Back from IzeaFest-Still Absorbing the Insights

It is the Tuesday after IzeaFest.  I drove to and from IzeaFest with my family.  I’ve been planning this trip since March.  This was the first conference that I have ever combined with a family vacation.  I was somewhat inspired by Robert Scoble at BlogWorld (or maybe it was the final New Media Expo . . . ) in Vegas in 2008.  He brought his family, and I briefly met them at the Hilton.  I say briefly, because I spun around to say ‘Hi!’, was invited to dinner and rapidly declined.

I wasn’t snubbing Robert nor his family, but I had flu like symptoms coming on and I didn’t want to get any of them sick.  So I begged out of the dinner feeling like a schmuck, just a bit, and feeling ghoulish just a bit because I thought I might be missing a wee bit of a networking opportunity.  But hell, I’m not going to network with someone at the expense of getting them or their kids sick, so I didn’t feel bad about that for long.  Instead, I high tailed it out of blogWorld early, headed home on the Red Eye, and recooperated with a story of what could have been (bad).

So I traveled to IzeaFest after loading up the family vanster, a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan with 168k miles on it.  We only use it for long distance trips, typically loaded down with Christmas presents on trips to Illinois to see my family.

We stopped first in Ridgeland, South Carolina, where my wife and I married in 1993.  Then the next morning we ventured into Savannah and walked around River Street with the kids.  My wife an I met there and lived there in the early 90’s and it always feels like going home, even though neither of us are originally from Savannah.

We then drove 5 hours down the road to Orlando.  We checked in at the Hilton Grand Vacations resort around 5 and by 7 pm, I was at the Renaissance waiting to get loaded on to 1 of 3 busses heading to Tampa for Howl O Scream at Busch Gardens.

I sat in front of Drew from @benspark (photo above left) and his wife and next to @Cramur who is a great guy I’ve known through Twitter for quite some time.  We talked about his new business venture in the Atlanta area.  He has set up something of a contractor concierge service.  Essentially, you sign up for the service and if you need something done on your home, they find the contractors for you.  They vet them, make sure they are licensed, they coordinate the calls etc.  No hassle, you just get someone reliable at your door to take care of your house if something breaks.

I think its a great idea, especially after my grandmother was first hit by a massive hail storm that took out her entire roof this spring and then just last week experienced extreme flooding in her basement damaging almost everything down there when a water main broke.

The insurance was great with the roof and terrible with the basement, but she and my parents had to handle managing all of the contractor calls, which was extremely time consuming.

Once we arrived at the park, most of us got instantly lost and separated (either that or I got ditched    ).

lol

One minute I was with a group of people and the next minute this group of vampires descended on me and I was singled out of the herd like a lame goat or something.  I guess when push comes to shove, you definitely count on a bunch of bloggers to watch your back, but I suppose someone was blogging about my eminent demise.

… vampires tend to take blurry pictures.

After I got away from those vamps, I proceeded to get really lost in the dark bowels of Busch Gardens.  At one point, I found myself walking in an endless loop of figure 8’s around a snack bar.  I wasn’t really hungry, just couldn’t find a way out of the loop.

Fortunately, on one of my loops, I came across @heatherinBC and @MurrayNewlands both friends from Affiliate Summit and great bloggers. 

I tagged along with them as we trekked through a haunted house, and then later with @MurrayNewlands and a few other bloggers from Market Leverage (Dina sp? James SP? and their camera person).  Their the ones doing the interview with some people from the park (right) after the same vampires that had me in their clutches decided that it was too dangerous from a marketing perspective to be interviewed by a couple bus loads of bloggers that the SeaWorld folks had hauled into their own park.  (little irony and lost opportunity there, but its all good).

A little later, we did wander by an area of the park where a couple elephants were eating in the dark.  For almost natural reasons, I found this to be the coolest part of the evening, as I’d never run across an elephant in the dark before, let alone eating in the dark.  That memory will probably stick with me longer than anything else from the night.

By the way, I took almost all of these pictures with my Palm Pre.  My new Kodak that I bought 10 months ago, died last month (after burning my thumb on it when it heated up during the first 3 months and Kodak wouldn’t replace the dangerous and defective camera, Kodak Sucks!)  This is not a review, just me pissed at Kodak for selling me a piece of junk that caused me physical harm and wasted my money.  Kodak has since been added to the list of companies that I will never again do business with.  That list started with AT&T who sucks even more.

