Announcement

You may have noticed that we’re a little quiet today. That’s mostly because we’re completely without power. I’m currently using Steve’s generator to post this message.

Everyone at Blog Business Summit is safe and sound, although unshowered and rather cranky. We’re hoping that Puget Sound Energy can get the power back online soon, and we’re thinking about everyone else out there stranded without power. Hope y’all are safe!

As we posted before, we’ve been assisting CEA in their evaluation of bloggers applying as press to CES. In addition, many of our conference speakers, attendees and sponsors will be heading to Vegas this January.

Being the event-loving people that we are, we decided that there was no better way to reach out to the bloggers than to throw them a party. We’ll be hosting it on the evening of January 9th at the edgy new Atomic Testing Museum, which is just a block off the strip. The fun starts at 5:00 p.m.

If you’re an avid blogger who covers the consumer electronics space and you’re going to CES, let us know so we can get you an invite. Just send us an email and include a link to one/some of your posts. Just send mail to teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

As always, we’re looking for sponsors for this little soirée. If you’re interested in getting your brand in front of the most influential and
interesting people in the consumer electronics space today, ping kim [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com.

Technorati Tags: CES, CES07, CEA, bloggers, press passes, Atomic Testing Museum

UPDATE 12/08/06: If you’re interested in buying a round of drinks for the assembled bloggers, here’s our sponsor PDF. Check it out!

Scott Niesen is giving an awesome presentation this morning on putting Web feeds to work. You should absolutely not miss it.

Our friend and longtime speaker Janet Johnson has been live blogging the conference at her new blog.

Just a note to let you know that C4Chaos from Zaadz is liveblogging the conference.

Jeremy Pepper of Weber Shandwick will be conducting a special breakfast session tomorrow morning along with Jeanette Gibson of Cisco and John Starkweather of Microsoft at 8:00 a.m. in the Bay Auditorium.

They’ll be talking about what’s next in online communications.

Steve and I will be presenting during breakfast tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. in the Bay Auditorium. We’ll be talking about how we created Big Business Jet a sponsored blog for our client, Greenpoint Technologies.

I’m really excited, as this will be my first presentation. Steve will probably wind up doing most of the talking, but either way it’s going to rock because we open the kimono and give away all our sponsored blog building secrets. Don’t miss it or I’ll be sad.

Stephanie, who is one of our partners in crime over at Randall PR, sent me this e-mail just a few minutes ago:

Waterfront Seafood Grill heard about the blog summit (they are right next door to Bell Harbor) and they want show some love for your attendees, too! Anyone who comes in wearing a badge from the summit this week will get 15% off their bill. A spectacular restaurant with an unparalleled view of Elliott Bay. A great way to relax after a full day at the conference, and so conveniently located. Can you let people know with a post to your blog?

Why yes, Stephanie. I just did!

We’re hanging out at the Bell Harbor Conference Center getting set up for the first day of the 2006 Blog Business Summit. The air is thick with anticipation. In the picture at left, you see fearless leader Steve Broback preparing for our leadoff presentation before Dave Taylor’s keynote.

See y’all in the AM!

Podcast/videoblog hub PodTech.net–whose CEO John Furrier and Vice President Robert Scoble are both speaking at our conference–recently interviewed our CEO and fearless leader Steve Broback. The podcast can be found here.

Marketing voices host Jennifer Jones is responsible for the killer interview.

Our speaker, Ben Edwards sat down with (BBS sponsor) PR Web’s Aaron Apple for a podcast interview about his keynote at our upcoming conference and how IBM is using corporate blogging.

I’d like to clarify one thing Ben said in his interview. He told Apple that the Blog Business Summit is, “really for people actively involved in blogging and thought leaders in blogging to come together and to share information and insights with us in corporate world.”

That’s almost the whole of it. But I’d like to add that the Blog Business Summit is also for newbie business bloggers. Our first full day of the conference is dedicated almost entirely to bringing newbies up to date on all the latest technology. Even if you come into day 1 asking, “what is a blog?” you’ll be ready for Day 2 and Day 3.

Easton Ellsworth of Know More Media and I have been working on a cool project for the past few months. I’ve been slow on my end of things in terms of getting it launched because of the intensive preparations for the conference.

Basically, this project is designed to gather the most comprehensive hub of information about what Fortune 500 companies are doing about blogging. I know there are a number of other resources out there that try to accomplish the same thing, but we’re hoping that this project can add value in a few ways.

First of all, this project is by bloggers and for bloggers. All the research will be done by people who are interested in the exciting world of business blogging. All the content will belong to the individual bloggers who do the research.

Secondly, we hope to provide qualitative information about Fortune 500 companies and their blogging initiatives. How well are they working with the blogosphere? What are bloggers saying about the company? Are they blogging internally or participating in social media in innovative ways?

