Sitting at the Airport

I'm at the gate at Southwest Florida International Airport, but my flight's not for a few hours. I had to leave the iMedia Brand Summit a bit early, since I have client meetings in Jersey tomorrow. I had to check out of my room, so I figured I would head over to the airport and get some work done in the terminal. Work has certainly piled up over the last day and a half, and the week is jam-packed. I have a few assignments that need to be done before I go to bed tonight, so I'm jamming through stuff while I wait for my plane.

The summit, although abbreviated for me, was a blast. Tom Troja and I delivered a presentation on Conversational Marketing with Todd Riley from GM Planworks and Liz Vanzura from Cadillac. We got a lot of great feedback from the attendees, who packed the room and even stood in the rear of the room when we ran out of seats. It was great to get that kind of support. We walked the attendees through the "Can We Talk?" execution we've put together for Cadillac, after talking about some of the basic strategic thrusts and ground rules for Conversational Marketing in general.

I wish we could have spent more time in Q&A, because there were people with their hands raised who didn't get to ask their questions, since we ran out of time. Other than running out of Q&A time, I think the panel went really well. I excused myself to the hallway outside after it was over to answer questions from folks lingering after the panel. There were plenty.

I think Jason Calacanis did a pretty admirable job of outlining what NOT to do in his morning keynote. It was the perfect setup for what Tom, Liz, Todd and I talked about. So we didn't have to spend a lot of time going over the McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Sony flogs and why they're wrong. We didn't have to talk about PayPerPost or any of the other companies with approaches antithetical to the principles that gave rise to the blogging explosion. We didn't have to go over any of the negatives, since Jason covered a bunch of them. Couldn't have been a more perfect setup.

I'm tired, and I've got a lot of work to slog through, so I'm going to sign off for a bit. Blogging light for the next couple days.