Tag Archives: Conferences
It’s conference season (when isn’t it?) and as the leaves turn to brown and travel budgets get squeezed we all have to carefully consider where we’re going and what we hope to get out of the experience. It’s not all trays of banana bread and drink tickets, so what makes for a good conference experience? For me it’s a focus on emerging trends and creative problem solving shared with your peers.
I was lucky enough to sit on a panel titled Managing, Measuring and Evaluating Distributed Content: Video, Webinars, White Papers and More, where we discussed the challenges and opportunities that distributed content models offer. Joining me was my partner on the client side, Kelly Turner, who is the content strategy lead at AT&T and provided perspective on what a large organization faces when it comes to distributed content and maintaining a strategic vision.
Kelly and I recently discussed what we brought home from the Internet Marketing Conference in Vancouver.
Derek Phillips: So, what did you think of the IMC? Was it what you expected?
Kelly Turner: Let’s see, I expected a big conference room, people with name tags, aroma of coffee and cologne, weird haircuts, hipster glasses…and on that front I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Other than that I had absolutely no idea what to expect. But I will say that overall it was definitely one of the cooler things I’ve gotten to do in my professional career. And remember, in my life as a journalist I saw open heart surgeries and interviewed criminals, many of whom were not elected officials, so I know what I’m talking about.
Derek: Were there any “ah-ha!” moments? Did you learn anything?
Last week I attended and presented at the 2011 IA Summit in Denver CO. I’ll start with a few thoughts on themes and in the coming days I will share some of the lessons learned during the event as well.
I think this summit was unique in that many of the talks revolved around one central theme: the meaning of the work. There were talks about analytics, business metrics, career planning , and musings about the future of the field. All of them revolved around the meaning of the work we do. This is somewhat different from previous years where the emphasis was more on tools, tactics, techniques, and trends around HOW to do the work.
That so many speakers independently approached this from different perspectives is not a surprise.
More and more we are asked to justify not only our strategic and tactical design decisions but also to communicate how these decisions and the experiences we create can drive tangible, measurable results.
Read More
Image credit: www.jonessnowboards.com
It started with 2,600 people packed into a Salt Lake City hotel ballroom eagerly awaiting the show to begin. This was my first year attending, so I didn’t know what to expect. The room looked like it has been set up for rock concert rather than a business conference. As a voice came over the loud speaker letting us know that the show was about to begin, Daft Punk started playing, the lights dimmed and the opening keynote for Adobe’s Omniture Summit began.
The annual event is a three day marathon of training, keynotes, breakout sessions, networking and, of course, partying with some of the best web analysts, advertisers, developers and digital marketers in the world.
The theme for this year’s summit was that digital marketing was the new extreme sport. If you think about it, the concept makes a lot of sense. Digital marketing, similar to extreme sports, is a combination of art and science. Whether you are analyzing a snowpack or spinning 180s over 120 foot gaps in the back country, you can’t (and shouldn’t) do one without the other. Summit takes all that is awesome about digital measurement and crams it into a very short time period. This makes for some very late nights and a lot of early morning coffee. But it is all worth it to spend some time with some of the world’s best and brightest marketers.
So what did I learn from the experience? Lots more than I care to write, but below are my four biggest takeaways.
Amongst the technology, digital natives, sponsors, parties, ideas, startups and even the SxSWi brand itself, there is something bigger and over-arching that embodies and represents the SxSWi event.
It is part culture, part people, part industry, part cyber, part promotion and part buzz… And while I give SxSWi full credit, it does seems bigger than them. I guess like all great brands, SxSWi builds on what is around them and while it may not be clear from time to time who is leading who, it still is the brand’s job to act as the guide and own it.
I think of SxSWi as a brand that is helping to guide us into the digital future, but more importantly I think of them as a brand that makes digital feel real. As you physically, mentally, and digitally take in the event, you can’t help but feel the ‘realness’ of digital all around you and appreciate that the borders are becoming more and more unclear.
A related note regarding these photos: The environment in and around SxSWi is plastered with promotion. In itself it is visually appealing and overwhelming at the same time, but if you sit and look at it closely for a moment, you can see that it is living and digital: QR codes, hashtags, urls, codes, etc.
15 of us CMers were heading down to SXSW. We all kinda new each other and we had met on the phone but we were more “part of the CM family” than “brothers and sisters in arms”. As we had learned from past SXSW years, it’s pretty chaotic and tough to keep everybody up to speed. Teams past have tried to use FourSquare, Twitter, Text messaging, and email…all of which kind of work but each has their drawbacks. We looked at a couple of group messaging apps and decided to go with Beluga (GroupMe was the first choice but it wasn’t available in Canada yet).
Group messaging is nothing new but the Beluga app (and web interface) makes it easy. There were a few immediate cultural impacts that we saw:
Constant communication breeds friendship in a hurry. Although the circumstances of the trip built an immediate connection between us all, the camaraderie was accelerated due to this fine little app. The culture of the group really took hold quickly and facilitated the face to face connections that really amplified the team spirit. Meet-ups, jokes, photos, observations, general news all flew around the group.
Sub-pods of the greater pods will emerge. Two sub groups appeared and they carried out their own messaging that was more appropriate for the smaller audience. Note: it can be really easy to message to the wrong pod (as somebody in our group quickly found out), so make sure you are going to the right pod!!!
Before:
The recycled air on this SouthWest Airlines flight to SXSW– or Austin, TX as the city is usually known – is filled with an excitement similar to what I remember of the bus-ride to summer camp. The parallels are unmistakable. Rows in front of me, I hear two people becoming fast-friends and exchanging stories from years past. Two dudes in the row behind me are engaging in what I can only term a game of “who knows more about what happened in social media and tech in the past three hours,” often peppering the conversation with, “Oh yeah I saw that” and “That happened like three days ago, dude.” To my left, in the window seat, an Austin native just sold me on his friend’s start-up, Tabbed Out and I’m already ready to evangelize the brand.
I can almost guarantee the 80 percent of us are attending the conference have started a conversation with, “I’m so excited.” These “kids” are going crazy and I expect them to break into song at any moment. Maybe that just happened at my camp.
Singing or no singing, as a SXSW newbie, I feel wide-eyed. I think the guy from Austin sees it on my face. He keeps asking me about the conference in that 30-minutes-before-a-first-date way a roommate asks about a guy.
I’m on board with these excited, laptop-filled rows of professionals sent away to camp for the weekend by our bosses. I am so excited, but when I’m excited, my attention span gets shorter and I flit around like a hummingbird, so I’ve set some objectives for myself. Further down, you can see how well I did in meeting them.
