Point Oh!

Just finished my panel at InnoTech in Portland a few hours ago and it went really well. I’m glad I got there early to gauge the audience a little because it turned out that they were much more social media savvy than I originally thought.  I got to drop a lot of the setup stuff I was going to do and get to the case studies right away.

It was also interesting to see how attentive people are at these regional events compared to the larger conferences. I’m sure a lot of these people have blogs and Twitter accounts but when the speakers were speaking it seemed to be a common rule of respect that just about everyone closed their laptops and listened. After seeing people browsing Facebook and playing online Scrabble during some SXSW panels, it was a welcome relief. I think there should be some sort of flag system for people that are live blogging and the rest of the people should be forced to shut their laptops during sessions like this. Isn’t that the reason this isn’t a webinar to begin with?

Getting back to my panel…I wish I did this sort of thing more often. Blogging is often like preaching to the choir but when you actually get in front of a group of marketers and answer their questions you really get a sense how people really feel about social media being integrated into wider marketing plans. Most of the questions I got were related to the ethics of pitching bloggers and offering them things like sponsored trips and, of course, measurement. Two somewhat foggy areas that definitely warrant more discussion in these kinds of settings.

I’d also like to offer quick kudos to April Karnes of Northwest Airlines and Emily Peressini of Razorfish. Emily had to jump in after a last minute cancellation and deal with a few annoying technical problems. Razorfish is doing some great work with Northwest and just watching their presentation made me want to fly their airline. How come I never get seats that cool?

Enjoying another couple days of Portland before heading back to the land that isn’t afraid to be rude.