Listen for the discussion wrapped around Andrew’s best line of the entire podcast (in Borsch’s opinion). While discussing how Ciceron encourages clients to think about what they offer, in a world where everyone is an instant critic who can tell the world, he says in passing, “every product is an iteration of its future self.” Find out what the “new and improved” Andrew 2.0 means.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins, and Phil Wilson
Music: “Zydeco Junkie” by “Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band“ via Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

• Macworld’s “Some Users Having Problems Upgrading to iOS5” (some users?) as well as Julio Ojeda Zapata on Fox9 News about iOS5 upgrade issues
• iPhone 4S Launch & Steve Borsch on Fox9 News about iPhone4S launch & Android
• Google earnings: Larry Page: Mobile Revenues At $2.5 Billion Run-Rate, 190 Million Android Devices
• Oops…Blackberry Outage Blamed on “Extremely Severe” Network Failure
• The end of unbundled cable? Why Hulu’s Owners Couldn’t Find A Buyer and best headline about it: “Hulu: We Couldn’t Get Some Sucker To Overpay For The Company So We’re Not Selling” (Henry Blodgett)
• CruiseCritic
• Clicker

Upcoming Events:

• Tues/Wed, Oct 11th & 12th: MIMA Summit 
• Thurs, Oct 13th: The Collaborative’s Venture Finance Conference (25th Annual!)
• Wednesday, October 26th: Tech Entrepreneurs Rally at CoCo
• Thursday, October 27th: WordPressMSP 
• Friday, Oct 28th: Social Media Breakfast MSP on Community Mgmt
• Friday, November 4th (weekly): Frontend Masters Workshop Series
• Sat, November 12th: ProductCamp Minnesota 3

Direct link to the show

Minnov8 Gang 141 – Everything’s a Beta is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott and Graeme Thickins (Phil Wilson is off).
Music: “Give Blues a Chance” by “Mean Gene Kelton & the Diehards“ via the podsafe Music Alley.

Discussed during the show:

• Apple iPhone event announced for next Tuesday 
• Amazon Kindle “Fire”
• Chris Espinosa, Apple employee #8 (and still at Apple) personally blogged about the troubling nature of the Kindle Fire “Silk” web browser and the security implications
• Amazon has Palm in its shopping cart — will it click Buy?
• Microsoft Shores up Samsung & HTC with Android patents
• Kris Layon will be speaking at MIMA Summit
• Capella’s iPhone app (there is also an Android version)
• English Books for Thai School – Can You Help? 
• “Facebook Won’t Like This Apple-Twitter Union” (FastCompany)
• “Amazon’s ‘Silk’ Browser Is Revolutionary: Here’s Why It’s So Important” (Business Insider)
• “The One Huge Reason Amazon Will Not Beat Apple” (Business Insider)

M8 Gang Podcast 139 – Capella U Mobile’s Kristofer Layon is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Covering that many great sessions was a challenge and a real treat. Re-live the magic with the liveblog recap.

MIMA Summit Liveblog: “You Are There” Edition is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

In the movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Humphrey Bogart’s character Dobbs, and two other gringos, embark in to Mexico to find gold in the Sierra Madres, an area in great flux and riddled with banditos, but policed by the Federales. In one of the signature lines in the movie the banditos, trying to convince Dobbs and his cronies that they’re Federales, say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!“ (usually misquoted as “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!“). There are several moral and philosophical questions in the movie and Dobbs dies, the banditos are killed by the Federales, the gold is lost and thus the analogy might as clear as mud: chasing opportunities won’t be easy but they’re out there; barriers and obstacles (and bandits) stand in your way; but we thought exploring opportunistic thoughts in this podcast was worthwhile.

Special Guest: For part of the podcast, Meg Canada joins us to talk about libraries, the iPad and more. Meg is a senior librarian for Web Services and Training at Hennepin County Library and currently coordinates public training and  social media efforts for the library. She volunteers helping with the Unsummit, recently presented at MinneWebCon, and is a regular contributor to Social Media Breakfast.

This Week’s Show Hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson.
Opening & closing music is “Santa Maria” by Will Kriski from Music Alley, purveyor of podsafe tunes.