My Palm Pre did OK as my primary and only camera, but its only a 3.0 megapixel camera.  It does best in good light, not so great in a Howl-O-Scream darkness . . .

Ultimately, it got late, and I feared I’d be turned into a pumpkin, so I headed back to catch the first bus back.  I was toast from the long drive and just needed some sleep.  The bus took off a little later than I expected and I ended up back in Orlando after midnight.  I hiked across an empty lot between the Renaissance and the Hilton Grand Vacation resort, and crashed.

Early the next morning I tried to get up to help with registration, but couldn’t get out the door that fast after the late night and travel the day before.  I ended up getting to the conference around 9 am instead of 8.

I was very impressed with SeaWorld’s conference facilities.  They didn’t serve any diet soda however, and even though one of the employees snuck me a diet pepsi (major gratitude as I am an addict) they didn’t know that there was a Diet Pepsi machine between the conference area and the main gate, which was about 100 meters away.  Would have given SeaWorld another $40 of my money that weekend if I had known that!

This is where I should have been at 8 am on Friday, helping Heather, Elizabeth and Ashley with registrations.

Unfortunately, I was just wiped and couldn’t get there that early.  I’d had a single beer the night before, and unlike the fine folks that convinced their bus driver to pull off the interstate to make a beer run at a convenience store, only later to puke it up and almost get in a fist fight, I stayed sober.

Below here, you might notice @waynesutton also from North Carolina, who also spoke at IzeaFest moderating what will probably be a famous panel someday called video gems, I believe.

What did I learn This last Weekend?

On the first day of the conference, I was thinking mostly about my own speaking session scheduled for just after lunch on Saturday.  I was distracted from the drive, and distracted by the lack of diet coke.  I wasn’t really on my game, and just couldn’t get into the sessions like I wanted to.

I was able to have some very good conversations with other attendees at the event.  So one of the things I learned is that if you can’t jam with the sessions for what ever reason, don’t feel guilty about spending your time talking to great people outside the conference hall.

I really had some good talks with people like John Raser, Murray Newlands, Warren Whitlock, John Andrews, and many more people.  From my perspective, these types of conversations are invaluable and I’d travel across the country to find and have them any day of the week.

That night (Friday night) I skipped the party at the IceBar and I’m positive that I missed a really good time. Then again if the flickr photos are anything to illuminate the way, I’m probably better off as I had to ride back to North Carolina with my wife…

I guess these are the original types of sponsored tweets . . . The Ice Bar Girls

Back to Business on Saturday

Myself and the other members of my panel on What Advertisers Want (Zena Weist, John Andrews, George Smith, and Joseph Jaffe) buckled down Friday night and had a 2-3 hour conversation about the topic of our panel.

I took notes while we were talking with my Sony device, so I was able to really focus on the conversation.  We were drinking beers while working, and unlike most conferences, I hadn’t spent much time in the days before building up my tolerance to be ready for the event.

I had been working ridiculous 21 hour days the days before the conference, so my reserves really were long long spent.

So by the end of our talk, they were ready for dinner and I was ready to head back to my room and get my questions as moderator of the panel ready.  However after the mile walk back to my room, plus the beer and the lack of any food since lunch, I was dead tired.  I ate a bear claw left over from River Street Sweets in Savannah, set my alarm for 5 am and went to bed around 9:30 that night.

I woke up about 2:30 am that night.  I went out on the veranda with my laptop, listened to my notes and proceeded to draft my introductions and questions.  I worked until about 5:30, took another nap for about 40 minutes, then got up with my wife to go to our Time Share Talk from Hilton.

You see, we got this great rate on our villa through Hilton, but it came with a catch.  We had to go receive a pitch for a time share from Hilton.  Now, we’ve never done that before, and we both thought it might be an interesting life experience.  As it turns out, I do think it could be a good fit for me, as I spend so much time in Vegas, but buying a time share in Orlando as opposed to Vegas did not make sense.

Spending my morning on Saturday listening to a time share speech when I wanted to be at the conference also did not make sense.  Yes we saved some cash, and we did need to save some cash, but in the end, I’d have done it differently.

