Although more than a week has already passed, I am only now reprocessing information from the New Marketing Summit (NMS) held on October 14-15 in Boston, where I was also lucky enough to vacation afterward. There was and still is quite a bit to take in.
Over two days, attendees were treated to a flurry of 32 bite-sized presentations and panels while tweeting questions to the Social Web stars on stage and tips to the Twitterverse (#nms08). Topics ranged from Web 2.0 for Internal Communications to SEO to SocMed Monitoring to Personal Mobile Technology to Millennial Marketing to Community Management, and also included some very cool case studies.
I was particularly excited to meet and see the faces of folks that have become familiar to me online such as Todd Defren, Chris Brogan, Christopher Penn, and David Meerman Scott. Although I didn’t get to meet Ann Handley (who was there on the first day), it still felt good just knowing she was in the room somewhere with me! 🙂 Yep, I was thrilled to participate in an event with so many social media Rockstars all under one roof!
The rapid-fire, breadth-of-info conference format was perfect if you had at least a working knowledge of and personal experience with social media and digital marketing. However, if you were seeking a “quick immersion” into the world of social media, it may have felt a little bit more like baptism by fire (as one of the attendees hinted). Either way, there were plenty of eager conference consumers and plenty of content to go around (unlike the food on the first day however!).
Although I didn’t have the chance to talk with all the vendor sponsors, those I did speak with were of a high caliber and a great match for the conference:
The best and worst part for me was the networking. It was the best because I appreciated and enjoyed the people I met, some of whom included:
- John Munsell of Bizzuka
- Charles Lauller of Bizzuka
- Paul Chaney of Bizzuka
- Valerie Combs of BuzzLogic
- Todd Parsons of BuzzLogic
- Linda Mueller of Robert Bosch Tool Corporation
- Patrick Rafter of Intrastand
- Keri Singer of Questex Media
- Rajesh Jaiswal of BostonBioJobs
- @bostonmike !! (He didn’t give me his biz card, only Twitter ID. That’s all we really need, eh?)
- Mark Roberge of HubSpot
- Tracy Johnson of ENC Marketing & Communications
- Chris Kieff of Ripple6
- Jim Lavelle of Vtrenz
- Candace Fleming of Crimson Hexagon
- Anya Woods and Kate Brodock of Otherside Group (who also blogged the conference)
- Pamela O’Hara and Michelle Riggen-Ransom of BatchBlue
And it was the worst because there wasn’t more time to meet more people. 🙂
Thanks all. It was indeed a pleasure.
p.s. Of course the absolute best part of my trip was visiting with my dear friend Robin Greisdoff Moore after the conference. It was the first time we’ve seen each other IRL in over a decade!