New Communications

Today I have been in the company of some of the most prolific journalists, innovative publicity professionals and forward thinking marketers that the industry has to offer.

I started the day by meeting Matt Galloway of The Basement, who you probably know from his word-of-mouth fame and his association with WOMMA, and if you've ever googled 'volkswagen' you definitely know him. Matt and I had been posting about eachother having met 'vicariously' at another conference, and it was a pleasure to get to talk to him. If you don't read his blog, look down on the bottom right of this blog and you can see the most recent posts - and then after that sampling, add him to your feeds.

Matt introduced me to Shel Israel, the co-author (along with Robert Scoble) of Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. And, Shel introduced me to Robert, who gave me some insights on how HE would use qtags.

I met several folks who engage regularly with one of my co-horts, John Wagner of Wagner Communications - specifically John, Shel Holtz wants me to tell you that he explained to me how important 'measurement' is, and to stop 'using your gut'! (he said you'd know what he meant...)

I met two women who I have been following for a few months and was thrilled to get to speak to - Toby Bloomberg of the DivaMarketingBlog and Jory Des Jardins of BlogHer. By the way - the BlogHer conference is coming up in July - I'll be going and will make sure to bring my sister who has started a blog recently to support a chain of retail stores. Toby gave me some great ideas on how Rachel, my sister can use the blog in-store to engage her clients, create a community and open conversations.

I spent a long time chatting with Brian Glover of biz360 and we ended the cocktail hour talking about how we could use qtags to help bands promote music at gigs. That is a fun way to talk business - hey want this song, text to get the link.

This is NewCommunications forum # 2, and it's spectacular. Tomorrow I'm one of the panelists in a New Advertising case study topic, and I just hope I can keep up.

John - thanks for letting me know about this conference, and Jennifer McClure and Elizabeth Albrycht, thanks for putting on a spectacular show.