The Online Community Unconference East was held last week (2/11) at Baruch College in New York. We had an amazing turnout, with 150 online community professionals from organizations representing a range of industries from publishing to marketing, technology and more.

A partial list of participants include: Google, Ebay, Consumer Reports, Deutsche Telekom, iVillage, Time Inc, IBM, CNN.com and others. I hosted the Unconference, on behalf of Forum One, and we were fortunate to have Kaliya Hamlin as our facilitator.

Key Takeaways
There were a lot of interesting conversations, both in session, and in the halls between sessions and during lunch. I had a few key overarching takeaways, in addition to tons of new ideas and tidbits and tidbits of insight.

• In a Challenging Economy, Interest in Online Communities Remains High
  I have to admit, when we first started marketing the OCUE late last year, I was very nervous. He had approximately 125 folks in New York at our 2008 version, and I expected to have about 100 folks this year because of the economy. To my surprise, we had 150 folks register this year. We also saw signs in our Economy survey in December of 2008 that although many community programs were being effected by the economy, interest in (and support for) community building activities in many organizations was actually INCREASING because of the relative cost compared to traditional marketing tactics, and the reach and immediacy of fostering a community of customers. These threads were mostly validated by the discussions at the Unconference East as well.

• The Conversation is Maturing
  Several more senior community practitioners mentioned that the conversations regarding community building practices were much more mature this year. There were fewer “newbie” sessions (I was told), and most folks felt that there was an equitable exchange of information amongst peers. I personally noticed that there were far fewer sessions about justifying a community program or engagement, and more about qualifying and communicating the value of online communities back to the stakeholders and also to community participants. As community and social media strategies shift from one-off experiments to a long-term relationship-building efforts, the conversations about those efforts will naturally mature as well.
• Think “Ecosystem”: Towards a Holistic Strategy
  One point that I have evangelized for many years is the fact that online communities generally don’t live in a single location. Most successful community strategies engage the entire ecosystem of touchpoints that members (or potential members) find valuable. This ecosystem can be made up of destination community sites, but relationships are also forming on blogs, social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), mass social media (YouTube, Flickr), and even offline at meetups or user group meetings. Conversations at the OCUE this year generally spilled beyond the boundaries of a hosted community destination, and most folks were thinking about how to prioritize various opportunities for engagement in their community ecosystem.

Topics
We had about 40 sessions throughout the day, including:

• Social Networking in the Enterprise
• Business ROI (+insights)
• Best Practices – Busting the myths of online community management
• Impact of SEO on Community
• Social Psychology 101 for Community Managers
• Scaling Moderation to meet the needs of users and the brand
• Holistic Community Management: New Frameworks for value and performance
• Managing + Motivating Community leader
• Member and Organization “Alignment”

We will be opening up the Unconference wiki, which includes notes from most sessions, in about a week.

Additional Content
Tweets from the OCUE2009 OCUE2009
Pictures from the Unconference OCUE2009