Last week I enjoyed one of the best events of the year: MediaCamp Roma. Held in Rome in the frame of the Broadband Business Forum, the event has been a real gathering of fresh and deep minds of the Italian social media marketing world, who dedicated a full day in a very informal meeting that has been defined a “permanent open round table“, discussing some key social media marketing topics such as user-generated content, Facebook Marketing, killer platforms and viral tools, corporate blogging, virtual reality worlds (Second Life and beyond), enterprise 2.0 and other topics such as privacy in the 2.0 world and more.

OK, disclaimer needed – I organized MediaCamp Roma after a good friend of mine, Chris Hambly, who started MediaCamp in the UK (MediaCamp Buckingham, MediaCamp London, MediaCamp Bristol) asked me to take the MediaCamp flag outside of the UK. I thought it was a great opportunity to start an Italian social media marketing network in Italy, so I started talking with some fellow social media marketers about it and, when I got the opportunity from the BB Forum organizers to contribute to the event with some content (I have been speaker and moderator at the event), I proposed to dedicate a day to a roman MediaCamp event – this is how MediaCamp Roma started. 

OK, second disclaimer – MediaCamp Roma was not the first Italian MediaCamp event. Chris Hambly and I started talking about MediaCamp Roma about one year ago, at the SMX London 2007 Conference (where I was appointed as speaker), and it took me an entire year before finding the right opportunity to set up the event. In the meanwhile Carmela Modica, an Italian social media expert living in Sicily and a friend of Chris since many years, aggregated the first Italian MediaCamp community in Noto, Sicily, in September 2008, 3 months before MediaCamp Roma.

Carmela, who is also a journalist and a pioneer of the new media and the 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life and Cyberlandia (the Italian 3D virtual grid, totally open-source), has been a fundamental pillar and my major support in the organization of MediaCamp Roma. Other Italian social media experts (and friends) such as Paolo Furini, Michela Simoncini, Michele Ficara, Khaled Kilzie, Nicola Gasperini, Roldano De Persio, Patrizia Filippetti, Pasquale Borriello, www.mediacamproma.com for more details on the format, content, participants and more – and we’ll definitely blog more about MediaCamp in the future, as the community will keep growing, with more and more initiatives and events, in Rome and across Italy.

Two more things to say in this blog post: the first is about MediaCamp Roma’s format, an open unconference that we set up through a blog that invited people to sign up to share their experience in the social media space. The knowledge sharing side of the event, joint with the open participation and free-flow conversation, has been and will always be the soul of the event, and has been fun, too.

The second thing I’d rather leave it to the MediaCamp Roma participants to say with their own words – the pleasure of being part of such a social media experiment, community and entourage – enjoy the videos (in Italian) here below (just mouse-over to start the first 20 seconds, click on them to access the full videos on DailyMotion).

To close this blog post, let me say thank you to all the participants to the event, to the organizers of the BBForum, to Chris Hambly and the international MediaCamp community and of course to Carmela Modica for being on my side to organize the entire knowledge sharing day!

Stay tuned with us and with the MediaCamp Roma blog and Facebook page and FB group to be updated with the next MediaCamp initiatives – you might want to be part of it!

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