I enjoyed Blog World Expo – as more geek than blogger, it was a little less intereting for me. I enjoyed the talk by Leo Laporte (both keynote and session) – here is a good blog post which wraps it up, also a community building session called “Leveraging Social Media for your Company”
It was hosted by Tom Gerace (gather.com) and Don Crowther (Affiliate Marketer). This turned out to be a great session. Tom and Don gave a short commentary and then answered questions from the audience. The highlights are:
- Keys to community success:
- You have to participate in the conversation – this isn’t a one way conversation. You must engage.
- Further more – add value to the conversation. This is not the place to spam…people will accept you if you act nice.
- You have to be honest about your stuff. You have to evangelize – you don;t have to bash your own stuff…but you must be real.
- Transparency is key – people must know who you are when you evangelize. If they find out later that you are affiliated with said stuff – then they will be very upset.
I really liked Tom – I feel he was totally genuine and really had a lot of advice. I think Don was “selling” a little too much. He wanted to give advise – but I fell like the went into sales pitch mode too much. Don also did a little too much talk TO us – instead of talking WITH us. But overall I really like the session.
The last thing i want to mention is the closing session with Mark Cuban.
Mark was fantastic – he is such a cool guy and a geek to boot. He really connected with the crowd and had great incite. Here is a good post about Mark’s talk and here is a link to google video and other Blog World Expo videos.