Discussed during the show:

+ Past Events: CloudCampMSP (see Minnov8′s coverage here); IgniteMPLS; Social Media Breakfast;

+ Upcoming Events: Mobile March; MIMA; DEMO; SxSWi; MinneWebCon

+ Mobile: MixMobi; WordPress mobile plugins (Mobile Edition; WPTouch); Square (mobile commerce)

+ Devices: Apple iPad; Microsoft Courier; Dell Slate

+ Other: Google pagerank to require speedier websites?; Hacker News.

Minnov8 Gang 69: “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

OK, there is one comment I heard; “It’s not really an unconference.” True, the ‘un’ in ‘unconference’ might denote that there is no set agenda, that the space is provided and the topics are decided upon by those who show up. This style of meeting has spawned many a BarCamp like event, our own Minnebar to comes to mind.

However, as it pertains to UnSummit, the ‘un’ is a hold over from the inaugural event last year. Don Ball, not able to secure a ticket to the always popular MIMA Summit, decided to host a gathering of those interested in Interactive and Marketing who, like him, either couldn’t get a ticket or didn’t want to pay the relatively spendy ticket price. Hence, being held at the very same, the UnSummit was born.

It should be noted that, at it’s even loftier price, MIMA attracted 1000 folks to it’s recent 2009 Summit…and despite a few exceptions was well worth the price. It should also be noted that what little competition between the MIMA Summit and the UnSummit that might have existed in the very beginning, or perception of such, has long since disappeared. At least it should have. So while the UnSummit does borrow from the unconference concept in it’s presentation, it is really ‘un’ in name only.

OK, so next time perhaps there can be a few more open times and rooms to build some sessions on the fly.

No matter the format, the UnSummit was about bringing together close to 200 hundred interactive enthusiasts on a Saturday to learn from each other and discuss the future of the interactive and online world in a relaxed environment. From my standpoint, at the end of that day, that’s what everyone walked away with. But don’t just take my word for it…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYb6ZJIn-Uo

Was Unsummit Perfect? is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The Minnov8 team was there with a booth and a plan to liveblog the event, archived here in case you missed either the event or the liveblogging.

Before I continue, accolades are due to the vision of the MIMA board and the flawless execution of the event by Jen Kane and team at KaneConsulting. The only downside — outside of their control — was the unfortunate technical issues with Wifi which made our ability to liveblog the event one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced as a team covering a live event like this one (we had to use our iPhones and the intermittent connections to upload what turned out to be minimal content for your viewing).

We were incredibly pleased to have been the media partner for MIMA at this event and want to thank the board, staff and Jen Kane for

Reactions to the sessions were mixed based on the people I talked with: those who are experienced in interactive marketing and social media found many of the sessions to be quite basic and somewhat redundant (same stories heard over-n-over again like Dominos, Motrin Moms, Dell Hell, et al), while others with less experience absolutely found the sessions enlightening and filled with new information. One attendee from a Fortune 100 company said to me during a break, “I know most of what was said in (session name), but three things were presented that turned out to be completely new information, and my criteria for a successful event is learning ONE new thing in each session I attend. On that count alone, MIMA was a resounding success for me.” I felt the same way and, frankly, am eager to view the videos of sessions I missed and access the slide decks of the presenters since there is so much value that was delivered at MIMA Summit.

The Minnov8 team has yet to process the event in full, but a few thoughts come forth: it would be useful to understand specifically who attends, what their level of experience is, what organizations they work for and so on. In addition, it would be fantastic to see significantly more vendor attendance with booths and, possibly, a two-day event in order to ensure that people had time to migrate through the a vendor exposition. I know I’d hoped to hear A LOT more about analytics software and would’ve loved to have had a chance to talk in depth with makers of analytics software and services.

As always at these events, the people are what matter. It sure was fun to see many of the same folks as at other events and to meet new ones. After the jump are two things from Minnov8 team member Graeme Thickins you will find interesting and useful.

