Ready to Explore?

The next Explore summit powered by Jason Falls' Social Media Explorer is in Nashville on April 13.

Jason has lined up an incredible group of industry leaders from all walks of business life to help you with your digital marketing and social media efforts. I am definitely excited about talking with Nashville about Optimizing Social Media within large companies, however I'm thrilled to be able to get my "learn on" with the robust topics covered by my fellow presenters.

You have your tickets, yet? If not, please leave a comment below with your contact info or reach out to me on Twitter and I'll shoot you a discount code.

After the event, I'll update this post to include my presentation and all the resources we discuss.

See you in Nashville!

UPDATE 4/12:

Deep Dive Into Operationalizing Social Media

View more presentations from Zena Weist.

IZEAFest 2009

Last year, I heard about the wonders of IZEAFest via my dear friend, Lucretia Pruitt (aka @Geekmommy) She is one of the WalMart 11 Moms and an amazing blogger advocate. When she says a conference is a "must attend" then my ears perk up! Lucretia suggested I connect with Ted Murphy, IZEA's founder. I did a little digging on IZEA and their take on sponsored conversations. IZEA is a governing member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) and they require mandatory disclosures for bloggers associated with IZEA. Blogger outreach is a topic I wanted to learn more about for my own blog and for my corporate brand marketing role at EMBARQ. Then I dug into IZEAFest via bloggers' comments, the post that really whet my appetite is from Ben Spark, 10 Best Reasons to Go to IZEAFest. This looked like a must attend for me.

I made it a goal to meet Ted at SXSW and pitch my case on why I should be on an IZEAFest panel. With Lucretia's introduction, Ted, Ashley Edwards and I not only met, but we hung out for an evening with Lu and Rick Murray discussing social media trends and blog talk. Ted asked me to speak on an IZEAFest panel before I had the opportunity to plead my case. I'm thrilled!

Check out the amazing line up of speakers and the schedule is jam packed with relevant social media topics. And if that isn't enough to get you going, IZEAFest is listed in the Inventor's Spot Top 10 Meet & Tweet Gatherings.

Interested?
IZEAFest is at SeaWorld Orlando on October 1-4, 2009. All the details are at the IZEAFest website. You can also follow the lastest IZEAFest news on Twitter via @IZEAFest.

Planning on Going?
Ben Spark has a great post to prepare you: 10 Essential Items for IZEAFest 2009. And let me know you're in so we can connect!

Photo credit: @eMom

Upcoming Conferences

Here's the upcoming events I'll be attending. Please let me know if you're going to any of them so we can meet up. First up, is The Society For New Communication's (SNCR - pronounced "snicker") 5th annual NewComm Forum April 27th - 29th in San Francisco, CA

NewComm Forum was my favorite '08 conference. It brings together thought leaders and decision makers to discuss the impact of social media and new communications on PR, marketing, advertising, media, journalism, business, culture and society. This year, I'm looking forward to the opening keynote conversation with Charles Best, founder of DonorsChoose.org.

I'm thrilled that our EMBARQ online outreach team will be sharing our socmed story as well.

NewComm is co-located with Chris Brogan's SF Inbound Marketing Summit. I haven't attended a Brogan conference yet and I'm really looking forward to this line up. I'm especially chomping at the bit to see @aaronstrout's Start Talking With Your Customers
presentation and the Listening and Monitoring session with an amazing socmed panel including @ambercadabra, @justinlevy and @spiral16.

Next up is SOBCon (Biz School for Bloggers) in Chicago, May 1-3. If you don't know Liz Strauss, I highly recommend you take in her blog and if you are on twitter, follow her. She is a quiet, wise soul in this frenzied industry. SOBCon is one of Chris Brogan's all time favorite conferences. I'm thrilled to be on a social web panel with three fabulous power bloggers Chris Garrett, Lucretia Pruitt, and Jason Falls.

On May 16, I have the honor of moderating a social media tools panel at Chicks Who Click in Kansas City and sharing my geeky marketing chick life over lunch. The first #CWC09 in Boulder was a heck of a networking conference. I was surrounded by inspirational women and a few brave men from diverse backgrounds, ranging in all ages and various aspirations but all passionate about online!

As for the Kansas City Clicks Who Click, do not feel like you need to be a power blogger, a twitter diva or a digg junkie to attend...as long as you are wanting to learn more about the social web, you are going to love this conference!

Chicks Who Click #cwc09

Chicks Who Click, a social media conference hosted in Boulder, CO, was masterminded by the brillant and delightful events coordinator, Denise Smith (@deetells), and the equally amazing social media maven, Gwen Bell (@gwenbell).

Hats off to you, ladies! The weekend was packed with fun community-based learning, interactive panel discussions, relevant tech-women focused presentations and networking activities that nailed the A+ formula for a social media conference. The energy and enthusiasm that continues to be heard in the echo chamber from the attendees demonstrates the creative power of community you have sparked.

