saturday @ barcamp (now liveblogging)

today erin & i will be heading to barcamp nashville. we are both going to pick up, hopefully, on some fresh perspectives on marketing and media use with the internet. along the way i might meet up with some other blogger friends. john is the only person i know personally that is going.. knowing only one person at an event usually ups the odds of meeting someone new. so that should be pretty cool.

gonna be there? look for me there, say hi

live blog (linking to happen later)

12:00... erin and i arrived before the 11:30am opening. quickly ran into john, whom is the only person i knew going into the event. so i was pretty happy to 1. see him again 2. immediately have another person to talk with. the folks waiting in line were quite nice. so it looks positive as an event. since getting in we met up with rob and newscoma. we see some other people we know through networks (not necessarily blogging)

12:30... chris houchens, "blogging gives you are word of mouth outlet." "social media it not the place for sales." people in corporate marketing have failed in trying to do that (sale over social media). "you need to be honest and sincere with social media" warhol revisited, "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. with social media everyone is famous to 15 people." now is the best time to be in marketing we've ever had, because the market is self-sorting itself. embracing the medium. corporate blogs do's and don'ts

• first, let's kill all the lawyers. it needs to be direct link out and not filtered through lawyers
• blogs work when they are based on: candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, controversy..
• blogs are NOT a press release machine
• understand what a blog is (example chrysler firehouse blog)
• don't be fake (example the coke zero blog as fake)
• discuss the Industry NOT just your Company (example brew blog by miller brewing)
• fictional characters CANNOT blog (example the pink panther blog, captain morgan)
• watching from the sidelines is important too, be aware of what is going on online about your company. search youtube and search engines about what is being said.
• if you are not going to blog about yourself, someone else is

chis put his presentation on www.slideshare.net "the youtube for powerpoint"

12:39... bryce wells from athlon: podcasting, lessons for traditional publishers. i hear, "content online is a black hole." wikipedia defines podcast as. what is a "traditional publisher." having a website does not mean you are a traditional publisher. in april 2007 over 100 million ipods are in the market.

• our magazines only come out once a year, our editors are consumed with our core sports throughout the year. some editors do more that 100 radio interviews a year.
• our online strategy is to turn each sport's preseason into an online event, team predictions..

lots o' information about logistics of podcasting. now applying lessons to video podcasting.

as traditional publisher should embrace podcasting and find ways to complement their core offerings.

1:00.. mitch joel, six pixels of separation, the new world of new marketing.

• "the the conversation is dominated by consumer themselves, and they're paying scant attention to the self-interested blather of the marketer, who needs ads- offline, online or otherwise? this raise the question of agencies are left to do." -bob garfield, dec 2005
• aol commercial "is the internet a bad thing?" put out commercial because they don't have a choice, people are saying these things anyways.
• blogs and these things are not a fad, they are not going away
• people do this because we can, we've always wanted to do these things. (connect)
• half of youtube's audience is over 34
• 17% of sony playstation owners in america are aged 50+
• 48% of leisure time is pent online.
• quiz: youtube's growth from april 2006-2007? 616% wow!!
• facebook growth from 2006-2007? 2424%
• "i really don't know whether we'll be printing the times in five years, and you know what? i don't care either." arthur sulzberger, owner, chairman and publisher of ny times.
• "newmark told an all-too-knowing audience that this is a time of 'creative destruction' and that he has a 'great deal of sympathy for people who run the printing presses. they are screwed.' it's not that journalism is becoming obsolete; rather the deliver methods are changing: 'even the kids realize new is important. the problem is paper is too expensive, ' he said." craiglist founder
• talking of being told that 'you' are killing the news. problem with that is, the daily show is only funny if you know what the news is.

one to many conversation

• if you understand you internal conversation, your one to one conversation.. how do we tell the world?
• advertise cost millions.. though the 'one to many conversation' has been democratized
• nobody talks about this, they talk about control

connecting real power creating community conversations

• "real power" never before have you been able to go through you day to day lives and affect change
• show another time and media where this could have happened?
• it wasn't enough where you could read and look, you can now create
• we are all intrinsically connected
• it's completely different from how we are conditioned to do things as marketers
• blog stats: over 71 million blogs.. some of them must be good, 120,00 new blogs started every day, over 1.4 million blog postings every day. 58k blog postings in an hour. don't try to get ahead of this today, just get on-board.
• 300 story of, civilization could have gone one way or another way. barcamp is our 300.