In that regards, I did get the life lesson I was looking for. 

I got to the conference Saturday around 11:30, about an 1 before my panel.  After everyone broke for lunch, I went up to the podium and began getting set up for my panel doing sound checks with Trevor and rehearsing my questions and notes, meanwhile some of my friends helped with the sound check and had fun goofing off at the same time

I’m glad I did that, because an hour later when things actually kicked off, I had ZERO jitters.  Sometimes (not always but sometimes) I get butterflies when I talk, and its usually just a lack of familiarity with the microphone and my own voice coming out of it for the first time at a conference.  With even just a minute or two standing in front of everyone, I can usually get settled and be completely comfortable and that is what happened before our panel.

From my perspective, our panel was excellent!  I was extremely pleased with the way it went.  I felt like we got the audience engaged.  I polled the audience initially with a number of questions trying to get a sense of where the audience was.  I knew this was not a typical social media audience and it was not a typical Izea audience either.

Those polling questions really helped me get a feel for the audience and hopefully helped the panelists a bit as well.  Once the questions started flying, and the responses and conversation got going, we were off to the races.  About halfway through the questions, I didn’t need my notes any more.  The rehearsing and conversations from the night before kicked in and we were all able to flow well through the conversation.

Zena Weist and John Andrews from the What Advertisers Want Panel at IzeaFest

George Smith and Joseph Jaffe from the What Advertisers Want Panel at IzeaFest

Steve Hall, from Adrants, took this great picture of our panel, but I haven’t had a chance to ask him if it might be cool to share it here yet (and hadn’t seen it on flickr yet to grab the html code).  Steve’s a great guy and I wish I had half his eye as a photographer (ok that’s kind of morbid, but hopefully you understand what I mean, my pictures completely suck compared to his, in fact, I don’t think you can even call mine pictures after you have looked at his.)

Once the questions died down just a bit, I then opened up questions to the audience trying to target bloggers that needed their questions answered the most.  After all this panel was supposed to target What Advertisers wanted from bloggers so that Bloggers could better connect with Advertisers more effectively.

I offered bloggers that asked questions free Artisteer Software to help them design better blog themes and templates.  As an Izea advertiser myself, this WAS one of the things I wanted from bloggers!  I’ve done a great deal of advertising through Izea and nothing shows me that a blogger doesn’t care or isn’t aware enough to act than a blog that displays a generic looking Blogger or WordPress Theme or template.

We got some great questions from bloggers.  The last question came from a person who would later steal the show that day, Tommy Fishback.

Steve Jobs to be Replaced by Tommy Fishback in 2019

Now, I don’t know Tommy, hadn’t met him nor heard of him before this question.  I later learned that Tommy was approximately 13, maybe 12 years old.  I say that not because age matters, nor is it anything I typically care about at all, but for those people that do think that age matters, Tommy’s presence, maturity and intelligence were pretty amazing.

Tommy asked a great question, but later that day, he got up on stage and gave a great 5 minute presentation.

Now, IzeaFest was definitely not short on scandal.  The video gems panel went off with a bit of a rude hitch.  The panelists were both women and as they gave their presentation, the audience began to heckle them via twitter live stream.  As I listened to their responses, they truly did not sound very good.  It seemed like one of those interviews where every response isn’t right and seems to get worse.

I don’t know if the panelists completely realized how their interview seemed to be resonating poorly with the audience, many women in the audience were offended by their responses.  Many men were as well.  Despite the offense felt by the audience, the offense cast across twitter and the world seemed to be relatively rude to me.  I even got up to ask a question of the panelists trying to unlock a more reasonable response from them, but my attempt failed and in fact someone in the twitter stream made a snarky comment that I was hitting on them.

Don’t know the best way to summarize how this went, but basically the panelists sounded like they were saying the only way to become YouTube famous was to be cute girls.

That did not go over well with many people in the audience, feminist minded attendees like myself felt that this discredited many women and men for that matter.  Some female attendees seemed to be offended by the requirement of youth and cuteness as well.  Not all bloggers are young, cute females, just a fact ( I sure am not! )

I basically asked them with my question, if now that they had achieved more with their internet shows, if they might look to expand their business and hire more people to support their efforts.  I mentioned that Rocket Boom used to have the business model to hire a cute female spokes person for their tech shows 3 years ago, and maybe they could turn that business model around and hire their supporting staff for their show as opposed to being hired themselves.

