As practically every man, woman, and child in the Twin Cities must know by now, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) held its annual conference Wednesday, themed “Feed“. These folks are marketers — they know how to hype, as they’ve been telling us for what seems weeks now that the event was sold out.  Prior to that, they promoted that it would sell out and the positioning was…so click and pay, friends, or you will never be able to live with yourself.

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.)…  [Read More…]