The Mashable Media Summit occurred a couple weeks ago, but I have been too busy to write this up. I am not a big social media person. I use social media. I have Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare accounts. I don’t consider myself a ninja, guru or any other stupid title though. I went to the Mashable Media Summit with the hope of picking up some cool ideas that I could take back to work, and share with our customers. Being in DC, we have clients in the different areas that were being present, sports teams, government, hospitality, and non-profit. Overall, I was rather disappointed in the presentations. I didn’t feel like I got a lot of innovative ideas.

I thought the presentation by Ricky Van Veen, to start the day, was a really good presentation. He shared some myths that some people believe when it comes to presenting content on a website. Some of the myths were obvious, but he offered some great anecdotes and examples.

The next presentation was on sports. The presenter was Len Berman. I feel that the jist of the presentation was basically, “I am an older guy, from traditional media, and I use social media to stay relevant.” He sends out email newsletters and posts on Twitter. He used it to sell his books. I am a big sports fan, and I follow a lot of people in the know, especially hockey. Allan Walsh is an agent for a number of hockey players, and he is known for his use of Twitter. He has gotten in trouble for saying things. He has used it to get a team to pay for his client’s surgery, after they said they would not. He encourages his clients, who play for in a league that has very few Twitter users, to use the service. He would be a good presenter in the future.

I thought the next presentation, on hospitality, was a very useful one. Our clients, who use social media, use is strictly as a means of promoting events. They do not use it to interact with their clientele, like the presenter Brian Simpson (Roger Smith Hotel) does. He also talked about how they picked the 3 most important aspects about their hotel that they want to promote, food, events and rooms. It was a good presentation that gave us some ideas to use.

We do not have any music clients, but I really enjoy the music industry. Other than the fundraising that Josh Charles did, I didn’t hear anything different than hundreds or thousands of other bands/musicians have done. I think bands were some of the first users of social networking. The first sites I can remember that offered a form of networking here Farmband and PureVolume.

After a lovely lunch, there was a presentation by the American Read Cross. I got 2 main points from this presentation. During the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, someone actually used Twitter to tell the Red Cross where their family member was trapped. That is a great story. The other part was, they did a text messaging campaign to raise money. It was a campaign that everyone knows about. I think it would have been better to have an smaller organization that uses social media to raise money or spread awareness in a different way.

The next presentation was from the Brand Manager at Starbucks. Chris Buzzo offered a lot of interesting information about some of the campaigns that the company has run. They seem to do a lot of market testing and know their customers pretty well. They are known for their marketing, so it was interesting to get some background.

Much like the American Red Cross presentation, the government presentation had a lot of info that we already knew about. The presenter took credit for the American Red Cross text message campaign. He spent some time talking about the Tehran media blackout back in 2009, and the use of Twitter and Youtube.

My last critique on the event is shared by a few of the people around me. The woman that MC’d the event was awful. It seemed like she felt that there always had to be someone talking, and most of what she said was useless and annoying.

In all, it was nice day to get away and hang out in NYC. There were a lot of big announcements that were made. We all got free Motorola cellphones, which made my wife really happy. I just wish that the presenters went a little deeper and were more creative in some of the topic areas. I sold my Conan O’Brien tickets for that night, and I am not sure, at this point, if it was a good choice.