know control

• consumer is not in control.. because manufacturers still control the price and products. the only difference is the consumers voice is as big as the companies. we live in a world where the consumers voice is an equal

what is social media

• the web as we knew it. look, it's about eyes
• today, it's about hands, you can change stuff

wisdom of crowds (book to read)

• together we are a lot smarter (example motorola q wiki page)
• co-creation, example starwood creating new...
• trust economy, is what this world is based on. i trust him through the online channel. in ebay, you would buy from the person with positive
• digital darwinism. if it is not good, no body will come and it will become extinct. if it is good it will evolve.

six points of separation

• make people the heroes - not the brands
• everything is "with" not "instead of"
• don't be fleeting - build, grown...
• earn the right to get your consumer out of lurker mode
• it's attitudinal not generational
• upload a video to youtube.. do something now

juan mann brings it all home

1:45.. wow!! break

2:05.. Luke Kanies & David Touve talking about humans and computers.. people are still chatting away after the break, so it's somewhat difficult to focus on these guys.

it's getting hot here.. okay, it got hot a long time ago. some 500 people in and out of the exit in while the temp goes up. you couldn't expect anything else.

dave and luke are making some great points about the limitations of computers due to limitations of our own self. the interactivity or imagined interactivity of computers we come in contact with. they are running a loop of computer/human images (six million dollar man, old ascii comps, etc) while talking.. which is pretty darn cool.

these guys are really sharp.. probably too sharp.. i can only imagine their late night drunk conversations. that'd be interesting.. or completely insane

2:26... jackson miller, 3 dimensional social networks. too many web applications don't do #$!. they make me do all the work. things need to be simple. pen and pad are simple. macbook tries to make complex things simple.

one dimensional social network

• do you know them?
• yes or no, true or false, boolean
• myspace, instant messenger

two dimensional social networking

• do you know them?
• in what context do you know them?
• facebook, linkedin, etc.

three dimensional social networks ?

• do you know them?
• in what context do you know them?
• how deep is your relationship?
• can there be a system that can identify how well and through avenues you know someone?
• "i want my communications to be weighted by this." sort by the amount of attention you give them
• our network apps will be able to know what is more relevant and we don't have to do all the work
• "relevance is measured by attention over time"

2:44... chris wage, centre source, demystifying web 2.0.

• web 1.0 the beginning. traditional client/server interaction. web as information-repository. cgi-the web gets interactive.
• what web 2.o isn't. not a new technology. involves a fair amount of marketing hype/buzz. will not do your dishes.
• what is web 2.0. primarily represents a change in thinking about how the web works.
• advantages of web 2.o. participatory, open communication, decentralized architecture, social networking, semantic web.
• technical changes, ajax, semantic markup, tagging, rest, xml (rss/atom)
• development processes, rapid development/extreme programming, the end of the software release cycle. (ie. google maps is still in beta)
• problems, nobody knows what web 2.0 means, semantic web is not an idea that is perfectly reconcilable with the real world, "bubble 2.0".. technologies like ajax circumvent a lot of standard assumptions about web-browsing.
• conclusion - web 2.0 is not a cure all, involves some useful rethinking about web usage, dangerous marketing buzz/hype.

3:20... caleb garner, on gaming stuff. at the moment he's talking about an upcoming game. i am not a big gamer person.. actually i never really play. that is a long story about me being a young child and not getting an atari. my family had to purchase a colecovision. apparently we were the only family that had one, so none of my friends wanted to play at our house cause we'd kick their butt.. my brother and i didn't want to play at their house cause we'd get our butts kicked. so eventually, gaming was not part of my life.

people are talkative again after the break. go outside!.. oh yeah, it's hot out there. we tried. i think the blogger friends went to the cafe. i hear it is cooler there.

you know, i think this stuff would be kinda fun to play with.. now, if only there were four more hours in the day that i could be awake.. hmmm

3:41... jared scheel on iphone application development.. can't afford it.. so i'm gonna rest the comp and let my lap cool off.

4:02... matt reed, on design aspects and techniques for the user. cool splash page thing. is that something design companies still put into a site. what they do with cabedge.