As I gathered my thoughts to write this post, I googled #cwc09 for reference and really the best narrative of the event to absorb is just watching it unfold on Twitter's search. The story begins with this @gwenbell tweet:

and continues to read as little vignettes of inspired information and sharing throughout the course of the weekend, with afterthoughts continuing. The entire Chicks Who Click weekend of events (and the network that has developed because of it) is another great example of the big share that occurs with community sourcing.

I have so many favorite moments from Chicks Who Click, it's hard to narrow down the highlights, but here's a few that stand out:
1) Getting to meet IRL and really connect with all the smart, fun and online saavy people I began following on Twitter because of the hashtag #cwc09.


2) The shock and awe feeling that enveloped the entire room when Carole Billingham,the Wisdom Coach speaker, asked us to turn off our phones and close our laptops for the next hour, yep...an entire hour!

We actually got through the session without issue and the "listen to your inner self" exercise re-charged us for the rest of the day as we hacked away on our keyboards :).

3) Meeting crafty, intelligent and fun-loving Jen Grant. Then watching her work her magic behind the camera and how she dove into learning livecasting tips on the fly with the vlogging master, Wayne Sutton . This is just one example of the "we're all connected, let's raise each other up" vibe that radiated through the entire event. (Hey Jen, it took all weekend but now I think "C" for craft vs "K" for Kraft when someone says "craft." Yep, you've converted me :).)
4) Being part of Barbara Jones' interactive session where we put our social media prowlness into action and to the test. These women know their social media strategies and tactics! There were some amazing ideas pressented! And to top it off, Barbara handed out the most creative "kick ass" medals I've ever seen for all participants, including judges (thank you, B!) and karate high kick trophies for the winners.



5) Being on the afternoon panel with two of the brightest women in social media - Barbara Jones (@barbarajones) and Kit Seeborg (@zsazsa) was such an honor for me. As we were discussing the pros and cons of listening to the long tail conversation, our wise moderator Doyle Albee (@doylealbee) piped in, "Realize that a blog with a readership of only 1: that 1 is Google" which very clearly and succinctly brought the importance of socmed conversation home.

I'll close this post out with a big heart-felt thank you to social media expert and dear friend, Lucretia Pruitt, (@geekmommy)!!! If it weren't for your nudge, hon, I wouldn't have been part of this geeky girl fest.

Photos courtesy Emily Lewin and Kit Seeborg.

SNCR's NewComm Forum

I'm starting this post out with a little background so the theme of it has some teeth to it. I've been in online marketing for 14 years (gulp, yep, ONE FOUR...no lie.)

I know that dates me, but I wanted to illustrate my years (along with blood, sweat, tears and bounced paychecks) invested in this industry, to let you know that I've had the time to attend several Internet, Web Marketing, and Tech conferences from Internet World to iMedia Summit to ad:tech to ITEC, etc.

And ya know, a conference, is a conference, is a conference with an exhibit hall and parties and some interesting keynotes. Lots of business cards exchanged, some information is relevant, some not - a good excuse to get out of the office and network. Overall for me, I haven't come across a must attend conference. They all kinda blend together.

At the beginning of this year, I spoke with an industry friend, Rick Murray, about my social-media-conference-with-a-slightly-different-lens search: more research based and a focus on conversation not marketing per se. He suggested I check out "snicker," explaining it's an acronym S N C R for a New Comm organization.

And that's how I ended up at last week's Society of New Communications Research's (SNCR) (again, pronounced Snicker) NewComm Forum. Given I'm in brand marketing, I thought this conference might be slanted toward PR or Corp Comm so I had my doubts going in, but Rick knows his stuff and I did asked for different. I definitely got different, but good different in the form of a social media conversational marketing recharge.

There were many tracks to choose from including separate ones for PR and Brand. I jumped around and was impressed with the depth of preparation, the timely case studies and the research findings shared at the sessions.

The keynotes were a mix of presentation, interview-style, and conversation. It was very "un-conferencey" and I know that's a term that's being thrown around quite a bit, but truly for a conference that is focused on research, it was very casual, adaptive and conversational.

The SNCR team lead by Jen McClure worked their booties off orchestrating the entire event flawlessly down to the minute details of introducing new attendees to speakers and tracking down extra drink tickets for the afterhours event.

And saving the best for last, SNCR was my first tweetup! I've heard so many twitterers talk about how amazing and surreal their first time meeting other twitters IRL is. And wow, words can't explain it...it's an overwhelming experience to connect with so many twitter buds at once in person.

I have a few more personal takes on SNCR that I'll save for another post. Bottom line, SNCR's NewComm is definitely my must attend conference.