Four interviews by Graeme at the happy hour at the close of MIMA Summit ’09 (Listen to or download the mp3):

Graeme’s Flickr photoset:

A Recap of MIMA Summit 2009 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The MIMA folks and Jennifer Kane Consulting, the people that brought you “little Seth”, are giving the geek meter a workout by providing plenty of tech fun gadgets and mobile access. For those of you who thought that free wifi at a conference was the shizznit, prepared to be amazed…

Behold, courtesy of the M Group, the Wayfinding Station. Not to be confused with the Wayback Machine (Sorry Mr. Peabody), this little gem, built on Microsoft’s Surface technology, is, and I quote, “a multi-touch experience to deliver conference information and services to attendees”. Check this, “Users can navigate a map of the conference facility and related breakout sessions by grabbing digital information with their hands and interacting with content on-screen by touch and gesture – without using a mouse or keyboard.” Sweet!

Wait there’s more. MIMA created “conference personas,” each with a pre-configured schedule based on an area of interest. You can chose a “persona chip” and be Social Media Maggie, Suzy Search, Email Ian, Mobile Mack, Victor Video, or Brady Branding. (Sorry, no Pete Propeller-Head.) You’ll then get an itinerary of sessions related to that area of interest. “Because Surface sees and interacts with objects, guests will be able to place their conference persona chip onto the Surface screen to trigger different types of personalized digital responses, and then the transfer of digital content to their mobile devices,” explains the M Group’s Janessa Meyer.

No, wait! There’s even more. MIMA is even using  individual tags that are embedded with the URL to each of the conference speakers’ social networking site of choice. These tags are printed on the conference signage corresponding with that speaker’s session. Using the Microsoft Tag Reader application you just use your mobile device to connect with the speaker’s sites and social media outlets just by snapping a photo of the tag with their device. Shnikies!

If they only had an iPhone app…wait…they have one of those too! Geek metered…pegged!!!!

(Crap! I don’t have an iPhone. My coal burning Treo 650 probably will only buzz and click pittifully. But still…it’s pretty cool.)

MIMA Summit Goes Gadget Happy is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrHI90Icw-o

The MIMA Summit is on October 5th and is sold out. Never fear….the Minnov8 Gang will be there with our tweets, video and photos so you won’t miss a thing. If you can’t make the MIMA Summit, join Minnov8 for the Unsummit at the Hennipen County Central Library on October 10th. There will be plenty to learn and share….and it’s free.

Going Mobile (Minnov8 + MIMA Movie) is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo0XxmsZezM

The MIMA Summit is on October 5, 2009. Everybody who’s anybody will be there…Minnov8 will be there as well! Heads up! Registration close on October 1, 2009.

Analytics As a Strategy (Minnov8 + MIMA Movie) is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The first in the series of three is with Lee Odden of TopRank Online Marketing. Lee is all about SEO and he spent a bit of time to talk as he was headed out of town.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdfJ0wY8npo

Look for interviews with Jennifer Veesenmeyer of Stratigent and Doug Rozen from Carlson Marketing in the coming days.

Minnov8 + MIMA = Movies is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The event will be held at Nicollet Island Pavilion and feature Scott Thomas (aka SimpleScott). According ot MIMA you’re invited to “take a look at how the Obama campaign looked before (Scott) and other designers, joined the team for the last election season.” and promises “You’ll see how it was, how it evolved, and the lessons learned along the way. ”

Scott Thomas, aka SimpleScott, was invited to join the New Media team at Obama for America during the campaign and it led to him becoming the Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign.

MIMA Presents Obama Online is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Wired for 2020 is the Mentoring Partnership of Minnesota’s year long engagement campaign to get more mentors involved with youth in the state of Minnesota. Their mission is to interest caring adults in becoming mentors to youth. Caring adults who are willing to help young people spark their future career interests and expand their possibilities.

Sponsors included names such as General Electric, Best Buy, Target, Federated Insurance, MN Dept of Education, Minnesota Interactive Media Association, Qwest, Science Museum of Minnesota, 3M, Thomson Reuters and many more.

With a daughter in college and a son in high school, you bet I care deeply about the future of education and work, the world they’ll inherit from us, and the value we can add to kids if we can help them locate their own, personal spark within and help them to see possibilites and opportunities that match their dreams.

In a world where high paying, yet low value jobs can be done elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of labor onshore, the challenge is in coaching our youth on how they can each strive and focus on higher value work and that they can, in fact, invent the future. It won’t be easy as global competition continues to grow. 

