My TribeCon Experience

On October 28th, I had the good fortune to attend the very first TribeCon in New Orleans. TribeCon is conference by and for both online and real life Community Managers:

“New technologies have eradicated geographic boundaries allowing our social networks to expand and align, creating powerful communities. Communities inspired by ideas, driven by a common purpose form tribes.”

The conference was attached to a three day multi-stage outdoor music festival, called The VooDoo Experience that is similar to Lallapallooza or Austin City Limits festival. Marrying a tech focused conference with live music is a winning combination if you ask any SXSX attendee and TribeCon was created with that conference clearly in mind. SXSW was often discussed at TribeCon, not only because of the obvious positive comparisons, but because that conference has become a Mecca for the tech community. TribeCon felt very much like what the first SXSW Interactive must have been like – tattooed, hipster music fans intermingling with tattooed, hipster technology fans to the benefit of both groups.

TribeCon is the brainchild of Chris Schultz who along with Tiffany Starnes and an army of volunteers like Jessica Rohloff put together an incredible line up of speakers and attendees. Chris is a rock star when in comes to the technology and entrepreneurial community. His has a few startups under his belt including his current one, Flatsourcing and he runs the very successful New Orleans’ coworking space, Lauchpad and yet he still finds the time to be actively involved with NetSquared. Chris and I met when he made the trek out to Houston for our first BarCamp and have stayed close friends ever since. I got a call from Chris on the Monday before TribeCon when he said something to the effect of, “Marc, I don’t see your name on the RSVP list, there must be some mistake.” to which I replied as only a good friend could, “You don’t need to twist my arm, I’m booking my flight right now.” That’s the kind of relationship you form when you deal with communities like he does. I wasn’t the only one apparently as Boulder (@micah, @bpm140 and @andrewhyde), Dallas (@blakestar, @tylerfields and @jenniferconley) and Shreveport (@johngrindley) were well represented.

There were a number of memorable moments like when many of the out-of-town attendees thought it was a joke when they said to wear shrimp boots (it was held in an outdoor circus-style tent just after a big rain) or when @micah’s keynote speech about Failure had the projector go out (like a pro, he kept going offering to pantomime his slides). Overall the conference focused on how to engage a community for a purpose – even if that purpose is simply to let other like-minded people know you exist. One of the key points across all of the speakers and panels were that passion from leaders and members is the most important factor in keeping a community together. Another topic that came up a number of times is that companies cannot simply “sprinkle community water on their users” and expect it to grow – they instead need to be a platform for the conversation to take a life of its own. Because it was held in New Orleans one of the strongest takeaways was that there is nothing like an apocalyptic disaster like Katrina to really pull a community together, but you don’t have to wait for another one to be prepared – check out what Robert Fogarty is doing with  http://www.evacuteer.org.

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It was really good catching up with old friends like Dogster and Catster founder @tedr and his lovely and talented wife @mollyblock (who has an opinion or two about the hipster scene in the Bay Area), @brianoberkirch who gave a great presentation and @taylordavidson who made Houston one of his stops on his cross-country tour. It was also great meeting new friends like @sloane who is doing incredibly good things with Kiva.org (and who stayed with our very own @ericaogrady after SXSW this year) and @murelle who is clearly going places in her life.

I can’t wait to introduce more Houston folks to TribeCon next year.