Before the conference
Do your homework; go beyond scheduling your breakout sessions and making hotel reservations. Take a look at the agenda, if you are attending with another colleague; resist the urge to sign up for all the same things. Split up and get double benefit from the event.

Once you determine your schedule, dive into the details. Take a look at each session, review the objectives, and research the presenter. Write down two or three of your own objectives so that you get the most from the session.

And the last thing you should do before you get to the conference is take a look at the attendee list if available. Plan ahead of time who you would like to connect with and network. If possible send out emails ahead of time, just a simple note that might say, “Ellen I see you are attending the ACEP conference next month, I would love to connect with you”

At the conference
Stick with your plan! Attend the sessions, make your connections and see what else the event has to offer. Sometimes there is a book store, or poster presentations, and of course the exhibits. Don’t forget the sales exhibits, yes they are there to sell products, but they also come armed with valuable information. Take your time when going through the exhibit area.

When in each session, make an effort to write down just one thing that you will do upon returning to work. Take as many notes as you would like, but we all know what happens to those notes. Make a list of just one thing from each session and you have a much better chance of making changes that will matter.

Connect with the speakers, get their contact information. You may find that you want to share information from their session; if you do it is nice to have their contact information in the event you have any questions. Or you might want to be recommend a speaker to present for your organization.

After the conference
Take that list you made of the one thing you want to implement from each session and rank it by ease and benefit to apply. Then work on the list ONE at a time. Most people never accomplish anything new after returning from a conference, so if you do even 1 or 2 you will be ahead of the game.

Follow up with the connections you made. Hopefully you came back with a pocket full of business cards. Do this quickly, maybe even while you are on the plane. Write your emails before the commotion of your real job takes over. And if you act fast your contacts have a much better chance of remembering you. A note sent 2 months later will most definitely go unnoticed.

And finally, thank your boss in a written note or email. Your organization invested in you by sending you to the conference. Let your boss know that you appreciated the opportunity and sum up the benefits. Share those one or two ideas you are planning on implementing. Let your boss know the investment was worthwhile and you might just get an opportunity to attend another great conference.

Follow these simple tips when attending a conference and I believe you will find the benefits multiply!

Bio of Liz Jazwiec, RN

Liz Jazwiec, RN is a nationally renowned speaker, strategist and author. In 2010 her book, Eat THAT Cookie! How Workplace Positivity Pays Off..For Individuals, Teams and Organizations was chosen as a winner of the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award in the leadership and management category. She can be contacted at Liz@Lizjazz.com

Integrated Marketing and Communications Confernce at West Virginia University, June 3-4, 2011

With one of our employees and several friends and acquaintances currently going through the IMC program, I hear great things about it all the time.  Registration rates vary, but you can save a boatload by signing up before May 1st.  Simply click on the link above to learn more, view the workshops, and register.

The attendees – mainly from all over West Virginia (yay for the great support from the Panhandles!), but also from Ohio and Kentucky – were able to ask questions pertaining to their own social media efforts both planned and in effect.  A huge thank you to the State Journal for putting on the event and everyone that came out.

Seibert then headed off to Columbus, OH the next day to present How to Protect Your Online Reputation at the Digital Media in a Social World conference. If you’re updating your Where’s Waldo maps for Seibert at home, that would mark four separate universities in the last month:

• West Virginia University
• The Ohio State University
• West Liberty University
• University of Charleston

This social media business forum features two speakers from our last series: Jeff James of Mythology Marketing and Justin Seibert of Direct Online Marketing. Jeff and Justin will sit on two panel discussions with a couple other great homegrown speakers, Emily Bennington of Dixon Hughes and Bob Coffield of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso. Other speakers include Karen Saxe of netSpray, Julie Hewett of JulNet, and Kevin Nelson of Huddleston Bolen.

We’ll add another post when we receive registration information.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, keep a lookout for more information from the State Journal, either online or in print.  Hope you can join us!

Mallabo.net offers a look at issues pertaining to social commerce from someone who’s been deeply involved in it from his time at eBay, LinkedIn, and GSI Commerce.  So to read more about what Jose’s been up to – especially if you’re interested in using social media to increase your site’s ecommerce sales, take a look!

Now in its 10th year, the global SES Conference and Exposition Series educates tens of thousands of marketers each year, with a 98% satisfaction rate. SES Chicago, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest, will be packed with 60+ sessions, multiple keynotes and Orion Strategy sessions, exhibitors, networking events and more. We hope to see you there.