When it came out, I immediately devoured Thomas Friedman’s book “The World is Flat.” There was one concept that leapt off the pages at me: that even PhD-level, linear and serial processes could (and are) being outsourced because they are defined and understood. I thought about the profundity of that reality and realized that once a process is identified and mapped out — regardless of how sophisticated — it can be handed off to people elsewhere in the world who are willing to do it less expensively.

So do we want to focus our youth as innovators of tomorrow — and mentor them as such — to be more efficient linear, serial thinkers and laborers? I don’t think so and neither do others.

A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel Pink accelerated my thinking along these lines about creativity and innovation with his premise: “The era of “left brain” dominance, and the Information Age that it engendered, are giving way to a new world in which “right brain” qualities — inventiveness, empathy, meaning — predominate.” In this book Pink describes a new era beginning to take shape in the global economy. This new economy calls for skills and talents that, historically, have been largely discounted in the workplace – creativity, empathy, intuition, and the ability to link seemingly unrelated objects and events into something new and different.

Seeing in parallel, making associations (i.e., connecting the dots), is a skill our kids must have for the future. While they will certainly need to understand how to link seemingly unrelated objects and events, that’s pretty useless if they lack the skills to communicate the idea, the innovation or the vision they have for an outcome. Our youth will need to understand how to grab all the relevant pieces coming at them in parallel, package them up and communicate them to people whom they may never meet in person but rather only virtually through some online venue.

Talk to anyone spending any time on the internet — looking at news, information, Twitter, or just trying to keep up with their friends in Facebook — and you’ll hear things like “river of news” or “I’m drowning in a tsunami of digital stuff” or “everything is getting a lot more complex” as we struggle to keep up with the flow of data that comes with online participation. Dealing with all of this in parallel, and drawing associative inferences from it or finding nuggets of gold within it, is already a skill most need but few possess.

Though my session was entitled, “Creating Online Content: Why You Need a Blog,” it really wasn’t solely about either content creation or blogging. Instead, the themes that ran through it was the imperative that mentors get their heads around the concept of dealing with the online world in parallel, engaging in social participation, why all of it is so potentially empowering for them and a must, and especially how we all are experiencing online media, news and information at different times of the day or night (vs. the old “watercooler talk” from pre-internet days when we walked in to work the next morning after seeing some live show broadcast, and we commiserated with our colleagues about that shared experience).

My overall point was that the only real way to understand this new realm of streams of information and social connection online and to have consistent and ongoing shared experiences today — especially between a mentor and mentee — would be if each was participating online within a social network, uploading photos to Flickr or videos to YouTube (or their equivalents), and sharing experiences while having them at different times of the day or night or even within a week or two.

The skills that both the mentor and mentee learn by participating online by creating and delivering their own content are invaluable (and there is no question that the mentee may become the technology mentor!). I can’t tell you how often I sit with 40+ people who want to know “the process of how to Twitter” or “what’s the workflow in publishing to a blog” or “if I do this participation thing, what’s my return?” as if they were still living in a linear, serial world where Step 1 leads to Step 10. Most savvy online participants are involved with the social web and online pursuits in a highly parallel way, connecting dots on the fly and being very fluid with their creation and delivery and connections to other people. Which is precisely the sort of behaviors that come naturally to youth today and will be a skill set necessary as a worker going forward.

What struck me about Wired for 2020 was how many of the people associated with the event, the organizers, volunteers, speakers and workshop creators (i.e., TEL.A.VISION and see this post on the Wiredfor2020 blog) down to those responsible for the Interactive Lab in which I participated (Mark Kurtz VP of New Media, Gage Marketing Group and someone with more energy than a bagful of bobcats, Wendy Meadley, from WM Consulting LLC), completely understood that there is a shift going on in the world and that they are completely geared toward ensuring our youth are ready to confront the challenges and opportunities facing them in a connected world with ideas and information moving around it at the speed of electrons.

Wired for 2020: Mentoring Our Youth is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson. (Photo credit: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog; Flickr).

Joining us on the podcast is a brand new Minnov8 contributor and participant, Gary Koelling, who is Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy Inc. After interactions with Graeme Thickins — who isn’t bashful about promoting Minnov8 — Gary decided he’d like to create for Minnov8 and completed the form (hint: you could too!).