So how does this work? Simple:

1. A blogger signs up on the wiki.
2. The blogger begins researching a company and posts his or her findings on his or her own blog example posts can be found here and here.
3. The blogger then copies the first 50-75 words of his or her post into the wiki with a link to their complete post about the company.
4. More bloggers join in until all Fortune 500 companies have been researched.

In addition to this effort on the part of bloggers, my fantastic boss Steve Broback and our awesome sponsorships director Eric Anderson are sponsoring a phone bank based in Delhi, India. There, our talented data gatherers will speak to marketing executives from all of the Fortune 500 and catalogue what they’re doing with blogging. This information will be added to the wiki as it becomes available to us.

Now, some of you may be saying to yourselves,“ wait a minute! This wiki is hosted at blogbusinesssummit.com! That’s fishy! They’re trying to take ownership of the hard work of good bloggers and dominate the world!”

Let me explain. Yes, we wanted to host the wiki on our domain for self-serving reasons. We want the PageRank boost, pure and simple. We’ve also committed significant resources to making this the best resource for information about business blogging anywhere on the Web. We feel like this is fair.

In the interests of egalitarianism, we want to make it clear that we don’t own any of the content written by the participating bloggers. The bloggers own their own content. We just want to link to it and reference it, making the wiki the hub from which all the information can be easily accessed. We also want to make it clear that any participant in the wiki may place an ad on the wiki for a period of time. If someone has written a book, started a new company or developed a new piece of software, they’re welcome to share that with the community. Please ping me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com for more specifics.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten to mention something here, so I’ll probably update this post, and post again about the wiki. For some more practical details, check out Easton’s post and check out the wiki itself.

Happy blogging!

At the Blog Business Summit, we value our speakers. Without them, our conferences would not be nearly as awesome. That’s why we work hard to create a memorable experience for them. This strategy helps us to attract the best and the brightest year after year, and bring the best and most informative content to our attendees.

That’s why we’ve put our heads together with a number of our sponsors to provide many of our top speakers and affiliates (read: those who drove the most attendees to the conference) with an amazing trip to Richland, WA on the day after the conference for our Grapes on a Plane event. We were originally going to take them to Walla Walla on a private jet owned by our sponsor Greenpoint Technologies, but then we recieved an offer we couldn’t refuse from Hedges Cellars (pictured above) in Richland, and decided to change our flight plan. We’ll be dining there on the evening of Saturday, October 28th. We also decided to add a second jet, also courtesy of Greenpoint.

Also on the menu for the speakers while they’re in town is a dinner at Maggiano’s Little Italy in Bellevue, WA. There, they’ll enjoy gin drinks courtesy of Plymouth Gin and wine courtesy of Di Stefano Winery. Incidentally, my mom brought a bottle of the DiStefano 2002 Merlot to dinner at my house on Sunday night. It was remarkable!

Plymouth Gin is flying a very special guest in from London for the event. Simon Ford is the Plymouth Gin brand ambassador and globe trotting cocktail guru for The Absolut Spirits Company, Inc. He travels the globe working with bartenders and sales teams to make the absolute tastiest gin drinks in the world. We’re lucky to have him.

Now, after all this gushing about all the good stuff we’re giving our speakers, your “elitism” detector might be going off just a little. We definitely understand that these kinds of events can seem exclusive and snooty. That’s certainly not our intention. In fact, attendees can go on the jet trip as well. Ping me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com for details.

But beyond that, we recognize that speaking at an event is a lot of work. Our speakers come from all over the world, and there aren’t any substantial monetary rewards involved in making the trip. They do it because they want to share their knowledge with you, and because they love what they do. They deserve our thanks, and this is how we show it.

All you savvy business types out there can take notice of these events as a testament to the power and influence of well-done blogger outreach. All the sponsors of our speaker events have one thing in common: they want bloggers to pay attention to their products. They’re not afraid of the blogosphere, they embrace it.

I also just posted about how we show our love for our attendees, be sure to check that out.

At the end of every business day, before I shut down my computer, I log into the back end of RegOnline to see who has registered for the Blog Business Summit that day. I eagerly peruse names and companies, and take note of which days people will be attending. When people e-mail me their bios and photos for our attendees page, I give a little squeal of delight.

Yes, we love your money. It keeps us in business. We’re not going to deny that. But our love for you guys is not completely motivated by dollars and cents. I LOVE blogging. I love everything about social media and how it enables better communication and more honest dialogue. It’s the future and I’m proud to be involved.

When I see that there are real, brilliant, hardworking people like you out there who want to make blogging work for your business, it reminds me that what I do for a living matters to people. I’m actually making an impact on the world. Now that’s professional satisfaction.

