The eROI presenters, Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, and I, have traveled all over the country to give presentations on various topics from Building Community Online to The Value of a Welcome Email Program to New Trends in Measuring the Success of your Online Marketing & Social Media Efforts. This blog post is an overload of resource material for 3 great presentations - enjoy!
I met Tom Szaky, barely 25 years old at the time, and a pure, scrappy, entrepreneur’s entrepreneur, at the 2007 Inc. 500 conference in Chicago. He spoke before keynote President Clinton and was clearly the more engaging speaker of the two (a pretty tough feat considering how dynamic Clinton used to be). Tom, born in Hungary, grew up in Canada, and dropped out of Princeton to start “The Coolest Startup in America” called Terracycle where every product and its packaging is made out of garbage. His story is fascinating and the lessons business leaders and public policy-makers can learn from his success are significant. The irony for Portland, one of the greenest cities on Earth, is that most business leaders and policy folks had never heard of him and were quite doubtful that some young kid would be any good as a keynote speaker at the wildly successful Greenlight Greater Portland annual event - thankfully, Tom proved them wrong with an excellent presentation of how to win by innovating and by being greener, better, AND cheaper. I don’t have his presentation electronically, so until I get it, you’ll have to settle for the YouTube video on his Good Morning America and Oprah appearances six weeks prior.
My two fellow eROI NYC folks, Chris Masagatani and Kavita Makadia, joined me in attending the June 1 Ignite NYC event just a block from Chris’s apartment in Midtown. I had been to an Ignite event in Washington DC which was pretty good, but a little stiff and serious, so my expectations were moderate before going to the event. At this NYC event, I was blown away by how creative, funny, and polished each of the 5-minute presentations were. I highly highly recommend you watch the video below of the brilliantly funny Baratunde Shares of The Onion.
I’ve attended hundreds of marketing conferences over the years, and spoken at a few, but this one was pretty unique in that the speakers and content were the best of the best from all over the country on leading topics such as email marketing, search marketing, and social media. But more importantly, Online Marketing Summit delivered in making a lot of personal connections primarily through its founder, Aaron Kahlow, who ran an online marketing agency for years and understands the subject material inherently and the crazy breed of people known as online marketers. Here are my tweets from Aaron’s opening session at the Washington DC OMS on May 14:
I highly recommend you attend another OMS - there’s also a good chance you will see eROI folks like Dylan Boyd, Alex Williams, or me speak at some of the upcoming cities - Chicago, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, San Fran, Portland, Seattle - there are others as well - check it out here >>. I will try to dig up where my presentation from this event is posted - stay tuned.
Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize - bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark. If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008. It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game. Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):
BATTLE OF THE BANDS
DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009
TIME:
6:00 pm
PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR
COST:
$300 per band
Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com
Here is my twitter stream from this morning’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast event where Ziba Founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, inspired me from a creative and entrepreneurial standpoint. Sorry for the upside down notes, but you’ve got to start at the bottom and read up:
The unsung hero behind an amazing integrated, grassroots campaign of traditional marketing, in-person events, and social media (well, she was mainly the social media part) gave a great keynote speech at the eMarketing Summit of Innotech today. Rahaf Harfoush was great. I show my twitter stream below of notes from the event, but also noticed she just launched a new site and blog - http://www.rahafharfoush.com/
Here is my twitter stream from Rahaf Harfoush’s awesome keynote speech at Innotech:
Very progressive. We can’t go backwards now to restrict all info to public.about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Impossible to replicate. It was the perfect storm.about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Grant park had 1 million deliriously happy people. Thx for great presentation @rahafharfoushabout 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
The PDC (Portland Development Commission) put together this video featuring business folks from Laika, Ziba, Columbia Sportswear, Oregon Iron Works, Vestas, Wieden+Kennedy and eROI. If you dig Portland and the surrounding area, check out the video below.
“Let’s make technology that makes us more human, not less human.”
