When people first construct a “personal brand,” the last thing they're concerned about is juggling the content, data, monitoring and associated analytics that come along for the ride. Personal branding sounds like a great idea on the surface. It allows you to control ownership of your voice, create thought leadership and add credibility to your professional outreach.
You’re producing an upcoming conference, and you have a thousand items on the to-do list. Layer on top of that a budget and needs assessment to go along with the thousand tasks. Reality check: You need to sacrifice a few darlings on your list. Prioritize based on the wants and desires of people attending the event. Your main concern should be the owners of the butts that occupy all those folding chairs. They even supersede your the wants and desires of sponsors. This little detail often seems to escape the novice event producer.
You wanna be one of the cool kids in the marketing lunchroom? Then you damn well better have a blogger outreach program. This is a micro-PR concept in which you research popular bloggers within the context of the client you are trying to promote. More often than not, you want to share a product or service with the blogger with the intent of getting a positive review or mention.
I was incredibly fortunate to participate as a VIP blogger at the recent Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2012. The event was a virtual Who's Who of social media, business, technology, distribution and enterprise experts at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin resort in Orlando Florida.
I was a much younger man then. Fill with energy and rage for that day. Days would follow and we would fall further into blame. The flags went up and so did the fists. Status quo. Today, I take my little girl to school. I look into the eyes of the future, my future, possibly your future. All I see there is love, laughter, dreams and discovery. We must now teach undying fearlessness with dogged practicality.
Trying to explain the thrill of creating a new technology, startup, user experience or integrated marketing tactic is hard to do with just words. But that excitement is ramped up tenfold when you're creating something that affects the real world. Such is the case with the new patent-pending technology that is being released by Starmark. This is the integrated advertising agency that I call home. Here I get to play with some of the most amazingly talented individuals that I've ever had the pleasure to battle for the best ideas. However, when we were challenged to construct the technology that would reward people in the real world, it was a new level.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012 at 10:13AM