I just Just found out that yesterday was the first ever Pangea day. Plate techtonics and subduction will continue to change the morphology of the earth and is an unstoppable force, so is compassion. What is subduction, it’s a geology thing, but it is also could be a metaphor for things that suck up time and energy - the forces that move us every day. Formal definition:
Subduction is the process in which one plate is pushed downward beneath another plate into the underlying mantle when plates move towards each other. The plate that is denser will slide under the thicker, less dense plate. Faulting occurs in the process. It is the process in which rocks break and move or are displaced along the fractures. The subducted plate usually moves in jerks, resulting in earthquakes. The area where the subduction occurs is the subduction zone. A long, narrow, deep depression forms in this area. It is called an oceanic trench.
I try my best to not put long videos on my site, but I’ve been watching this 25 min piece and it’s worth it for a geologist, geographer or just the plain person. Pangea day is a great concept that we are all sisters and brothers on a single planet. So you don’t have 20 mins? Well, carve it out, any video which opens with Desmond Tutu has to be good.
Want to find out more about Pangea Day? It’s a day of film and sharing, so find a way to put this concept in action, Be more empathetic and more understanding of the diversity and adversity that exists on our planet. Find a way to give back.
So conferences are crazy things! Drinking, music, slides and conversation - not in priority order, but after the event there is apparently a ramp your Technorati authority. The Conference Authority Impact (CAI) is a fairly interesting phenomena which appears to increase your Technorati authority just for attendance, more or less.
So here is what I’ve noticed: spatially relevant’s “authority” went from minimal to horribly mediocre in just days, with NO apparent justification. Oh wait, I know why this may have happened. A bunch of people linked the attendee list and created “blog reactions” which have since my last point of reference raised my technorati authority.
The CAI might just be an interesting thing to understand. What is the credibility of any social media benchmark?
So back to being an opportunist….
So I’ve think there are 3 things I have decided might theoretically extend the CAI: Write (novel), payback (appropriate) and provide a little visibility to the lessons learned directly or indirectly from the event. This is an indirect post.
Conferences as an Authority Generation Strategy
Conferences aren’t just a narrowcast placement opportunity for sponsors, but apparently for the participants as well. Most of these folks hopefully descended on Chicago with products to position and promote. Events represent a promotion channel for the participants’ product, their blog. Apparently not only can brands become humanized, so can bloggers.
So as you think about attending a conference, it might be important to develop an outreach plan to manage the lead nurturing cycles which could deliver increased authority, visibility and a follow up plan on how to use the CAI spring board post conference.
At the end of the day it appears conferences are essentially promotional channels for hocking your brand/blog and sharing tip, tricks and links from others in the room.
With CAI potentially being a real thing, I’m gonna plan a little better…. I’m contemplating logo swag for the next conference and an iPhone giveaway for the most insightful post on currency fluctuation.
Question: Is Authority Generation an expected, warrented or unintended by-product of attendance? Curious, as I’m not sure I did anything new except write a check, eat a bunch of room service and meet some folks.
Had a couple of who emailed and some people who asked about the quote in my preso from Demian Entrekin and where I got it, so I figured I would post presentation for reference.
SOBCON08 - definitely a good event on all fronts - hotel, venue, food, people and content. There are plenty of great re-caps online about what took place at SOBCon from a content perspective, lessons learned, visuals and a even musical spins, but not a whole lot on the sponsors of the event which definitely help make the event a success. Several key sponsors participated throughout the Jim Beam, Utterz, Buzz Logic and Network Solutions, which I’ve labeled “platinum sponsors” based on my ability to remember mainly. There were a couple of bronze and tin sponsors thrown in, but since no of the other stuck in my head, I’m focusing on the platinum sponsors.
With a focused group of bloggers north of 100, each of the sponsors below innately improve the impression of their brand with the group and create awareness for their offerings and brand.
They brought the brand manager and his pitch seemed completely honest, if just a little bit unstructured. Even a little humorous with his public declaration of “what is blogger casual”? I didn’t know either, so my laughter was for a different reason. Brand guy spent 3-5 minutes doing a recap of their nascent social media strategy while acknowledging this was all a new thing for them and they came to learn. Thanks to his rambling confession of lack of knowledge, every Sicilian Kiss I order going forward will be with Jim Beam.
What is a Sicilian Kiss? A Sicilian Kiss is a drink which is 1/2 Whiskey, 1/2 Amaretto and a splash of orange juice chilled (shaken over ice) and served as a shot.
The bald guy was there - he pimped a Bessie or two, did some demos and did the video ad thing which Jen won. The selection process Sim engineered was very egalitarian and represented the voice of the people. The process also offered another opportunity to meet folks and share ideas.
Overall the Utterz participation was a cool thing all around. I just seem to like this company just a little more after their sponsorship and am wondering when I will just make the call and shave my head. What was your tipping point Sim?