Gary is the founder of BlueShirtNation.com, Giftag.com and leads several social technology projects within Best Buy. He describes himself as a tinkerer, gadfly (and an aspiring iconoclast), reader, tryer (someone who tries), teacher and listener (with a fairly tuned bullshit meter). Due to the success of the efforts he’s involved in, and the high profile of our hometown consumer electronics retailing giant, Gary has been able to talk to lots of people and companies around the country about social media and social technology.

Our favorite quote about his speaking around the country from his LinkedIn profile? “I don’t know if it’s helping, but I enjoy it.” We sure think so since he’s in-the-game, taking risks, experimenting and driving towards high value outcomes for his employer.

LINKS
Here are links to sites, products or other resources discussed during the podcast:

• Good economic news for MN tech firms in Q4 2008: MTS revs up 9%, EPS up 21% (view MTS “Test Suite“) and NVE up 24%, EPS up 44% (view NVE “Fun Facts” page)
• Mashable article on 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them (Scroll down to the “Retail” section)
• Fortune Top 100 Best Places to Work: Mayo (24th) and General Mills (39th) as great places to work (via MNHeadhunter)
• Forbes listing America’s Top Most Wired Cities: Minneapolis is #7 on the list
• The (mostly mythological) “Osborne Effect” but is there some reality to it in an online world?
• Macintosh image editors increasingly used by Tim Elliott: Acorn and Pixelmator
• Gary headed to Etail in Phoenix and a Computerworld event (both he and his cohort and colleague, Steve Bendt)
• EVENTS: Social Media Breakfast 1/30/09; Minnedemo (RSVP if you want to get in!) 2/6/09; Unsummit 3/7/09.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 22 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Microsoft had plastered us with messages like this one for months: “Join us on the PhizzPop Tour to watch the top agency talent as they show us their Expression Studio and Silverlight skills.”  Get the picture?  Uh-huh, yessiree, they’re trying to sell you software.  But at least they’re out to make it entertaining. And no industry in the world likes a competition more than the ad industry. These folks live for this stuff.  

(Side note on the Minnesota connection: You may find it interesting that the promotional talent Microsoft chose to plan and hype these events is none other than Minneapolis-based Gage Marketing.  But, wait, there’s more.  Did you know Microsoft maintains a development office here that’s focused in its Expression Suite product?  The company recently announced it will lease new digs near downtown for this operation, headed by software industry veteran Doug Olson.)

As the Phizzpop about page explains, this Microsoft promotion includes both live events and an online competition.  This year, the PhizzPop Tour is visiting seven U.S. cities — which, naturally, includes Minneapolis, as we’re one of the top advertising centers in the country.  Microsoft touts the event as “a prestigious design competition combined with a social gathering for top web professionals, brands, designers, and developers. Watch the hottest agencies compete in an interactive design challenge in front of a panel of judges and YOU, the live audience.”

The latest tour began in November 2008 and continues through March 2009.  In each location, agencies compete to design the solution that best solves a unique design challenge using Microsoft technologies. Before each event, the agency teams are trained in the newest Microsoft technologies. They’re then given a “design challenge” to solve. Each city’s local ad and creative community is invited to their respective event, where the competing agencies present their solutions to a panel of judges and the event attendees. The winning team from each regional event is flown to the SXSW festival in Austin, TX, to compete against each other for what the event promoters call “best in U.S. bragging rights.”

And the Winner in Minneapolis was … ?

So, five teams of three web pros were given the same business challenge and a few days to come up their own online solution using Microsoft technology. The winner, announced at the close of the January 15 evening event, was Zeus Jones, which had teamed with local development shop Sierra Bravo.

Design team members were Christian Erickson, Chad Hancock, and Sierra Bravo’s Greg Wurm.  As reported on the Phizzpop site, they “created a winning next-generation proof of concept that clearly demonstrated enhanced online browsing and cross-sell scenarios, as well as enhanced physical shopping experiences.”  For more on what that was exactly, I guess you had to be there (and I wish I could have been).  But, the winning entry will be available for viewing soon at this Phizzpop Tour Event Detail page, they say. Also, links to a video and photos of the Minneapolis event are coming soon, to be posted on that same page.

Other Minneapolis agencies competing in this year’s Phizzpop event in Minneapolis, besides winner Zeus Jones, were Colle+McVoy, Hanson, MOOV WorldWide, and space150.

