So I just returned from a week-long, back to back conference trip where I re-connected with current friends and made lots of new ones. Personally, I love traveling to conferences. Sure, it puts a huge dent in daily productivity but what you glean from the experience, what you learn while you are there and the new connections you make with people far out weight staying home and going through yet another day of the same old thing no matter how much you love your job.
In Las Vegas at Blogworld, a conference which explores blogging and its role in just about everything, I was lucky enough to have wandered over to the conference a day early where there was a sort of pre-conference occurring. At the conference, Wine Library’s Gary Vaynerchuk, who I’d seen once before in Boston, was giving a keynote about how, as a blogger, one can carve out a niche and work their way towards becoming the expert in that niche. It was very motivational talk, filled with Gary’s trademark excitement. It was informative and gave me more than a few ideas I could put in motion to improve my own situation.
Wherever I was - at the conference, at the Techset party, at the Affiliate Summit dinner, at the Prive party, at Mirage’s Revolution, in the exhibit hall, at a Planet Hollywood dinner, hanging by the Maker’s Mark bus during the exhibit hall party or during the insane last night during which 23 of us just sort of moved from one place to another in the MGM Grand - I just kept seeing and meeting more and more people I knew or came to know.
There was Hugh MacLeod, Lisa Bethany, Photrade’s Krista Neher and Andrew Paradies, Rubicon’s Nicole Jordan, Guy Kawasaki, Brian Solis, Stephanie Agresta, Marjorie Case, Shawn Collins, Missy Ward, Maria Thurrell, Laura Fitton, Dave Taylor, Lee Odden, Sarah Townsend, Dave Alston, Toby Bloomberg, Jesse Stay, Chris Aarons, Annie Lynsen, Linda Bustos, Tessa Horehled, the Comcast Cares guy, Micah Baldwin, Jay Billingsley, Greg Swan, Scott Monty, Annie, Dorothee Royal-Hedinger, Chris Brogan and countless others whose names I sadly can’t remember or that have left my brain. (Continued)
There are a lot of bright people who work in the field of marketing. There are few who stand out for their forward thinking mentality and vibrant outlook on the continuous changes ravaging the space. With the :30 long under fire and marketers flailing about trying to determine what’s next, it’s nice to know there are few smart people out there who can help guide them through the perils of this sea change.
Alisa Leonard-Hansen works in the New York office of Arizona-based digital marketing agency iCrossing, writes for the company blog and shares her own thoughts on social media (or that fact there’s no such thing) on her own blog, Socialized. There, she offers her outlook on social media or, according to her, “the current iteration of the web.”
Last night at the Commonwealth Hotel in Boston, wine guru Gary Vaynerchuck hosted his 
