CLIC Social Media Conference

I attended the CLIC Social Media Conference last Wednesday, which was ideal as many CPD23 Things were discussed, as well as one person actually giving a talk on CPD23 Things.  It was nice to meet other librarians, who were all either using social media, or trying to learn about it.
I heard about Twapperkeeper, which allows the archiving of hashtagged tweets from Twitter.  This doesn't sound that useful, until you realise how popular tweeting is getting at conferences - there were loads of tweets flying around actually during talks, which explained the constant buzz of mobile phones.  I did tweet a couple of comments myself, and they are good as aide-memoires, when looking back, although they may be a little distracting during the talk itself if you're not that good at multi-tasking.
I decided to use Twapperkeeper, and found that someone else had already set up an archive, but unfortunately it only dates from about 4pm on the date of the conference, which is a little unfortunate as I know there were loads of tweets before then!  I can still use Twitter's search for this though, as it's less than a week old.
I've just checked and I'm sure there were more tweets on the day, but perhaps they hadn't hashtagged them? In any case, it was a good conference, and I did make a few notes on the programme!
The first couple of talks were overviews by Mandy Powell and Emma Harrison on how they use Social Media in their lives, and how useful it is to them.  I found it really interesting that something that looks really complicated can be quite easy, such as Emma linking her Twitter account to her LinkedIn account.  Mind you, I've yet to work out how to add it to blogger, but I'm sure I'll sort something out!  Once it's done, it then automatically updates, making you look terribly efficient.
Emma noted that the twitter accounts of all the Uni of Glamorgan librarians are named after their position, so it can be passed on to the next person to get the post.  They also had beautiful professional black and white photos done for their avatars.  For now, I'm sticking with my cat!
The remaining talks were shorter, but we still managed to over-run by half an hour, and it didn't drag at all!  I could certainly see how an organisation can make good use of Twitter in particular (can you see a pattern?  Everyone loved Twitter!), but it's necessary to keep it focussed so it remains useful and relevant.  There was some mention of Facebook, but many people prefer to keep this personal.  Organisations can set up pages, but these are probably better for general announcements.
LinkedIn is a good way to make connections, although there wasn't too much discussion of it.  I'm still setting mine up!
There was a short demo of the CU Virtual Librarian Service, which looks amazing, even though it doesn't really apply to my own position.
There was a little time left at the end to have a quick tour of Trevithick library, which is very compact, yet somehow spacious.  It's very modern and up-to-date, and was renovated with the help of sponsoring companies, who have placed tasteful ads around the library.  They really just look like art posters, with the name of the company noticeable, but not distracting.
All told, a very well-attended, professionally useful and genuinely interesting conference!