A company I had previously not heard of which apparently does influence visibility, ok I have see folks post on them like Jeremiah, but didn’t spend any time figuring out what they did. Know that I know, there are just a bunch of uses for this for businesses and bloggers alike. Uses from companies range I suspect from competitive intelligence, brand influencing and as strategic planning tool for social media. It could also be used potentially for demand shaping. Buzz Logic invested throughout the event starting on boat night. Great music and a reasonable liquor thanks to their willingness to throw down some hard earned VC cash.
Buzz Logic not only was nice enough to sponsor, but they sent two hotties as the demo team, Valerie and the other one. Both provided real-time product demos on topics of interest for each person they engaged - personalized demos WORK! Good stuff for everyone which got the opportunity to work with both of them over the conference.
Active participants throughout the event. Provided web site analysis for the participants which I personally didn’t benefit much from, but I may not of asked the right questions or something which impacted the value. They even had a guy who was now going to blog after his attendance based his newly found understanding of blogging. Dude, let us know the the URL when you’re “online”, as I would like to see what you do. Your name would be cool tool.
A Humanized Brand
After re-reading my post so far, I’ve noticed a common theme - humanization. By deciding to engage people and not crowds with their sponsorship each company developed relationships with users/buyers/influencers/evangelists. While I may not remember all the components of everyone’s solution, stories or names - I do remember the effort. By sponsoring this event these folks have done more than an Ad, blog post or “coordinated” social media campaign could.
At the end of the day, that’s what SOBCon was about - meeting people, learning thier stories and trying to improve. There was very little personality driven discussion or focus it was more about process - trust me as the short guy with that cool chick Emily.
PLEASE NOTE: I authorized the use of the term hottie prior to posting with both Valerie and the other one, Sandra Ponce de Leon.
It’s always a little difficult to open a post with a quote, but sometimes you have to try. A kernel of knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing and a fact many, myself included, forget all too often. So with that fundamental baseline, I’m in Chicago to learn and meet good folks. Every day represents a new opportunity to drive change, improve your understanding of stuff and develop relationships - day 1 was of SOBCon has provided all 3 for me at least.
The first thing I have learned is we all want to meet others like ourselves and be part of a community. A quick/ad hoc survey of the attendees last night easily represented all four corners of the US and around the world. The diversity in geography is only matched by the diversity in expertise and passions which are distributed amongst the attendees I’ve spoken to so far.
While it seems that the blogosphere is littered with marketing folk and productivity leaders, this meeting represents participants who have diverse editorial agendas - parenting/homeschooling, education/international culture…. While I met a good deal of folks (ok Emily did - she was my introduction wing chick), we spent the majority of the evening engage in just a few coversational circles. It’s not the quantity, but quality and I was able to find some quality insights without a doubt from everyone I spoke to.
One of those more interesting and rewarding conversations was with Mary-Lynn and George, from Bigg Success. So today, I thought I would post the 3 things I learned from Mary-Lynn and George:
Cards are good
Get ahead of the game
Play into your strengths
Cards are Good
Yup I love pinochle, but this reference is about a different type of cards - business cards. Ok - nearly everyone I met reinforced this lesson along the way. Apparently everyone makes their own cards - CRAZY creative cards which convey their focus.
Style, substance and brand are just part of having your own cards, but they also serve the very tactical purpose, follow up. You will invariably meet so many smart, cool and interesting folks throughout an event you can’t possibly remember everyone, even though you try. Essentially it appears that your cards are an extension of your brand.
Lesson learned - get cards - CHECK!
Get ahead of the Game
Last night I spent the better part of the evening honing my introduction pitch. The pitch organically meandered into an overly verbose apology for the lack of business cards while rolling into explaining that I’ve been traveling for three weeks and that my recent content shouldn’t be seen as characteristic of what I’m trying to do at spatiallyrelevant.org. I’m actually not sure what I am trying to do here which is another reason I am here at SOBCon08.
While I did reasonably hone this intro, my sheepish/apologetic intro pitch to George and Mary-Lynn teed up an immediately valuable retort on the importance of staying ahead of the game. George made it pretty straight forward: plan, write, edit and post. Seems simple enough - stay 1-2 weeks ahead. Initially I thought this was uniquely related to audio, since Bigg Success focuses on high quality audio production, but no it’s all things content since all content requires planning and execution. George confirmed this by providing an overview of their hybrid approach leveraging text, audio and newsletters for their readers.
So the key thing to remember for me was to stay ahead of the curve on content production. If I can practice this seemingly straight forward concept, I just might be able to avoid the horrible content holes which continuously creeps up by accident or by conflict here. So hopefully, the conflicts of my life, travel and the absence creativity can be avoided by staying ahead of the game with my content.
Play into your Strengths
So while I have multiple ways to look at this, Mary-Lynn and George put it simple: “We plan, we produce and leverage core skills which makes a better product in our opinion”, or something like that. So I took a little time to think about this. My conclusion - it’s as much about as skills as it is about reputation. The talented folks I have met here already have a common thread/quality - they are leveraging their past experiences to drive credibility and authority.
