Spoke this morning at NACS in Milwaukee on how consumer shows can benefit from deploying/employing Web 2.0 technologies. It wasn't the biggest audience - 15 hardy folks - but they were a great audience and fun to work with throughout the presentation.
We covered blogs of course, but spend more time on Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace while offering suggestions on how to harness both the technologies and the opinion leaders and their followers who use these applications.
This was the first time I'd been at an NACS event. The difference in speaking here vs. speaking at IAEM or SISO or MPI was astounding. People here wanted to understand the technologies and philosophies as it applied to them being able to build their attendee audience - especially among the under-30 crowd. It was not about immediately monetizing everything as seems the case with other meetings industry events where I've presented.
The session almost didn't happen. First, my flight in was 40 minutes late, so I arrived at the Midwest Airlines Center with about 50 minutes to spare. Still, plenty of time to make sure everything is ready to go...
Except that I had brought my new Powerbook (and I'd advised the NACS folks I was doing so) and the techs did not have the proper connection cables to link the Powerbook to the projector. Which meant I couldn't present off my Mac.
Luckily the conference manager wasn't using her laptop and had enough space on a thumbdrive so I could move everything to Windows. Except the videos, which were in .MOV format. We were forced to watch those off my 13" Powerbook screen, but everyone got the point and working off the two platforms lent a bit of old-fashioned charm to the proceedings.
As a couple of the folks in my session are on the conference commitee, I heard I might even be invited to San Diego for NACS '08 to talk more about Web 2.0. And not for a breakout session.
We love San Diego ;-)
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