My first event as a blogger is over. Despite my best intentions, too many good or at least educational offline distractions kept me from almost any online activity at Business Leader NW. Here are a few impressions from the Blog Pavilion and beyond.
Day 1
The Blog Pavilion is an island on the floor of the main conference hall. People stop by, some attracted solely by the shiny new iMacs and free internet access. Through the conference, we the Pavilion participants discussed with the conference attendees’ the basics of blogging and social media in general (lots of “Aha!” moments), and set up a number of people on Twitter. Social media remains an unknown to many business people.
The lunch roundtable moderated by Alex Williams, the Blog Pavilion coordinator, with Dawn Foster and Marshall Kirkpatrick. I enjoyed and learned a lot from the discussion about the ins-and-outs of community management and using social web applications in business. Too bad the audience consisted mostly of the participating bloggers. Thanks Luke Lefler for the podcast (35 min.)!
Great walk through at the Travel Portland trade show upstairs. I still can’t figure out why people wanting to buy products or services from the exhibitors, who themselves pay for their presence, would be charged for entry.
In the afternoon, I missed Dr. Jennifer James’s apparently awesome and stirring (for the present audience) talk on urban anthropology. Thanks Amber Case for recording it for future generations!
Day 2
Solid morning keynote by Stephen M.R. Covey on trust in business. No real breakthrough ideas but a well-packaged plethora of elucidating examples and general inspirational stuff. Trust is a key element of leadership that can be learned and improved. Trust increases the speed and efficiency of business. Practice smart trust, not blind trust. I also learned the good that presenting with a constant grin can do to your presentation style.
The breakout on using social media for business got hijacked by a couple of worked-up Luddite naysayers. I walked in about 30 minutes in, and the presenter Kevin Jones hadn’t even had a chance to start his presentation proper. He managed pretty well, considering the forces. Later on, Alex Williams reported overhearing a comment along the lines, “What is this world coming to, if we communicate online?”. I enjoyed Kevin’s analogy of social media adoption: the Spandex Continuum moves from intrigue (about a new technology) to abuse of and disgust with it to discovering real uses to blending with other solutions.
P.S.: Check out all the Business Leader NW tweets. Great to meet everyone who made it to the Blog Pavilion, and thanks Alex for all the hard work you put into the event!
P.P.S.: Your regularly scheduled Sustainable Marketing Blog content returns with the next post.
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