This back fired on me on two levels:  First, one of the panelists apparently had worked for Rocket Boom and might still have a relationship with them,  Old business model apparently still thriving.  Second, my question was misinterpreted like I, as a middle aged guy, was looking to get hired by one of these young women, self described as ‘cute’.

Lesson Learned – If someone Self Destructs on Stage, the kindest thing you can do is to Just let them GET OFF STAGE as fast as possible! Once one of these things goes south, its just doomed to continue the misunderstanding.

Now, the next day, one of those panelists came back and attempted to heal the damage to her reputation.  Personally, I thought that took some real guts and tweeted that out.  It got quite a few retweets and I was glad to see that some of my fellow attendees also had some of the good stuff flowing through their veins.

Unfortunately, she followed Tommy Fishback, who even at 13 or so had so much damned charisma that her powerpoint presentation replete with long text written slides, just fell as flat as a freshman in a 101 speech class speaking about why its important to register to vote in congressional elections or something.  It was a cold speech, and even thought the content of the speech did help show that she did have some intelligence and substance her delivery followed by Tommy’s performance made for a bad contrast.

Other Cool Stuff

SeaWorld really put on a great conference with Izea.  It was a cobranded event and I think both companies really won.  SeaWorld is relatively new to social media and you could tell they are going through a learning phase.  They did a lot of things very well, but they could have rethought a few things:

• Like letting bloggers take more pictures or do video interviews at Busch Gardens
• SeaWorld put on a presentation on day 1 about their social media efforts.  This felt like what I advise all my clients to never do.  We were eating lunch and they were essentially giving us a marketing pitch, replete with some examples of ads.  I always tell my customers that a blog is like taking a client to lunch.  You don’t take a client to lunch and then hand them some marketing brochures and a press release and tell them to read it, you get to know them and talk to them.  I think they should have taken a page out of Liz Straus’ SobCon book and instead, set up a scenario of what they have done so far to the audience and then asked the audience to talk over the situations and see if there was a better way and then have a couple tables in the audience come up and talk about their suggestions for SeaWorld.  A dialogue with bloggers would have done wonders to engage people on many levels.
• SeaWorld did have a great little stunt with a Sea Lion (I think).  They tried to bring him up on stage, but he had a little stage fright and took off in the other direction.
• 

One of the cool people I met at this conference was John Raser, a pro golfer who is also a blogger.  John had apparently been growing his hair out to make a donation to Locks of Love and had his hair shaved at the end of IzeaFest.

John, also nominated me for coolest shoes at IzeaFest.  I was wearing my Vibram Five Finger Shoes and the shoes really were conversation starters with lots and lots of people.  They aren’t as cool as the new VFF’s coming out sometime this month (black leather made for hiking), but they got people talking.  I’m not shy when it comes to conversing with people, but I’m not always the best person to 1) introduce myself to a stranger and then 2) launch into that conversation.  The shoes definitely helped.

Towards the end of Saturday, I also met Michael Daoud, the man behind xShot, those great hand held monopod camera holders that have been enabling me to take better pictures (when my camera still lived) shooting over the heads of crowds, coming up and over from weird, but cool angles and getting great pictures of myself and anyone I might be standing next to.

Drew from The BenSpark introduced me to XShot’s last year at BlogWorld, but this was the first time I had a chance to meet and talk with Michael.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to talk with everyone, like my old friend Colleen, whom I’ve known since 2006 online and 2007 in person. I ran into her briefly at Howl-O-Scream right about the time I was racing back to catch an early bus. I almost bought a SeaWorld ticket off of her, but my goofy schedule made that impractical. That raised another lesson learned, don’t squander a chance to catch up with an old friend, just because you are racing to get on a bus. The dumb bus is probably not going to leave on time anyway!

Finally, after IzeaFest was over, I was ready to go out and play a little bit.  Saturday night’s event was a dueling piano bar called Howl At the Moon.  Everyone there was pretty tired, but ready to have a stress free good time as well.

I didn’t drink a lot as I had driven there in the vanster, but I had a great time hanging out with everyone and had some really good conversations with quite a few people that evening.  I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, nor would have had I had a real camera, but I got a couple ‘good’ shots in that they captured some quick snaps of people that made the night fun and interesting, even if my camera quality didn’t due anyone justice visually.

