The Social Web at Work – Parachute 2009

Parachute, a New Zealand Christian Music Festival held at Mystery Creek, Hamilton, New Zealand, has recently finished and, while our church had its share of musicians playing at the event, I started receiving a fair number of followers during and after the event – even without attending, or referring to it. It would appear that the power of the social net is such that, by association, newcomers to a community will seek out others to follow and often it’s solely the adjacency to someone they currently follow that you will be selected as a person of potential interest.

One of these people is Vaughn Rivett who took the initiative to create a twitter identity for the event and used it to post information and public service announcements over the weekend. Vaughn has recently published an article on his blog outlining the process and what happened which makes for some interesting reading. I’ve already posted a comment suggesting the inclusion of hash tags for next years event, but click over there and make your own comments as to how he (and the organisers) could embrace the social web to gain even more traction for next year.

Since Vaughn started following me, we’ve had a bit of back and forth starting from an issue I was having posting a comment on one of his other articles, moving on to the fact I own a EEE netbook and resulting in him using some of his business contacts to actually find me a car charger that I was looking for prior to Christmas (and as a result, being able to help some other EEE owners looking for the same). Again, the social web strikes, connecting two people who didn’t know about each other until a few days ago, and resulting in unprompted offers of assistance to solve a problem.

Edit: As I drafted this article up, Vaughn has tweeted out (using a suggested hashtag) a request for retweets to do just this.

Awesome the speed of the web isn’t it?