“Built to build relationships” - How SobCon Grew a Conference from a Comment Box

Liz Strauss is easily one of the top ten people I look up to in the social media space. On top of being a real sweetheart, she’s got a wonderful instinct for community building. After our last chat, I went back to my blog and implemented some of her community building strategies. Lo and behold, I’ve seen a huge increase in the quality and frequency of comments on my blog. And thanks to the stellar input of my good friend and co-blogger Andy, great conversations — like this one — happen with encouraging regularity.

Given Liz’s penchant for community building on her blog, it’s no surprise that her conference — SOBCon, now in its second year — grew completely out of the community of commenters on her blog. I called her up in Chicago to talk about how this all worked.

Liz took over her blog — www.successful-blog.com — in December of 2005. For the past two years, she’s been building it into a community of bloggers. “I didn’t want it to be about blogging,” she told me. “I wanted it to be about bloggers.”

She began hosting open comment nights on Tuesdays. The conversations that took place, she says, were like “Twitter on Quaaludes.” That is, they were complete conversations, run more like a chat room than a stream of consciousness. Just like at a neighborhood bar, the regulars began to develop relationships with one another.

Very soon, commenters were suggesting a real-world open comment night. Everyone would come to Chicago, they joked, and do the whole thing in person. And thus, SOBCon was born.

“We realized very quickly that if we really wanted everyone to come to Chicago, we would have to make it something that people could write off their taxes,” Liz says. “And if we were going to do that, we would need to provide them with some really useful information.”

So Liz and a couple of her dedicated community members — Terry Starbucker and Chris Cree — began planning logistics. “We were so stupid about it,” says Liz. “We had no idea what it took to put on a conference. We didn’t even announce the conference until Feb 22 and it was supposed to take place on May 12.”

Despite their lack of experience, the conference was an unqualified success. The attendees all walked away feeling that they had networked well and come up with some good ideas.

“It took me a while to figure out exactly what happened,” Liz told me. “But you know how you are when you’re hanging out with your best friend and you aren’t worried about who you are? That’s how it was. We weren’t in a roomful of strangers. We were among friends.”

This year’s conference — which will take place May 2-4 — plays on that theme by using the relationships among conference members to enhance the learning experience.

“This year, the conference is built all around the attendees working together,” Liz explains. “It’s going to go deep into networking experientially. Speakers only talk for 20 minutes, and they must offer a model of how you might work your business online.

“Then talks turn into mini-mastermind groups. Attendees will figure out how to apply that model to your blog or your business. Over the course of a day, you’ll switch between a speaker and your table every 20 minutes. At the end of the day, you won’t just be able to say that you know the people from your table, you’ll be able to say you worked with them.”

As for the real-world open comment night, it’s still going strong. Liz is committed to opening SOBCon that way because it gives newcomers a chance to see how veteran SOB-ers operate together.

“They’ll get to see how we do things,” Liz says. “The veterans will drag the newbies in and say, ‘this is someone you have to meet.’”

I can’t wait.

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!