Now, I’m still pondering what I’ve learned.  I was just at the Birmingham WordCamp and still soaking that in as well.  Next week I’m going to BlogWorld and speaking at WordCamp Las Vegas within BlogWorld.  I may not have a chance to really reflect until sometime after that.

But as I roamed through the blogosphere today, here are some things that other bloggers picked up on, and these sentiments do resonate with me as well.

Chris Heuer ~ In short, and putting it bluntly, the science of marketing has for too long been focused on manipulation, not value creation.

brettbum ~ I really like the emphasis Chris makes on value creation, I’d call this improving the quality of content or media or something, but its a different perspective and one I think I can relate to sincerely, just need to grok the perspective a little more.

Michael Quale ~ Panel discussion with @brettbum moderating. A marketing session for blogger’s. Guess what? A-listers are snobby! yeah no kidding?

brettbum ~ note toself, try to avoid the mister obvious conversations on a panel.  One of my concerns going into the panel was that I was the only advertiser on the stage that had advertised with Izea.  That said, I DID think that the perspective of the panelists was extremely important as they represented contact with major brands and campaigns that had not YET used Izea.  For Izea or bloggers in general to field future business deals with major brands, the panels perspective was invaluable.  I hope I helped bring just a little of that out. 

brettbum ~ Susan from the House of Blue reminded me that Kodak camera’s may not suck completely as she was able to mobile post with hers, while my regular blogging activities were not all that frequent, not counting my utterli posts.

Robin Eads ~ Don’t take on more than you can handle, learn how to say no

brettbum~ phwew! I wish I could say no easier and faster.  Too often I hem and haw when I really want to say no, then i sound like I’m complaining, when I really should just say no.!

Thomas Thorspecken ~ (speaking about Aaron Brazell’s keynote) He said some bloggers have a Rock-star mentality that attracts attention for a short span but a true influencer gets attention for the long term….  Someone who is an influencer is hungry all the time they always want to learn more.

brettbum ~ on one level this resonates a little, but I harbor a fear that it sounds good to me, because I am always hungry to learn more, but I’m not sure that truly makes a person an influencer.  This is one of those ‘sounds good’ type of things for sure, but not so certain that there is REAL truth in the statement.  Or to put it differently, I’d like to believe this is true and not just something that gets past my Pander Blocker.

David Isley ~ This business is NOT complicated. The only secret there is is TAKING ACTION.

brettbum ~ I would tend to agree with this, and offer it as advice to anyone.  Actually, I offer it as advice to almost everyone.  That said, we do have to be careful, because there ARE (surprisingly maybe to some) a large number of people that get completely lost and baffled in the application of social media, even blogging.  I’ve seen thousands of people get mired down in details and problems that seem very simple, but they are still stuck and need help getting out.  Even though this seems simple, it doesn’t jive for everyone.  If I could figure out WHY it doesn’t work easily for everyone, well then, I’d be a guru for sure.

brettbum ~ I just liked this post from Greg from TellingDad

brettbum ~ In awe of Laurie from La Vie de Laurie, I think she even went to Disney too!  no idea where I could have found that kind of energy.

Technosailor himself ~ Transparency is absolutely essential, but transparency only makes it easier to see inside. You have to be transparent to sell services, business and trust. However, if the content of your character sucks, then transparency only ensures that the world will see it. Transparency solves no problems if you suck as a person or your product sucks because it just does. It may be better to worry about your DNA then worry about making sure the world can see it. Just saying.

brettbum ~ In general, I like the way Aaron (@technosailor ) puts this.  The comments about ‘being real’ strike a hollow chord in me.  Partly because of the verb ‘to be’, which is just non-sense, but I do agree that there has to be something inside.  Short of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, it is almost impossible for a blogger to be about nothing and still be a good blogger.  (probably why this blog here should have never been, and why my real passions take place elsewhere, this site is truly for my own personal relfections and I don’t really care if people read my ‘diary’ as I’m transparent to a fault.

Addendum – Yes this blog article needed an addendum like I need a hole in the head, but it just reminds me as I proof this article that I really need to redesign my own blog.  Its over a year since the last design and the blockquote css style is driving me nutty.