It was October 5th at the Minneapolis Hilton. And if you didn’t hear about it, where were you?  Well, at least if you’re from these parts. Because, when marketers gather for an annual confab, they know how to hype it — especially our local marketing community.  I said the same thing in my coverage of last year’s event.  Except, this year, the local crowd brought new meaning to the word noise, owing to the fact that — unlike last year — they now seem to have fully embraced social media.  Yessirree, can you say… Twitter, Twitter, Twitter?!  Matt Wilson, current/outgoing president of MIMA, said from stage soon after the event was underway, “You know we’ve made it when our Twitter hashtag has already been flagged as spam.” And that wasn’t even the only hashtag — there were other variations being used, too, by what had to be a large majority of attendees pecking away on Twitter apps all day long, most from their mobile devices. (You could spit from any spot in the Hilton and hit an iPhone.)

But myself and my colleagues from Minnov8 decided, as we have for other recent conferences we’ve covered, to skip trying to live-Twitter the whole thing — so limited by 140 characters and all — and live-blog it instead using a tool called ScribbleLive.  And, when we wanted to tweet — or when we needed to, when the wi-fi was challenged (which it was a lot) — we had it set up with our Twitter streams feeding into that live-blog window, too.  So, all four of us had our mobile phones at the ready to tweet, as well as our laptops open to live blog.  We were jumping back and forth between the two, but it worked pretty well.

So, here’s the result of that live-blogging/Twitter-feed combo: it’s now archived here at Minnov8.com. And there’s other Minnov8 coverage of the event as well from my colleagues: Steve Borsch did a great recap post, and Phil Wilson shot and edited a nice FlipHD video, interviewing attendees at the closing reception to get their takeaways.

I did some audio interviews, which you can listen to or download here:

• Graeme interviewing Rohn Jay Miller of interactive agency IconNicholson

• Graeme interviewing Mark Kurtz, VP New Media at Gage Marketing, a sponsor of the event

• Graeme interviewing Scott Severson, CEO of AdFusion

• Graeme interviewing Lee Odden, SEO guru and head of TopRank Online Marketing

Here’s my Flickr set of photos from MIMA ’09, such as they are (can you say grab shots?):

And, just for fun, here’s a quick Animoto video I made for free using that photo set:

Finally, here’s a video I shot with my new iPhone 3GS before the morning sessions got going: