Yesterday I had the pleasure of moderating the first Unpanel in social media along with its founders Jason Breed of Neighborhood America and Marc Meyer of the Digital Response Marketing Group. I really like the style of UnConferences, so the concept of an Unpanel was intriguing to me. The Unpanel reminded me of the Plurkshops* from long ago (*Plurkshops were an hour long topical conversations on Plurk that anyone could join). The cool thing about these Unpanels is that no “echo chamber” talk is allowed…only forward thinking is permitted.

The concept of giving a lot of people a platform and opportunity to share their thoughts around the topic of social media has always been important and the way Jason and Marc (and the rest of the team!) integrated the conversation into one location is pretty cool.

There will be an Unpanel every Tuesday, Noon-1pm EST. Each Unpanel will feature a different topic and moderator. I know I am looking forward to more…so I hope to see you at the next Unpanel!

And finally, I asked Marc Meyer to share his thoughts here on THoM…so without further ado, here’s Marc’s post about the first Unpanel:

Lo and behold though something occurred on Tuesday that was somewhat memorable and very worthy to write about. Tuesday was the first official Unpanel event on Twitter. A one hour, once a week, no holds barred, fast paced moderated twitchat. Or, to quote Jason Breed, one of the founders, “an Unpanel is a purposeful interaction with individuals around their industry or business on Twitter….”

So this Unpanel was significant on a few levels and I want to highlight them for you so that you make a point of blocking off the time each week to participate in a truly engaging and elevated conversation about social media.

#1 We had a moderator that absolutely drew out of the 100, yes that’s right, 100 participants, more than just the cursory “social media is all about transparency” comments. Did I mention that Beth Harte was the moderator? We could not have had a better “first” moderator/host. [Note from Beth: Marc is being entirely too kind!]

#2 Pre-set questions; but not your normal “what is social media” questions. Below are those questions:

• Q1:  Where are the deficiencies in business around People, Interactions & Technology? In other words, where does social media make sense in a business setting when addressing those deficiencies?
• Q2:  Play the “What if” game.  Addressing the above deficiencies, remove all barriers and let the imagination roll.  (For example, what if CRM systems were filled up by buyers not salespeople) Use the “In a perfect world” scenario when plugging in a social media solution. What does that world look like?
• Q3:  Combine the identified needs in business with the “imagine if” comments and let’s create a high-level road map

#3 Incredible discussion. Powerful give and take. Amazing connection with people on social media issues that we can all relate to that get beyond the echo.

#4 A discussion on Twitter with actionable takeaways.

#5 Value. I harp all the time on the value of a tweet or the value of a persons tweets, and in the span of one hour, there was more value in what was being said than what might be gleaned from a week of following a so called social media expert..

#6 The website Hashtagsocialmedia, provided a forum to follow the tweets right on the site. It also provided Beth’s tweets on the side panel so that we could see Beth’s insights and followup questions. Key and critical to pushing the discussion to a higher level. [Note from Beth: be sure to check out all the conversation there.]

#7 People worth following AFTER you’ve had conversations with them, Not before and not based on who they are following, I cannot tell you how many times I said during the Unpanel, “Wow what a great point”…

#8 As awesome as Beth was, the Unpanel will have a different moderator/host with a different perspective every week and thats an important aspect. They don’t have to be rock stars to bring value to the discussion.

#9 A compilation in one place, of potentially the best minds in social media, that SOME people might not know. And we’re able to talk with them. Only through the power social media is this possible. How cool is that?

#10 It’s going to get better.