Sierra Bravo is a Bloomington-based web development shop that, by its own words, “executes creative ideas online, including social media and Web 2.0 applications.”  It was recently named to the Inc. 5000 and Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s Fast 50.

It claims to have made Phizzpop history by accepting invitations to join competing teams — the firm also partnered with the MOOV agency’s team.  Tom O’Neill, Sierra Bravo’s VP of software development, explains: “Phizzpop lets Sierra Bravo publicly showcase our most essential capability: partnering with ad, marketing, and design agencies to make their creative vision live and breathe online. With our programmers on two different teams, we liked our chances.”

Sierra Bravo’s Jeff Klawiter worked with MOOV – even crashing on the agency’s office couch for two nights before Phizzpop, O’Neill added.  Winner Zeus Jones had previously engaged Sierra Bravo for multiple web projects for its clients, according to the latter’s news announcement.

The Zeus Jones/Sierra Bravo team will be winging their way to the Phizzpop finals in March at the interactive portion of SXSW in Austin, TX, taking on regional champs from Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and San Francisco.

‘Phizzpop Tour’ Pops Into Town, Gets Coldest Day of the Year is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The agenda is still coming together based upon attendee input but the theme of “Hacking the Recession” sounds timely and a good way to frame social media marketing in these challenging economic times.

If you are unfamiliar with UnSummit, you can check out our coverage here and on our podcast or visit the UnSummit blog. A sign-up list for attendees is on the UnSummit wiki. Without the overlap with the MIMA Summit, it looks to be a much larger event this time. Hope to see you there…

UnSummit Set To Return March 7 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Based upon feedback we’ve received from you and many other listeners, the Gang is increasing the pace of the show and getting to areas of interest in a tighter show format.

In today’s show, a few links mentioned include:

+ Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit

+ The concurrent UnSummit that occurred for those unable to get into the MIMA Summit 

+ TechCrunch article on the credit crunch

+ “With credit tight, young companies keep closer eye on cash” by Katharine Grayson, Twin Cities Business Journal

+ RangeBuzz, “...the Iron Range MN online guide to northern MN dining, nightlife, music and area events. RangeBuzz.com makes it easy for you to discover what’s happening on the Iron Range in Northern Minnesota!”

+ Next Social Media Breakfast on October 31st at Deluxe Corp. (watch their site for details to appear).

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 9 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As you can see from Phil Wilson’s Unsummit post, there were those who ignored the hype and chose to do their own (free) concurrent event at a nearby pub, thank you very much. (Okay, many of them were too cheap to pay the big MIMA fee.) And the MIMA folks actually cheered them on (even from the stage the day of the two events), since they felt bad they couldn’t have accommodated more people. But the venue — the very nice Depot downtown — could literally take no more. (MIMA has vowed to find a bigger site next year though that won’t be easy — maybe the Convention Center?) This year’s attendance, I believe, was something north of 700. MIMA’s membership is now about 950, but the Summit’s attendees also included some non-members and invited speakers, of course.

So, how did the event go?  This was my first year attending (they have not given press passes to us lowly bloggers in the past), so I went courtesy of my employer, to do some serious working of the crowd.  My assessment: the hype didn’t quite meet the reality as far as the overall content, as quality conferences go. But this is an association, after all, not a professional conference producer. And don’t we all kinda forgive a certain percentage of marketing build-up most of the time?  Nonetheless, the logistics were handled quite well, and my hat’s off to the MIMA officers and their band of volunteers who pulled this thing off. (I’m sure they’ve worked out a lot of bugs over the several years they’ve sponsored this event.)

As with any event like this, I attend much more for the people, the networking, the connections, and that part was excellent. The chance to exchange notes and news with your peers, meet new folks in our amazing marketing and advertising community, and meet out-of-town speakers as well made the event very worthwhile. As they say, it’s what goes on in the hallways that matters, not in the meeting rooms. In the age of Conversational Marketing, this was indeed a blab fest of the highest order.

