
• Ability to post questions ahead of time: With knowledge of some of participant questions beforehand, the speakers can not only make the session more interactive but also fine tune it to the audience needs.

I do still believe that it will be a great conference to attend given the Who’s Who of Digital Marketing speaking at the event. But I would like the next Social Media Conference to leverage some more social media tools.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptanitinonline

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