Getting Social at the ASU GSV Summit

The 7th ASU GSV Summit starts tomorrow and, as with previous years, will bring together some of the most impactful people from diverse constituencies—entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators, policymakers, philanthropists, and university and district leaders—to create partnerships, explore solutions, and shape the future of learning.

This post is an update on some of the work that I was doing this time last year and includes exploring social business practices and highlighting the potential that I feel Declara has for various stakeholders in education (and in a number of ways). 

This basis of some of the ideas and projects I'm involved with includes some resources that may be of interest to attendees as it includes a Twitter list and some social media stats for the speakers, sponsors and presenting companies at this years ASU GSV Summit:

ASU GSV Summit Speaker Stats

I've also put together this Twitter list of ASU GSV Summit Speakers.

This kind of data is the same as I was exploring this time last year for another education conference, but for the same reason.

Suppliers, Social Business and Social Media
This time last year, as the #SatChat team were getting ready for their Connected Educator Day and I wondered if there should there be a Connected Supplier Day, as you can see from this post any findings were based on similar research with ISTE exhibitors:

ISTE Exhibitors 2015
ISTE Exhibitors 2015: Social Media Links
ISTE Exhibitors 2015: Twitter Stats

I was surprised to find that there were up to 30% of exhibitors who did not appear to be on social media (especially as I was told that 6 years ago that social media "came with the job today" if you wanted to be involved with EdTech).

With the ASU GSV Summit data, while the 1,189 Twitter accounts that I curated had a collective following of almost 66.5 million people, or that there are over 120 verified accounts and the presenters with the most followers is extremely impressive...

However, as there are a lot of accounts with few tweets, followers or general activity I think there is a lot that these stats can tell us about both the way that ideas roll out and the importance of the roll out process of technology and new ideas.

# of Followers	# of Accts
1-499	401
500-999	164
1000-1999	156
2000-4999	179
5000-5999	41
5000-9,999	98
10000-19999	67
20000-29000	24
30000-39999	14
40000-49999	11
50000-100000	23
100000+	41

Something that I will be exploring is the relationship between the CEOs account and the company account, as I feel there may be evidence in this kind of data to support of Brook Freedman's ideas around Evolving your sales process for a B2C2B World.

Will the data highlight ideas such as "If the CEO 'gets' the platform and can see the value in it, then it will get the support required to succeed internally, if not then adoption may be a challenge is another champion can't be found?

As well as assessing personal and business accounts I found the icons on company webpages interesting too. Out of 705 companies 147 had no icons or links to social media on their websites, with 542 with links to Twitter and 487 to Facebook.

What are we to make of the difference in use of social media amongst this group of forward thinking, tech savvy CEO's? What are the implications for getting traction with technology in other areas of education when the stats here differ so much?

One development from assessing all this data at ISTE last year and the ASU GSV Summit this year is that I hope to detail my experiences with social media and social business, the the hope being that it will help others to reskill because I 100% agree with the commentators who argue that cold calling is dead.

Needless to say that I'll be following the Viral Adoption of EdTech session tomorrow at 4pm PST with interest!

Something that I think can help with the viral adoption of technology in education is this...

Declara

This time last year I had just published my second post about Declara: A Declara-tion of Interdependence,  I've gone to great lengths to develop an independent voice on my blog and realise that when I write something like 14 posts about any particular company or platform that any impartiality may fly out the window.

The reason for this is because this platform that promises to "spark social knowledge" has continued to live up to expectations and to delight since I first found out about the platform.

As a self confessed grumpy laggard it's been an interesting journey for me to be an early user of this platform, my reasons for joining was because the pre-launch literature 100% mirrored my own learning experiences.

Today Declara is more relevant than ever as I have reskilled from sales to community management through social media and learning from the #cmgr community online... something which, through my Community Manager Resources Collection, I hope to "Pay it Forward," as anyone who takes the time to check out these articles will know about as much as I do on the topic.

This year the GSV Summit has sessions around "Collaboration being the next Disruptive Force for Innovation" and "Why can't we be Friends: Vendor Interoperability in Districts"

With these sessions in mind and with a collective following of 66.5 million followers and many shared contacts and users, you can't help wonder what would happen if we did indeed all collaborate and play nice... Here are a couple of examples based on my experiences:

#DigCitSummitUK: Twitter Reach and ROI 
How Helping a Competitor has been Beneficial

In my opinion, you'll be hard pressed to find a platform that's as well suited for this kind of collaboration and knowledge exchange than you will with Declara... and guess what? 

A couple of weeks ago I was informed that Declara had been commissioned by GSV to support the event and I was asked if I'd like to help out. What? Helping to support one of the EdTech events that I learn so much from on a platform that I'm a huge fan of and on a project that will help further develop my #Cmgr experience and skills? You bet ya!

Declara at the ASU GSV Summit

I will be sharing my experiences with reskilling from sales to community management, my research with how ideas roll out and some of the implications with the stats that I've curated as well as the potential that I see with Declara in education over the course of the conference on Declara and social media.