Las Vegas, NV (LAS) 17 Oct. 2009.
Las Vegas Convention Center
After finding the South Hall as the driver dropped me at the Hilton Hotel (they are not allowed to drop off people at the Convention Center) I picked up my registration information and was able to see Anthony Edwards and Jermaine Dupri greeting attendees at the end of the keynote . They were two of the four keynote speakers. I then found @sseagraves, met some new people (@chrispian and @ifroggy) and wandered around. I was pumped!
It was interesting meeting @ifroggy as I had started to use his discount code to get the 20% saving on the registration fee, but I also had one from BlogWorld. Thinking that I could use them both I entered the BlogWorld one and it overwrote the @ifroggy one as you can only use one. By then I had forgotten what the @ifroggy code was. It made a funny icebreaker when I met him face to face. By the way BlogWorld, I think you should have a Saturday only rate for those who canonly make it on Saturday. Just a thought.
I talked to a guy, @remco, from the Netherlands at a booth for www.yubby.com, a new video aggregation site. You should definitely check that out. You can see what I did with it at http://www.yubby.com/i/cruisinaltitudecom/channel/player/8490/first. I will be playing with for a bit to see how it can showcase our videos. He also has a site at http://www.dik.nl and he had stickers saying “I (love sign) DIK)”, freaking hilarious. He said “dik” means “fat” in Dutch.
I also attended a travel panel with folks from an Advertising agency, Disney Parks and Fairmont hotels. It was great to get the perspective from their end. I learned a lot here. Mike Taylor of Fairmont Hotels seems to have a good handle on how to use social media in the travel space. Disney was concentrating on mom bloggers, but I think they are missing out on the other bloggers out there who can bring an audience to Disney. The guy from the agency, Tom Martin, seemed a little harsh, you can read his thoughts on his blog. Overall, it was a good presentation on how to get in touch with the players in the travel space.
I did two sessions on video editing, but they were both disappointing as I expected a more hands on approach as opposed to just telling me Web sites and application names. I wanted a, here is a video and this is exactly how to get it on your site, adding tags, etc. and it works. Don’t do this, do this type of approach. Hopefully that will be better next year.
I unfortunately, missed the session with the top bloggers (Brian Clark [never heard of Brian before], John Chow and Darren Rowse and Zac Johnson [I’d never heard of him before today either]), but I’m hoping to find a link to it somewhere. If you find it, please let me know. I did get to talk with Darren after so that was good as I did sign up for his 31 Days to Blogging free e-course which was fantastic. He knows his stuff. I did meet John Chow too; a super nice down to earth guy.
One of the weird things is that there were a few good sessions (titled anyways), but they occurred at the same time, so I had to pick one. I did see recording equipment, so I’m expecting a link from BlogWorld directing me to them very soon, hint, hint… I did get a book, “The Worst-case scenario Business Survival Guide” from an author called Mark Joyner from Auckland, New Zealand. As soon as I read it, I will blog about it. It looks like a good read.
My last session was the “How to Make 60K A Month With A Membership Program? with Timothy Sykes and Adarsh Pallian. These guys were pretty good and did give some good pointers although Tim was like Simon from American Idol and shot down a bunch of membership site ideas. But he is somewhat of an authority as he is quite successful at what he does. I did wonder if the 11:30a session called “The Money Making potential of Continuity Programs” with Tim Kerber and Ryan Lee was better? Did anyone attend that session? or BlogWorld is recorded somewhere? Would love to have attended, but the Travel session clashed with it and being a travel blogger, I had to attend that one.
About 15 minutes later was the final keynote with Guy Kawaskai hosting Kevin Pollak, Chad Vader (Aaron Yonda and Matt Sloan) and a very funny/raunchy female comedian of whom I’d never heard of called, The Blogess. It was a great session with Pollak doing his famed impressions of Christoper Walken and William Shatner. These were priceless. The Blogess also had this funny recount of a twitter incident with William Shatner. Pollak talked about how he makes people imitate Larry King on his online show at. Try as he could though, he could not get @guykawasaki to do an impression to the dismay of the audience.
