A post I wrote on Minnov8 on October 16… click here.
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A post I wrote on Minnov8.com yesterday …. click here.
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:
As I said in my previous post, I used a tool called ScribbleLive to do live-blogging at the DEMOfall conference earlier this week in San Diego. I've now converted all that live-blogging to an archive, which puts everything in proper chronological order — from the beginning (even prior to the start), all the way through till I stopped blogging on Wednesday afternoon, September 23.
I hope you enjoyed my coverage. There were many amazing companies that launched at this event, and I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more from them over time. For more details and reporting on this event, visit DEMO.com, and also search Twitter on the hashtag #demofall09. And, for some visuals, please check out my DEMOfall09 Flickr set.
My twice-yearly coverage of the DEMO conference — this one, the DEMOfall edition, where some 70 new ventures will be launching — will appear here. It's a special event because it will be executive director Chris Shipley's final DEMO, after 13 great years. She's co-producing this one with Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, who takes the sole producer role as of DEMO 2010.
Here's the page where my live blogging posts will appear, in real time as they are published: bit.ly/TWU3L. (I'll be leaving this post here at the top of my blog as a "sticky post" for a few weeks.) To do this live blogging, I'm using a great tool designed just for this purpose called "ScribbleLive." My coverage begins either Monday evening 9/21 (after the reception), or Tuesday morning 9/22 when the opening session kicks off, and goes through early afternoon Wednesday 9/23, when I must bolt for the airport.
At the last three DEMO events I've attended, I have live-tweeted them rather than live blog — and that works okay. But this approach is better, for a number of reasons: (1) I'm not limited to 140 characters per post… (2) I find it a nice middle ground between doing short, often hard-to-write (and understand!) tweets and the more rambling long-form blogging… (3) it's as fast or faster than tweeting… (4) it's way faster than me trying to post quickly on my own Typepad blog here… and (5) it prevents many of my Twitter followers from getting mad and unfollowing me when I'm doing so many rapid-fire tweets at events, which for a DEMO can be upwards of a couple hundred! Another cool thing is that I can attach a photo to any of my live-blog posts as well. (Though I will also upload all my pix to a Flickr set during and right after the event.) The tool also allows me to attach an audio or video file, if I wish, but I don't expect to do that.
For me, as a longtime event reporter, this ScribbleLive tool is really an ideal solution. Thanks to my colleague on Minnov8.com, Steve Borsch, who set up this tool for some of the other events we cover, and helped me with this one. Here's an example of how our team of four Minnov8 bloggers used the tool simultaneously for the first time: it was at the recent Blogwell event at General Mills in Minneapolis.
I look forward to DEMOfall and hope I hear from you — whether during the event, before, or after. I will likely be publishing some other, stand-alone posts here on this blog while at DEMOfall — namely, audio interviews, as I did for DEMO '09 back in March. To communicate with me, you can always post comments here at my blog. Or, talk to me via Twitter by putting @GraemeThickins at the beginning of your tweets — since I will be monitoring Twitter search closely as I live-blog the event. I'll be in my usual spot in row three of the press section, right down in front.
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