• entertainment (20%)
• informational (70%)
• application (10%)

when designing, what to keep in mind

• designer, client, user, google
• designer and clients need to begin with the users and google in mind
• in bad design, designer thinks they rock.. client thinks it rocks.. user is out.. google doesn't know what it is. in the end the client is not happy.
• if you break the site down to the core, the html, then what? it makes sense to the broad web and google, but real people don't eat it up. the designer is ashamed, the client feels jipped, user doesn't think it looks legit, google loves it.
• applying a style sheet, designer is happy, client is happy, user thinks it looks legit, google is able to index it. a lot of architecture on how to show the information, shorter design time, shorter changes
• text navigation helps in making sites changeable
• design for the user, all things circle around that, and it is sometimes hard to get a client to see that.

(battery low.. got to switch to computer #2 soon)

switched to back up computer.. yeah it works (the battery sometimes likes to run quickly, which it may still do). people are kinda loud. bluepaw paid for a round.. well $500 worth of a round.

5:03... chip gallent, from linearmill on tips to increase web traffic (conversion metrics).

• the conversion funnel, breakdown you site behaviors. understand all of the steps to understanding your success metricscale, lead or registration. what you think you know is unimportant.
• the goals, break down your conversion process to determine where the opportunities for success. understand why your site visitors don't continue to the next step.
• conversion funnel chart, internet traffic 2 website visitors 2 website prospects 2 transaction initiation 2 transaction steps 2 transaction success.
• understand the funnel, at each step within the funnel, your visitors are going to make 1 of 3 decisions. continue to the next step, leave the site...
• what worked?, stop guessing. start knowing. invest in analytics. a/b test your registration/shopping cart steps & order. eliminate all intra-registration, on-page links. the offer will impact the results.
• ? used google analytics because they rely on google adsense. also used omni(something)

www.conversion-funnel.com

5:22... john ellis, from resort quest, 7 habits of highly effective pay-per-click advertisers.. the travel biz in search engine marketing is very important. so how do we convert our searchers into buyers?

• separate content from search. know that there is a difference between the content links and search links that are
• control spinning by adjusting bids... not daily spend budget. set it and it won't go over it, but if you only manage that you miss out on a lot of clicks. lowering your position on the page can get you where you need to be, but you must monitor your cost per click.
• create a negative keyword list.. it's not the traffic that counts, its the quality of traffic that counts. lose unwanted traffic. get rid of the people who are not really interested. (ie. if you are a soap company take off soap opera to eliminate that traffic)
• conversion matters, not clicks. what you want is the buyers. what are they doing when they come in and when they leave?
• avoid #1 spot. the return is not in the number one spot. (hey i'm number one in google) you get a lot of wasteful traffic. the people that want to buy look at the 1st and 2nd but will buy at the 3rd or 4th position. if you try for #1 it's more expensive and a competitor will start a fight wasting money for that one spot. they will get more traffic which you have to be cool with, but the end results are similar
• bid exact, avoid broad.. these are the exact keywords that you put in. being exact enable the more targeted consumer.
• good analytics are needed to measure the cost per click. where are they coming from, figure out the funnel path. follow the customer path.

it's not traffic that matters, it is unwanted traffic that you want to get rid of and get the close. you will start paying less and making more. google is still the top dog in searches, be there first, 60-70% of your traffic is there. yahoo is around 10%.

5:43.. stasia holdren from sitening on local search and narrowing your results.

• why? $243.1 billion in the us online retail sales in 2007, people are researching online and then looking local for the services or product.
• what is a local search? with people looking you want as a local business to get online there.
• why is it cool? because there is money to be made there.
• could be found through tradition words or zip code type applications to help match people and products
• identified as local,
• business listings in google is now in google maps.
• you as a business owner can put in more detailed information into the google local information. there can be reviews put into the website. (this is really cool, i'll have to see if i can do this with the church's listing i am sure the other churches don't know this)
• some local portals will sort by ratings
• how do i get listed? at the bottom of the google maps page there is a link to edit business information.
• if you can show your address and information in a traditional envelop style the google bot can pick up the information is easier.
• they then will do a phone call verification.
• ppc and google level. local searches are not limited to google, but they are like 70%.
• ppc geotargeting. get your information out there and make sure it is correct in as many places as you can. if it is wrong then other sites will pull information that is incorrect
• targeting.. (that was fast)
• roadblocks, isp prevents google from identifying ip, ip doesn't match location of searcher, google doesn't recognize location.

6:04... dinner?

7:32... parker and colin polidor, cell journalism/nashflix and community powered media.