Bigg Success’ Mary Lynn is an example of this with proven/verifiable career in radio, as is George who brings to bear a life of lesson’s learned in business and an academic approach to sharing the information they provide on their shows. These folks are an example of how we should use our knowledge, skills and integrity to deliver value to our readers/listeners in a medium that best suits a person’s abilities. This is just what they have done.
While video may be killing the radio star, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Bigg Success, they are hopefully at the start of their online hockey stick, but for them it is more than stats.
George crisply summarized what “Bigg Success” would be for he and Mary-Lynn: “If we can help a single person with each program then we have accomplished a big part of why we are doing this”.
Back on this whole blogging thing after a whole bunch of slacking caused by just a little too much travel. This week’s travel is just the beginning of my Spring Tour which will take me to Chicago this weekend, Boston, Dallas, Calgary, New Orleans, Scottsdale, and Detroit. Trust me this will change and grow, but that’s only the parts I know of between now and June 11, I have a couple of 2 or 3 day holes to fill in still and they WILL. I can only hope that these future trips bring as much rewarding feedback and opportunity as the last 2 trips have to Austin.
Austin has been a whirlwind set of activities over the past two weeks, caught up with folks I haven’t seen in a while and was able to meet a person that I was hoping to meet a long time ago, Michael Wilson, CEO of Small World Labs. I spent some time last night getting the opportunity to better understand where they from a product perspective and was clearly impressed with thier strategic take on Social Networking. Social network technologies are what they are, but the easy to identify differentiation of SML is their understanding of how to effectively plan and implement thriving communities via their expertise and customer engagement processes leveraged for every implementation.
The team’s passion and understanding isn’t contained to Michael, but everyone I’ve had the opportunity to interact with at Small World. Even the newest guy I’ve met, Sam Eder, is emblematic of the folks at SML -he is this high energy creative believer of the good things the team can do for organizations to improve customer relations, drive loyalty and increase companies revenues.
There is good reason for the energy and optimism they have a stable of easily recognizable customer logos and a fairly recently announced funding round to drive out their strategy.
Based on the organization I’ve worked with, it is clear that the success of a community is less about implementing a technology platform but a more a partnership with a vendor which develops a strategy for enablement and community engagement. Unequivocally these guys are positioned to continue to lead the market for social networking platforms, so if you are looking for a social media platform to develop an engaging community you have to put them on the shortlist.
That’s more or less all I got to say about that - on to SOBCon and Chicago where I will finally meet this Brogan cat…. I think.
With all the focus on the diminishing attention and the general availability of time in my life, I spent some time itemizing what I do and throwing it into a spreadsheet, just to get an idea of how much time I’m investing in social media.
That sleep bar continues to shrink - can’t be good.
Legend:
Travel - Commute, Air travel
Friends - Directly engaged and interacting in person
Family - Engaged as a dad, husband, son, brother, uncle, cousin
TV - Various - family overlay most of the time
Sleep - dreaming, REM, tossing, turning
Email - Personal - private, Personal - public, Spam, Work
Social Media - Reading, writing, searching, thinking, posting
Work - Thinking, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, speaking
So I’m on the lookout for a new productivity tool for social media and this whole FriendFeed is a great candidate for my new social interface. Can’t imagine the time slice of social media Chris Brogan, Aaron Brazell or Erin Kotecki Vest have on their spreadsheets, I bet their sleep bar is considerably smaller than mine.
That’s right - honesty is the best policy. So in full disclose this is Just a traffic update, yesterday was the worst traffic this blog has had since I’ve been paying attention! (Nov. 07). That’s right, celebrate the little things, because it appears y’all are transitioning to rss readers. Thanks team!
Maybe it is that no one is searching of relevant terms for what I’m writing about, so let’s highlight the top 10 search items, since we have analytics.
bob’s ichthyosaur - A Great book and apparently the top search term.
what is scientific management - High school students everywhere are googling.
mbifm - A made up acronynm, which apparently means Member of the British Institute of Facilities Management.
calculating gross margin
danielle pribbernow - Chick on the Check out blog, wonder if it’s just her searching on herself? Way too much traffic for a Wal-Mart employee. No I mean WAY TOO MUCH.
dijouri - I made up this name for my second son, 12 years old. I think this IS my son searching on himself or people trying to figure out if I made up his name or people looking for movie made in 2003.
things i am thankful - This is encouraging.
afro - Right on.
giggly quotes - Who searches on giggly quotes?
So if you don’t find anything interesting above interesting, perhaps one of the top 10 “trafficked” pieces, mainly produced via keywords - which you will notice via the relationships between keywords above and titles below. That being said,I REALLY am partial to the Stuck in the Middle series — and — I like the Mosaic piece the most, mainly because it plays well in my head. Yup, I’ve sucked you into a replay post, but a replay of posts everyone else seemed to like too, or at least this is 10 most visited posts here.
