Yesterday was a fun day, although the people I was with are all bloggers and I think I saw more than one sign of withdrawal from not being by an Internet connection for more than seven hours!
I’m not going to put any notes about Seth Godin’s presentation here because (a) I didn’t take any (!!), and (b) there are a ton that I’ll link to at the end of this post. Great notes, videos, pics, etc.
It was interesting to see the comments from yesterday’s post that I titled “I’m Not Going To See Seth Godin Because…” – they ranged from “ya! Right on!” to “I agree that $50 is too much and unaffordable.” I don’t disagree with that at all – there is no way I was going to pay $50 to do something like this last year. In fact, there are opportunities every week for me to drop $50 on network things here locally that I choose not to do because I don’t think the speaker or crowd merits it.
However, there are ways to be creative about it – I’ll share one way to get in for free:
- Find out who the sponsors are (it shouldn’t be hard – it’s usually plastered all over the marketing materials)
- Network your way into that company
- Find a “decision maker” and begin to develop a relationship (remember, it just starts with “hi.”)
- Let them know that you are in transition, or that you aren’t in a position to drop $50, but you’d really, really like to go, and “do you have an extra tickets that I could have?” (or something like that)
Obviously, you have to get over the pride thing a little, but I knew the sponsors at this event, and I knew they were scrambling to get all their tickets out! The presentation was awesome, the networking was awesome. It was way cool.
So here’s my recap. Weeks with lots of work (not me, I was pretty busy with JibberJobber stuff but was cc’d on all the coordination e-mails) paid off big time. Seth’s presentation was awesome. Towards the end of the Q&A session he asked who wanted to do the book signing, and who wanted to continue Q&A. About 1% wanted to do the book signing, so we got another 20 minutes or so with Q&A. I’ve never seen a more diverse set of questions, and he answered them masterfully.
I’ve heard people say (and Seth has also) that Seth’s blog is where he writes about obvious stuff, and it isn’t worth reading. After hearing him for almost 90 minutes yesterday I have a new appreciation for his perspective and thoughts, and don’t see his blog as “just pointing out the obvious” anymore. He wowed me.
This is the wordmob team that worked to get Seth here:
Here are links to various things that can give you a better feel for what we experienced:
Ash Buckles, CTO of BridesClub.com is the biggest Seth Godin fan I know. He had his head shaved by Seth Godin: see it on flicker
Steve Spencer, owner of Twelve Horses (which was a major sponsor) had a huge role in this event. HUGE thanks to Steve for being involved and all the work he did to make this happen. You can see him here with Ash (I think Steve did some follow-up shaving on Ash’s head: see it on flicker and here are 11 seconds of Ash’s fame on YouTube.
Phil Windley, local tech superstar took some great notes and has some excellent pictures here.
Phil801, one of the founding members of WordMob and owner of TagJungle, with a recap on the day and his mishaps getting Seth back to the airport (pretty funny! Thanks to Jimmy Zimmerman and Brian Corrales for essentially saving the day!!).
Chris Knudsen, who has said he isn’t blogging for the summer (but seems to blog more than normal :p) has some great notes in an easy-to-read bullet format.
Quick comments from the Buzz Booster team on the event (thanks for the photo I stole :p).
Finally, true to her name, the NewsPaperGrl has multiple posts broken out into subjects (all of these came out of the presentation):
Ash BucklesThat’s it for this week – have an excellent weekend!
Touche…