• immediacy of sending content remotely is undeniable.
• okay.. so we are all of a sudden talking about how said self grows up with the internet.. uh, we all have that history, you have 20 minutes.. get going, this isn't a one hour presentation where you touch my heart, why cell journalists? why community media?
• okay, so just realized that time is running out.. also mentioned in the twitter page
• kat asking what benefit for the community sending it in if it is monetized. answer, this is a platform for putting up new media.
• nashflix is still in beta, which we heard today one is always in, but then they mentioned that they are seeing what the users want.. which i can't help but think is an interesting perspective

7:55... brittney gilbert, on blog bold.. learn the rules , then break them. getting back to the basics

• what are the rules? specialize, standardize, have a message/mission statement, identify your traffic & write for your readers, make money by selling ads.
• breaking the rules. specialization is a good idea, but overrated. a personal blog can be both "general interest" and successful. many people read blogs for the person behind it, not the subject matter.
• people read your blog because of who you are.
• note: brittney looks small behind the podium.. she's not that small
• breaking the rules. your blog need not look like everyone else's. don't have a blog roll if you don't want. don't allow comments if you don't want. don't look at too many other blogs before you design. having a mission statement is great, but not essential. you don't need a message, ramble if you want. some of the best-loved blogs have no mission or aim. write when the mood strikes, about whatever that may be.
• breaking the rules. forget you have an audience. write for yourself. look less at your stats. trust yourself and your material.
• breaking the rules. ads are not essential. bloggers make money in other ways-writing gigs, employment opportunities and book deals. concentrate on the content, not on the advertising. blog because you love it, not for the money.
• rules worth following. post often (every post doesn't have to be a masterpiece), mind your manners, don't feed the trolls.
• want a blog job? don't wait for one to open up. create one. lobby local media outlets. pitch your blogging skills to companies big and small. they don't even know they need you yet. show them that they do.
• odd, she waves bye and i for some reason i wave back... hmm..

8:18pm... penelope trunk, the brazen careerist, someone who sticks to a path that is true to themselves. she "was like the best at selling ads on her bikini" as a beach volleyball player. so as she climbed the ladder she sees that all the people at the top are such "losers".. talk will be 10 myths

1. job hoppers will hurt your career. it's a smart thing, get the learning and then go and get more learning. 18-24 yr olds will have a new job every two years and it will persist till 2010. you build your skill set faster and network faster. job hopping is actually good
2. office politics is about backstabbing. true, if you are a backstabber's. the way to get the projects you want or get someone to take you further is that you get people to like you. find the people who have empathy, can forge relationships, that people will want to bring you up.
3. do good work and then you'll do fine. good work is totally overrated. people will rather work with someone who incompetent and likeable than someone competent and a jerk. focus on how likable you are more. if you spend the majority of your work day with your head down getting your job done then you are not getting your work done. pay attention to people.
4. you need a good resume. a resume only gets about 10 seconds worth. that 10 seconds is to help them throw you out. 90% of jobs people get from connections. think about your story. your resume is not everything. you need an integrated story about how you got to where you are.
5. promotions are good. promotions are someone elses vision for your career. it is what the company needs for you to do, not what you need to be doing. people who were recently divorced and promoted says that divorce is less stressful. instead of promoted from programming to management, promotion means you get to pick the cool project
6. grad school opens doors. grad school generally closes doors. if you are not going to a top 10 school for an mba the degree is not worth enough to give up working to get, keep working or go to night school. the people who are making law partner are better marketers.
7. entrepreneurship is risky. corporate life is just as risky as there is no safety net. in entrepreneurship now it's the less risky move as you can rely on yourself instead of others. the bar for entrepreneurship is really low right now. a good idea sticks and if it is not then it is only a wasted weekend. if you are learning and able to live then you are a success, but if you are stuck in corporate and miserable then can you be a success.
8. don't reveal too much of yourself online. no one needs to give you warnings about what is too personal. plus, human resources is not going to go through all your myspace to only find that everyone else is unhireable because of the same thing. if you are going to blog then get credit for it, put you name into it.
9. work hard to reach the american dream. college, wife, house, kids, retire.. yeah. generation x is the first generation to not make more money than their parents. but it's not biggie as they are not money oriented as their parents. generation x and y value their time more than their money. if we have our own company then we control i time more. we are redefining the american dream
10. find a stable job and have a stable adult life. unfortunately companies cannot trade off that type of safety. people can offer the ability to find fulfilling work and specialties. find stability inside you by accepting that things are going to change.

"my blog is a community where we ask these same kind of questions".. i like penelope trunk, she's cool.

8:52... whew!! it's been a good day, but we are outta here. (will clean up grammar and links later)