One insanely funny thing was that The Blogess drank white wine from a bottle given to her by @guykawasaki, then she passed it to the other three guests who drank from it too. Then Kevin Pollak passed it to an audience member who took a swag and passed it along. I refrained when it got to me, but that bottle made it to the back of the room to resounding cheers; that was totally awesome! I’m not sure if this is what a closing keynote should be like, but whatever. I did ask one guy in a nearby hotel elevator what he thought of the show and he mentioned that he hated the closing keynote as there was too much cursing from Pollak, oh well.
Oh, I did meet @crimpshoes, Qiana Markham who makes her own shoes and blog about them. One of the bloggers, Tim Skykes, thought this was not a good idea to be a continuity model, but you be the judge, go check out her stuff.
After the keynote was wrapped, we headed to the closing barbecue party at the Hilton poolside. Lots of food and beverages. Oddly enough, local beer was complimentary, but anything else was paid including 4.00 USD for water. We all though that was odd.
After a quick dinner and drinks, I bade goodbyes and headed for the taxi rank. It was 8:22p and a taxi was the only way to ensure that I got to the airport ontime for the 9:45p to Newark connecting to the 5:45a for Houston.
I got a cab right away and enjoyed talking to the cab driver who is originally from Ethiopia. He even slowed down to allow me to take pictures as I kept snapping away as we continued our journey. Once at the airport, the fare read 14.70 USD, I added a 2.30 USD tip and was surprised by a 3.00 USD service fee. Ridiculous I thought, but I had to pay it. I did and bade goodbye and headed into the terminal.
How was your BlogWorld Experience?
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Have you ever considered adding more videos to your blog posts to keep the readers more entertained? I mean I just read through the entire article of yours and it was quite good but since I’m more of a visual learner,I found that to be more helpful. Just my my idea, Good luck
Curious: why did you think the “agency guy” was harsh?
@TomMartin (said agency guy)
Thanks and great recap of the conf.
Hi Tom,
Thank you for your comments; its appreciated.
The information you gave is very useful and I appreciate the time, but your delivery made it seem that it would be difficult to impress you with a proposal. Hence my term “harsh.” You kept reffering to your clients as this group of really busy people so my impression is that it will be difficult to impress them. So my thought as a small blogger is that there is no way I can break into that circle.
Dispite that though as I mentioned above, I enjoyed the presentation and the information, although delivered bluntly, will help me to move forward and approach possible sponsors.
I hope this answers your very fair question.
Your recap was a good one, giving thanks to all those you meet was awesome. I didn’t make it this year, but every event I am able to attend I try to give credit where it’s due. The photos are awesome also thanks a lot.
Jayson,
Thank you for the comments and glad you enjoyed the pictures. Yes I agree with you on giving thanks. Everyone I met were genuine and chatted with me. It was so good to meet the people I follow and those who I adore their work. Hopefully you can make it next year.
As someone that was in charge of speakers, this is a good recap. Would be curious to hear about what you thought was a good session you attended. Thanks for the recap and we are listening for next year!
Jim,
Thank you; I appreciate that. The best session I attended was the Travel Track with the folks from Disney, the Advertising Agency and Fairmont Hotels. They made me feel O.K. about contacting them or others in the industry by telling me what they look for and what not to do in a very non-threatening way. This was the key. They took a lot of questions and realyl thought about their answers. I would think that everyone felt the same as I did or similar. They were also readily accessible after the session so you could talk to them one-on-one.
The Timothy Sykes session was good as well, but I think people wanted more, of course :-). It was good to listen to them though and gain insights into what they did, the software they used, etc. Would have been good to hear about how they get traffic to the site though, that would have been the crowning moment I think. People are always worried about how to get that all important traffic. What do you all think for those who attended this session?