Event Overview:

• Real-time actionable information you need to grow your business through search engine marketing
• Ins-and-outs of search engine marketing from top search experts and the search engines themselves
• A unique setting to network with fellow marketers and search engine industry professionals to discuss the trends in search engine marketing
• Access to the world’s most comprehensive gathering of search engine marketing & optimization-related solutions providers and potential partners & affiliates.

What You Will Learn:

• How search engines list web sites for free and through paid placements
• How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors
• How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results
• How to calculate the ROI of your search marketing efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy-and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t

Oh, and Justin’s sending me off with a packed lunch as I’ve been invited to present a Tinbasher case study next Wednesday at the Blogging for Business session.

Some pretty exciting news on the Next Generation Marketing front.  Well it’s not quite news yet – more like an embryonic news nugget.

Jeff, Skip, and I got on the phone this morning to plan out our next dates.  One thing that looks more or less definite is a stop in Beckley, WV in November.  We’ll post more here and on the main site when this gets locked down and we have more news.

* I just felt like opening with some Spanish today.  Weird – I didn’t even catch any Dora or Diego this morning.  If that’s misspelled or otherwise incorrect, please let me know.  I took Deutsch in high school and college.

Looks like the Marketing Genius blog is back after the hijacking.  That was much quicker than anticipated.  Please continue to enjoy posts from our good friend Skip Lineberg, which resume today.

In the meantime, I wanted to give you an update on 2 items:

1. For a time being we pulled posts from each of the travelling speakers from Next Generation Marketing.  We are no longer doing this, but still encourage you to check out each one individually:

• Direct Online Marketing Blog – Justin Seibert and Paul Woodhouse
• Mythology Marketing Blog – Jeff James
• Marketing Genius – Skip Lineberg and other folks from Maple Creative

2.  You’ll note I didn’t link to Skip’s blog.  We didn’t have a falling out – I still want to give him a great big bear hug every time I see him.  His blog – Marketing Genius – got hacked.  Really tough situation. As soon as the situation gets resolved, I’ll provide an update.

The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, as developed by marketing executive and blogger, Todd Andrlik. It’s really as simple as that, except that the name isn’t strictly accurate: It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline. It’s now housed on Ad Age, partly because we thought it’d draw some traffic and links for us, but also because both Todd and Ad Age figured it was a useful service to rank and showcase all these sources of information in one place, where thousands of readers could discover them. With more than 700,000 registered users on our site and a host of daily and weekly products, we also hope we can grow the traffic to Todd’s creation and some of the blogs it highlights.

Methodology
What Todd came up with is a largely objective ranking, which is probably why it’s already gained such popularity among marketing and media bloggers. It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of eight sources, seven of which come from Google, Bloglines, Alexa, Yahoo! and Technorati. The last is Todd’s own personal subjective measure. In the case of a tie, individual scores for a blog are weighted in the following order (from highest to lowest):

Todd Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.
Yahoo InLinks (1 to 30): Much like Technorati’s InLinks count, Yahoo uses its Site Explorer to tabulate the number of links to a particular blog. We then scale this number down to a 30-point scale.
Technorati Ranking (1 to 20): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Technorati Authority (1 to 20): Much like the InLinks count, Technorati’s Authority count is the number of blogs (as opposed to individual links) that link to a particular blog. This number is then scale down to a 20-point scale.
Technorati InLinks (1 to 20): Technorati tallies the number of links to a particular blog, and we then scale that number down to a 20-point scale.
Alexa Points (1 to 15): Alexa ranks sites with an algorithm that incorporates page views and reach (the percentage of all web users who have visited that particular site). For the Power 150, we take that rank and assign it a proportional score between 1 and 15 and factor it into a blog’s total score.
Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 10): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 15) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.
Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.
Collective Intellect (0 to 10): Collective Intellect is a social media analytics company that works with brands to evaluate consumer opinion, measure buzz, identify customer sentiment and manage corporate reputations at the industry, company, brand, campaign and messaging levels. For the Power 150, Collective Intellect’s authority ranking uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate an author’s authority on a topic, including such measures as link-analysis between on-topic posts, topic density, author’s percent of contribution to the topic, number of comments and post quality.

This honor is to be shared by all of you, our entire community of marketing geniuses. It goes to show how important all of you are who comment, contribute, link to, recommend, tag and ‘favorite’ this and other blogs. Thanks! We couldn’t have done it without you.