To show our appreciation, we want to take good care of you. That’s why we’re working with our sponsors to show you a good time while you’re in Seattle.

On the evening of Wednesday, October 25 between 5:00pm-7:00pm our sponsor Getty Images will be hosting a happy hour at Nectar Lounge. Nectar Lounge gives a true taste of the Emerald City, serving up the Pacific Northwest’s favorite microbrews in Fremont, Seattle’s funkiest enclave and local hot spot. Bring your Blog Business Summit badge (or a printout of the attendee e-mail you recieved) and meet on the mezzanine for a free drink on Getty Images.

The Nectar Lounge is located at 412 N. 36th St in Seattle and can be reached at (206)-632-2020.

On Thursday night after the conference, our attendees and speakers will all join together for delicious hosted drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the conference center.

We’ve also worked to convene a number of topic tables during the conference lunch break. This is to give you the opportunity to chat with our experts and speakers in a more intimate environment, and to ask follow-up questions. You can vote for your favorite topics here.

Finally, we’re committed to outstanding service. If you have any issues or problems that you’d like to address with me before the conference, you’re welcome to e-mail me at teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, or to call me at (425)-889-8509. Please keep in mind that this is my home number (I work from my house) so try to limit your calls to the hours of 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Pacific Time.

In one of our late-night brainstorming sessions (coffee, yay!) we came up with the bright idea of putting up an attendees page with bios and photos in order to facilitate networking before and during the conference. It’s kinda like having everyone send in their photo before freshman orientation in college. Ahh, the good old days! But I digress…

Apart from the obvious networking upside, there’s another good reason to send in photos and bios. If you’ll notice, those attendees who have sent me their info get a bunch of inbound links to their sites. Those attendees who have only given us permission to post their name and organization do not. Since we have a Google PageRank of 7, having an inbound link from us is valuable for your website in terms of search engine optimization. (For more information, learn from Wikipedia.)

So keep those attendee bios and photos rolling into teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com and I’ll keep putting them up.

We’re very happy to announce that just in time for the National Business Aviation Association Conference, we’ve soft-launched our newest editorial property: Big Business Jet.

The blog covers issues of importance to those who own private jets or are thinking about buying them. Obviously, that’s a pretty long-tail market. But it’s interesting stuff nonetheless. We’ll discuss everything from the materials used in jet completion to how CEO’s can demonstrate the value add of the corporate jet to shareholders.

Big Business Jet’s sponsor is Greenpoint Technologies (GTI). They’re the aviation industry’s most fabulous private jet completion center (read: they do the interiors), and they’re the wonderful people providing the Lear Jet for “Grapes on a Plane,” our post-conference Walla Walla wine flight.

The blog was built with Wordpress and the template was modified from an existing one by yours truly! All those hours of toil learning CSS and PHP and all manner of other geekery have actually gone into creating something cool. Hooray!

I’ve had a backlog of speaker and attendee bios for a couple of days now, and I’m sorry that I didn’t get them up sooner. I was out yesterday fasting and davening and doing all those other good things we Jewish types do on Yom Kippur.

But I’m caught up now, so you’ll see that we’ve added to our already amazing list of powerhouse speakers. Newcomers to the list include former Microsoft “blog queen” Betsy Aoki and Yahoo! blogger Nicki Dugan.

Equally incredible is our ever-growing attendee lineup which includes Christopher Johnson from Phrasetrain and Drew Meyers from Zillow.

We decided to publish our attendee lineup because we recognize the importance of conferences as an opportunity to network with other professionals. We encourage attendees to take a look at the lineup and make a list of people you want to meet during the conference. That way you’ll know names and faces even before things get started.

The more attendees that send in their bios and photos, the better the experience will be for everyone, so keep ‘em coming. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do that here. If you’ve already registered and would like to see yourself up on that page, you can e-mail a 200 word bio and photo to teresa [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com. Now that the High Holy Days are over with, I might actually get it up in a timely fashion.

Our very own Steve Broback will be speaking at the upcoming Venture All-Stars NW Fall Business Soiree.

The gathering is geared toward entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who want an opportunity to network and build new partnerships. Steve will speak on a panel with October Blog Business Summit speaker Andru Edwards and Venture All Stars’ Tim Reha about leveraging new media tools for businesses.

If you’re a blogger, and you want to get $100 off any package to the upcoming Blog Business Summit, all you have to do is post and link in.

Here’s how it works:

1. Post about the event and link here.
2. E-mail Kim [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com with a link to your post.
3. Recieve a discount code worth $100 off the conference.
4. Click here to register and use your code.

Pretty simple, eh?

Update 10/12/06: Here are some banners and bugs to throw up on your site if you’d like to.