We attended the BlogWorld Expo conference last week in Las Vegas. Surprisingly, this event made national news--who would have thought that a bunch of geeky bloggers together in one space could cause such a buzz!
Nancy and I attended this conference with two goals in mind:
1. How do we add blogging and other social media to our arsenal of direct marketing tools? What can we learn so that we can help your clients in this area?
2. Can we learn new strategies and pick up some good new ideas on ways to grow, as our blog matures?
Well, this conference accomplished the above, and more! Look for us to add video blogging and some other new things that may surprise you. And, we now have some concrete ideas on ways our corporate direct marketing clients can use new media. Exciting stuff!
I wanted to share, today, some tidbits from the opening and closing sessions.
Opening Session: Thursday morning, November 8, 2007
First of all, consider the setting--hundreds of bloggers, sitting in front of their laptops. Many had video cameras, recorders and regular cameras (to best record the event). Most were live blogging from the session--something I personally had never experienced. It was hard NOT to spy and check out what people around us were typing.
The format of the session was a Q&A, with questions directed at Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of Wordpress. Here are some direct quotes from Matt:
- "The future of software is open source."
- "Selling software is dead."
- His goal: "Create a tool so the world can publish, for free."
Now jump forward to Friday afternoon. We're basically brain-dead from a combination of days filled with good information (and lots of it), then nights filled with nice meals, good wine and a party or two. Still, the blogging enthusiasm is strong--our keynote is none other than Mark Cuban, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. And, more importantly (to this audience) a successful blogger and a true believer in the medium.
I was pleasantly surprised by Mark. He seems like a good guy. Kind of a control freak in that you can tell that he is hands-on in most of the things he does. I don't know how he has enough time in his day... He shared some fun anecdotes about his experience on Dancing with the Stars (including how he solicited fan votes by sending out Facebook messages to all 40,000 of his friends).
He also warned people that what we write in our blogs stays there--it's a historical record. So, be careful that what you write doesn't come back to bite you. He specifically shared how much he'd like to get back at Bill O'Reilly who continues to taunt him, but knows that if he does so in his blog, he'll regret it.
Overall, BlogWorld Expo was a success for us. We're already looking forward to next year!
3 comments:
Good defense by the Dallas Mavericks drama boys, if only we could patch up the difference, this will be a Dallas good season. They are running, switching in defense, rebounding see those efforts. We don't have yet the Mavericks team down.
I which I could see some Mavericks games live. I was looking for tickets all the good seats on ticketmaster were taken I had to check broker. And man you don’t want to do that especially for the Dallas Mavericks. Thanks god there sites like Ticketwood which work as comparators here is the site
Mavericks Tickets
http://www.ticketwood.com/nba/Dallas-Mavericks-Tickets.php.
I like slam dunks that take me to the hoop my favorite play is the ally-hoop,
I like the pic n roll,i like the given goal its basketball yo, yo lets go!
Go Mavericks Go!!!
I Twittered that "Selling software is dead" comment of Matt's. :)
Given that my employer is a software company, it's hard for me to imagine a world where all software is free, but I suppose anything is possible.
I hear ya, Fiat Lux! But then, it's a brave new world out there . . . lots of things are possible. It was really interesting to hear Matt's comments and his viewpoint. Thanks for your comment!
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