One of the best things about attending a conference like BlogWorld is that you get exposed to some amazing people you might never encounter otherwise, and learn about interesting sites, companies, and tools from the people who are already using them successfully. With that in mind, this post aims to share some of the cool resources and ideas I discovered this year, in the hopes that you’ll get something great out of them too.
People You Should Listen To
I’ll be listing everyone’s Twitter profile, since that’s usually the easiest way to connect with them, and I didn’t meet anyone there who wasn’t active on Twitter. If you’re at all interested in marketing and aren’t already, get on Twitter. Seriously.
Amber Naslund- Made some great points about managing corporate brand identity on social networks, and gave one of the most useful talks of BlogWorld on “Managing Your Social Media Time.” This talk was a real eye-opener for me (especially in my day job), and was a great example of how social media can be no-nonsense and results-oriented. You can check out the slideshow from her talk here, though without her talking you don’t get the full effect.
Margaret Francis- Really impressed me on the brand management panel as well. She obviously knows her stuff and had a lot to contribute.
Laura Fitton- Gave an extremely inspirational keynote about why you should recognize that you’re awesome and stop hiding it from other people. Her talk was a perfect way to kick off the event. Funny, entertaining, and has “been there, done that” herself.
Erika Neapoletano- Never actually met her in person at BlogWorld, but have been following her and reading her blog since then, and she’s got some hilarious and refreshing thoughts on marketing and writing. Well worth following.
Nathan Hangen- Nathan is a great writer, and teaches people the right way to get the most out of Twitter and their other Internet marketing efforts. He’s also a really nice guy, to boot!
Sites and Tools You Should Use
Social Mention- Like Google Alerts, but for social media. With Google Alerts becoming less useful and less accurate all the time, this is a great option for research and tracking.
NetVibes- Like iGoogle or other homepage tools, but on steroids. Follow a crazy variety of sources that are important to you on one page. It’s a great tool for listening in to conversations on the web.
Klout- A great tool for measuring your influence on Twitter, and seeing how your activity and influence stacks up against other people in your network.
Del.icio.us- Many of you are probably already using this, but if not, get an account now. Besides having totally portable bookmarks that don’t clutter up your browser, there’s the social bookmarking aspect. You can discover great new sites all the time, and help others do the same. One of the best information-gathering and discovery tools out there.
Slideshare- Share your slide presentations online, and check out those by people you find interesting. You can get some amazing free content from shows you didn’t attend, if you follow people who are presenting at shows.
Stuff You Should Read
The Awesomeness Manifesto- A treatise on why being awesome is more important than being innovative. Even if you think there’s nothing new under the sun (a topic I plan to write about soon) there’s still room to be awesome and make a big impact on the world.
279 Days to Overnight Success- Written by Chris Guillebeau (who I’d like for his name, if for no other reason), it talks about the hard work required to become an “overnight success” and how you can create your own success story.
Marketing Advice Worth Remembering
On social media for your business (from Amber Naslund’s session): You can’t possibly be everywhere at once, so pick 2 or 3 social media tools and stick to those. Ideally, they should be where your potential clients/customers are. Don’t bother chasing the bleeding edge of tech tools, go where people are already having conversations. The Top 5 tools where people are having conversations are: Forums & boards, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs. Your audience may only use 1 or 2 of those, so do some research to find out which are being actively used and which to not bother with.
On the size of your audience: Don’t worry so much about how many followers or subscribers you have- worry about how those people engage with you. When you share something with them, do they take action, or are your efforts falling on deaf ears? Who cares if you have 5,000 followers on Twitter if nobody’s actually listening to you? It’s better to get real results from a small but dedicated audience than to have a huge following that doesn’t do anything for you.
On differentiating yourself and your business: No matter what your industry or niche, it’s tough to be the first to talk about the topic. This is true whether you blog about blogging, making money, being a mom, video games, whatever. You need to 1. find an angle or hook that makes your message somewhat unique and 2. let your personality shine through. Give people a reason to want to get to know you and like you. If that turns some people off, that’s OK. It’ll likely attract more people than it drives away… unless you’re just genuinely unlikable 
On not reinventing the wheel: Ben Huh of Failblog gave a great talk about how they’ve grown their site to about 250 million pageviews a month. The most amazing thing, though, is that they’ve done it while hardly doing any internal development. Every aspect of their site uses somebody else’s technology, from their site platform (WordPress) to their video hosting (YouTube and Viddler), to their intranet (Google Docs) and much more. Almost all of their platform uses free tools, which makes it even more amazing. They realized early on that the likelihood they could build a better tool or piece of software than what someone else came up with is pretty low. Instead, they decided to let others handle the heavy lifting when it comes to the tools, and just stick to providing the content their users want. Stick to what you’re great at, and let others handle the rest.
There was a lot more I learned and other great people I met at the show, but I’ll cover some of those ideas in later posts. Be sure to subscribe if you’d like to hear more!