Portland, Oregon is a long way from Washington D.C. So, we should be psyched about playing host to the New Media Strategist, Rahaf Harfoush. She led arguably the social media strategy for the best online campaign implementation of any major politician in the history of politics (love the drama of that sentence even though politicians have really only used the web significantly in the past 4 years). Harfoush is the keynote speaker at InnoTech Portland:
Date: April 23, 2009
Time: InnoTech starts at 8am, Harfoush speaks at 11:30am
Place: Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon
How much: BIG DISCOUNT if you use these codes when you REGISTER HERE >>
(INN48 - gets you a $12 Discount so it’s only $48 for General Administration)
(EMS20AT - gets you a $20 Discount so it’s only $129 for the two day eMarketing summit)
Of all of the talks given at SXSW ‘09, I loved the last 15 minutes of Tony Hsieh’s presentation the best. This part of his talk focused on The Science of Happiness and his earnest desire to spend 10% of his time studying the structured elements of what makes all of us happy. The three levels he shared were: rockstar, flow, and meaning/higher purpose (check out Slide 44 on the Slideshare presentation below). I’m now dedicated to reading and learning more about this balanced, structured approach to happiness. Comment below if you recommend a good book that speaks to you on this topic.
Watch the entire slide show—-
Ah, the vastly entertaining Guy Kawasaki started off the keynote with swagger and a few digs on Sarah Lacy’s dismal interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg which happened exactly one year ago at SXSW. Guy followed up with some poignant questions for Wired Magazine publisher Chris Anderson who is about to publish his book “FREE” which of course be free in its electronic version. The debate centered around whether or not freemium (new word thrown around liberally in this SXSW Kawasaki / Anderson interview) products lower the value of that product based on pricing it as FREE for the standard/limited/trial version and a cost to the premium version of that product or software. Check out the video and tweets below to draw your own conclusions.
My Kawasaki / Anderson tweets—-
#sxsw keynote - who’s going to be the star - Guy Kawasaki or Chris Anderson? Will Guy give more Apple examples or Alltop?
Kawasaki and anderson take the stage now. Gonna be good - I feel it.
Sarah lacey jabs already by kawasaki - nice.
The big question is how will twitter make money now?
Before this presentation at SXSW, I had no idea what “whuffie” was. Check out the video, slideshare presentation, and tweets below to get the real definition, but my paraphrased version is that whuffie is good karma points but more in the context of an online community. I sat next to Portland’s social media guru, Dawn Foster, Shizzow founder Ryan Snyder, and Silicon Florist’s Rick Turoczy - so the side conversations were as valuable as the actual presentations. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, there was a huge Portland turnout for SXSW ‘09 - impressive.
Watch Tara Hunt’s slide show—-
Got some great ideas from the Breakthrough Innovation talk at SXSW. Instead of looking at incremental changes and feature bloat, look at game-changers (e.g. Wii, iPhone) by focusing on one thing you do really well - so well that you’d put it as the word or phrase on your super hero outfit. A phrase that does NOT work would be something like “Increased Productivity.” A lot of her points reinforced what I recently read in the book “Made to Stick” by Dan and Chip Heath. If you are in a product development cycle like we are here at eROI, this session was uber-relevant. Check out the video and my tweets below.
My tweets—-
#sxsw session on making breakthroughs - we often get into an arms race w/ competitors and hit a brick wall
breakthroughs with ideas or performance - Kathy Sierra seems like she’s gonna be a rockin speaker #sxsw
you need to help people kick ass to breakthrough the competition
One contributor, Zoey Margolis or “Abby Lee”, turned her popular blog into a book:
My tweets from this SXSW author session—-
Zoey margolis, author and blogger, talking about being a sex fiend.
She has a british accent - must be smart.
Love her words like tosser and wanker
Angelic feet. Guy saw her at the tube station. He had foot fetish. Great vocab.
She had a snog with him. More british slang. F word works for her. Good emphasis.
Girl with a one track mind with sordidness all about her. Very entertaining.
Here is a great example of making your transactional email more than just a notification. When done right, transactional email can be a great branding opportunity.
Check out this awesome shipping confirmation email from Cd Baby below (click to enlarge).
I saw this…
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