The Blog of Lisa Morosky

The fourth day of BlogWorld (Saturday, October 17, 2009) was another jam-packed conference day.

I think this tweet from Saturday morning accurately describes how I was feeling at this point:

I was over the heat of Vegas, and the constant smell of smoke everywhere we went, very quickly. Vegas is fun and everything, but it’s only fun for about two days (versus the five I was there).

Anyways, I digress.

The morning keynote was entitled “The New Celebrity”. The panelists were Jermaine Dupri, Anthony Edwards, Robin Antin, and Matt Goss. The session was fine. Jermaine Dupri was entertaining, but totally misguided in some ways.

Anthony Edwards had some great things to say about using social media and celebrity status to raise funds and awareness for important causes.

I don’t know why Matt Goss and Robin Antin were there. Especially Robin. Everytime she talked I just wanted to yell at her to say something that makes even a little bit of sense.

During this morning keynote is where we also found out that BlogWorld attendees had set the Guinness World Record for “the largest mass distribution of a social media message in 24 hours” because of the #beatcancer hashtag use. I’m so happy I could be a part of such an awesome thing while at BlogWorld!

The first session I attended on this day was the best session at BlogWorld. It was “The Money Making Potential of Continuity Programs”. The session was moderated by Jim Kukral, and the panelists were Tim Kerber and Ryan Lee.

Let me tell you what – I feel like there wasn’t enough said about creating your own products as an income stream at BlogWorld. A lot of sessions were very ad-centric, and that is just ludicrous in this day and age. The big money, and the sustainable income, comes from building your own empire.

This session was inspiring and extremely helpful, and my sincere thanks go to Tim and Ryan for the information. This was the only session in which I jotted down actual notes to reference later.

After that session, I stayed in the same room and attended the session you guys chose for me: “How To Earn A Big ‘Ole Pile Of Money By Making Lots Of Killer Blog Content”. The video for this session is coming soon, so I won’t say much about it other than that JB Glossinger was probably the most motivating person I saw at BlogWorld. He has a crazy cool presence about him.

The next session was the Blogging Super Panel, with Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Zac Johnson, and John Chow. What can you say about these guys? They’re awesome. They gave some great advice (though, honestly, still a little bit too ad-centric for my taste) to people. I had the opportunity to meet each of these guys (minus Zac Johnson), and they’re just the nicest guys and so good at what they do.

The last session of the day was “How To Make 60K A Month With A Membership Program”, with Timothy Sykes and Adarsh D. Pallian. I’ll be posting a video of part of this session later on this week, but this was a session that was purely comic relief. I didn’t get anything out of this, other than a few laughs. The people I was with definitely felt the same.

Last but oh-so-not-least, is the closing keynote with Guy Kawasaki, Chad Vader, Kevin Pollak, and Jenny The Bloggess. I’m not going to say much about this, because I feel like Dave said it all for me, but I will say that it was just the wrong place and time for the majority of this keynote. I follow each and every one of these people and enjoy what they put out there, but what culminated was something that rubbed me the wrong way having been at a conference.

That’s it! I went to dinner with my mom that night, and the next day I went home.

Overall, BlogWorld was a great experience. It’s a conference you just need to go to because everyone’s there and it’s a blast.

On the third day (Friday, October 16, 2009), I finally got a taste of a full conference day.

The day started with the opening keynote, given by Richard Jalichandra of Technorati. The whole premise of his keynote was showing some of the overall results of the latest State of the Blogosphere survey Technorati had completed. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, I was pretty surprised by some of the results. You can check out the results for yourself here.

I intended on staying in the same spot after this keynote to listen to the next session entitled “The Death and Rebirth of Journalism”, but after a few minutes I was pretty bored so I took off. It might have been interesting for some people there, but I just wasn’t feeling like it was a good use of my time to sit and listen to the panel.

There was a pretty big gap in time at this point. I hung out with some people and chatted for awhile until the exhibits opened up.

I didn’t spend much time looking at the exhibits. I just kind of cruised to see who was there and what their deal was. I’m not big on swag, so I didn’t pick up much, although there were some cool choices. Lord knows that if you needed new tshirts, you could have scored at BlogWorld.

I will share one exhibitor story with you though.

I went up to the Webgrrls International booth because they peaked my interest and I wanted to see what they were about. I had a short exchange with one of the women at the booth. Then she asked for my business card so she can contact me about future events. I handed her my business card, and I was met with a glance at me, then a glance at my card (which I’ve gotten some compliments on, by the way), then a very condescending piece of advice:

“Umm. For future reference, just a tip for you for your networking, you should have white space on your business card so people can write information about you on the back of it.”

That took me completely off guard. Here I am, at your booth and giving you my card and am a potential member and customer, and the first thing you do is essentially tell me I’m networking incorrectly. Not really a positive way to greet those who approach you. So I probably won’t be giving them a second thought.

[Sidenote: I don't know about you, but I design my business cards based upon my brand, not based upon what makes it easiest for the other person to write down notes about me. I only give my business card to people who I've connected with and will surely remember me. I don't hand them out willy-nilly. The only reason I gave one in this situation is because it had my email address on it to sign up for their newsletter, and she asked for it.]

The first session I went to was the one you guys chose for me for Friday: “Are You Getting The Most Money Out Of Your Blog As You Can?” (recording coming soon). Good choice, guys. I really enjoyed this session, with the exception of one member of the panel who I felt didn’t jump in enough, and didn’t have the stellar qualifications the others do. But, Chris Pirillo is entertaining, and Dave Taylor and Tim Jones know their stuff (and are really nice guys).

The next session I went to was a little different. It was “The Role Of Blogs In An Age Of Micro-Blogging”, hosted by Rick Klau. Rick had a lot of interesting things to say, albeit it a lot of basic things to say (in my opinion, anyways). The best message he gave was the fact that blogs and micro-blogging are complementary. I really believe that.

The last session I went to on this day was hosted by Jay Berkowitz, and was called “Making Social Media Make Money – The Top Ten Strategies”. When I mentioned to some other people that I was going to this session, they already knew exactly what it was about, because apparently it’s a popular presentation given by Jay. There was some really great information in the session, but it was wrapped in a fairly salesy package, which kind of rubbed me the wrong way and somewhat diminished the power of his good content. But, nonetheless, he knows what he’s talking about.

After this session, my mom and I got all dolled up and headed to the buffet at The Mirage for dinner. This buffet was stellar. It was easily some of the best food I had in Vegas. After dinner, we went to The Beatles LOVE Cirque du Soleil show, which was phenomenal (a full post on that coming soon).