The highlight of the day for most everyone was surely the lunch speaker, Ze Frank. This guy is a polished, well coached and practiced speaker to large audiences (including the likes of the TED conference and other high-brow affairs), and he did not disappoint. The man is flat-out funny and entertaining. He’s a bona fide Internet celebrity since launching his first video (him dancing) several years ago, a video that went viral beyond all viral to that date. (He talked about getting a $30,000 bandwidth bill from his ISP after that experience.)  See more about the Ze Frank Show at this page of his archived links or visit his blog at www.ZeFrank.com. (By the way, if you want to be cool, you pronounce his first name “zay.”)

It’s a good thing Ze was so well received, because the earlier keynote, to open the event, was horrid. Note to planners: one hour is too long, and editors may write well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to speak. (I live-Twittered the event: here’s my archive page, which is six screen shots of my tweets, starting with the beginning of the event on top.)

So, what else did I pick up about the event, what was the overall buzz?  Well, there were those who said it wasn’t “interactive enough,” which is an interesting take for a gathering of interactive marketers. But it can be hard to have participatory discussions with such a large group (impossible?), even in the breakout sessions — some of which easily drew 150+ in packed rooms with many standing.  Choosing breakout sessions is always a challenge, and I missed some very good ones because, well, I had to make one choice each session. I’m sure many went away feeling the same.  There were just too many not-to-miss talks scheduled concurrently (not good planning on the part of MIMA) — six each in two particular sessions! Way too difficult to choose, and jumping from one to another, to catch two concurrent sessions you like, just never really works.

Funny thing was, two other breakout sessions had four choices each and were largely duds — none of the choices had much appeal to me at all.  So, I left feeling I missed what could have been some really good content.  Example: I just had to attend “Mobile…2009 and Beyond” (which was good), but missed the concurrent session with the Zappos guy talking about “Making the Customer Connection in 140 Characters or Less” (that would be Twitter). But I made up for it by chatting with him at the cocktail reception later.

I was only able to catch two other breakout sessions: one on ad exchanges vs. networks (by Google), which was only mildly interesting to anyone except a media buyer, and another called “Marketing Mix Challenge,” which had four panelists describe how they would spend “only” $500k on a fictitious consumer product launch. I heard criticism later from people on that one who just don’t relate to the large agency world, which thinks $500k is a small budget.

But, all in all, it was as successful an event as each individual made it to be. And I made it a good one — lots of great new connections with whom I look forward to following up.

MIMA Summit Packs The Depot is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The day was set in the increasingly popular “unconference” format where the agenda naturally evolves around a given topic or question. Some fifty interactive and social media enthusiasts spent the day addressing a wide range of topics. Three separate “spaces” played host to discussion and presentations on How Traditional Agencies Can Move to Digital, Social Media Reality Check, New Possibilities in Video, Marketing Heresies, Community Management 101,The Future of PR, and a  session addressing the lofty goal of Measuring ROI of Social Media…nope, we didn’t quite figure that one out. Dang!

In addition to the sessions, good food, and the ability to enjoy a Guinness before 11:00am, an ongoing project session to provide the Local and it’s sister Irish pubs with a social media strategy was undertaken. With so many creative professionals working on it, any business would have to consider this one heck of a bargain. Though time constraints prevented the finished plan from being presented, organizer Mykl Roventine intends to compile the pieces of the strategy and present it to the Local within the next few days.

Like many conferences these days there was no shortage of Twitter activity, and for a brief time, there was a bit of competition for “hash tag” (#unsummit08) dominance Twitter Search with the MIMA Summit being held down the street. That’s where the competition ended as many of the UnSummit faithful were very interested in the information coming from MIMA. I’m sure their participants were equally interested in what was happening at UnSummit. One of the pleasant surprises of the afternoon was an unexpected “phone-in” round of drinks and appetizers compliments of MIMA President, Matt Wilson. With plans for many of the UnSummit attendees to attend the happy hour with the MIMA Summit attendees you could almost feel a group hug coming on.

Don Ball, Mykl Roventine, Meg Canada and a host of other volunteers supplied the many social media outlets with a stream of information, session summaries, and photos. All readily available with visit to the blog, a search on Flickr for the tag unsummit08, and of course a Twitter Search for #unsummit08.

In his closing remarks organizer Ball noted that the next UnSummit will take place on a date that does not coincide with another event. Whether that is the case or not, there appears to be plenty of brain power and interest to go around in the Twin Cities.

UnSummit ’08…More Than a Summit Alternative is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.