Before the conference
Do your homework; go beyond scheduling your breakout sessions and making hotel reservations. Take a look at the agenda, if you are attending with another colleague; resist the urge to sign up for all the same things. Split up and get double benefit from the event.

Once you determine your schedule, dive into the details. Take a look at each session, review the objectives, and research the presenter. Write down two or three of your own objectives so that you get the most from the session.

And the last thing you should do before you get to the conference is take a look at the attendee list if available. Plan ahead of time who you would like to connect with and network. If possible send out emails ahead of time, just a simple note that might say, “Ellen I see you are attending the ACEP conference next month, I would love to connect with you”

At the conference
Stick with your plan! Attend the sessions, make your connections and see what else the event has to offer. Sometimes there is a book store, or poster presentations, and of course the exhibits. Don’t forget the sales exhibits, yes they are there to sell products, but they also come armed with valuable information. Take your time when going through the exhibit area.

When in each session, make an effort to write down just one thing that you will do upon returning to work. Take as many notes as you would like, but we all know what happens to those notes. Make a list of just one thing from each session and you have a much better chance of making changes that will matter.

Connect with the speakers, get their contact information. You may find that you want to share information from their session; if you do it is nice to have their contact information in the event you have any questions. Or you might want to be recommend a speaker to present for your organization.

After the conference
Take that list you made of the one thing you want to implement from each session and rank it by ease and benefit to apply. Then work on the list ONE at a time. Most people never accomplish anything new after returning from a conference, so if you do even 1 or 2 you will be ahead of the game.

Follow up with the connections you made. Hopefully you came back with a pocket full of business cards. Do this quickly, maybe even while you are on the plane. Write your emails before the commotion of your real job takes over. And if you act fast your contacts have a much better chance of remembering you. A note sent 2 months later will most definitely go unnoticed.

And finally, thank your boss in a written note or email. Your organization invested in you by sending you to the conference. Let your boss know that you appreciated the opportunity and sum up the benefits. Share those one or two ideas you are planning on implementing. Let your boss know the investment was worthwhile and you might just get an opportunity to attend another great conference.

Follow these simple tips when attending a conference and I believe you will find the benefits multiply!

Bio of Liz Jazwiec, RN

Liz Jazwiec, RN is a nationally renowned speaker, strategist and author. In 2010 her book, Eat THAT Cookie! How Workplace Positivity Pays Off..For Individuals, Teams and Organizations was chosen as a winner of the American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year award in the leadership and management category. She can be contacted at Liz@Lizjazz.com

Integrated Marketing and Communications Confernce at West Virginia University, June 3-4, 2011

With one of our employees and several friends and acquaintances currently going through the IMC program, I hear great things about it all the time.  Registration rates vary, but you can save a boatload by signing up before May 1st.  Simply click on the link above to learn more, view the workshops, and register.

The attendees – mainly from all over West Virginia (yay for the great support from the Panhandles!), but also from Ohio and Kentucky – were able to ask questions pertaining to their own social media efforts both planned and in effect.  A huge thank you to the State Journal for putting on the event and everyone that came out.

Seibert then headed off to Columbus, OH the next day to present How to Protect Your Online Reputation at the Digital Media in a Social World conference. If you’re updating your Where’s Waldo maps for Seibert at home, that would mark four separate universities in the last month:

• West Virginia University
• The Ohio State University
• West Liberty University
• University of Charleston

This social media business forum features two speakers from our last series: Jeff James of Mythology Marketing and Justin Seibert of Direct Online Marketing. Jeff and Justin will sit on two panel discussions with a couple other great homegrown speakers, Emily Bennington of Dixon Hughes and Bob Coffield of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso. Other speakers include Karen Saxe of netSpray, Julie Hewett of JulNet, and Kevin Nelson of Huddleston Bolen.

We’ll add another post when we receive registration information.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, keep a lookout for more information from the State Journal, either online or in print.  Hope you can join us!

Some pretty exciting news on the Next Generation Marketing front.  Well it’s not quite news yet – more like an embryonic news nugget.

Jeff, Skip, and I got on the phone this morning to plan out our next dates.  One thing that looks more or less definite is a stop in Beckley, WV in November.  We’ll post more here and on the main site when this gets locked down and we have more news.

* I just felt like opening with some Spanish today.  Weird – I didn’t even catch any Dora or Diego this morning.  If that’s misspelled or otherwise incorrect, please let me know.  I took Deutsch in high school and college.

He’ll be live blogging the conference today to give folks that couldn’t make it – or are waiting to register for Martinsburg – a taste of what we’re discussing.  You won’t get the slides, the free marketing book, a free review of your Web site, the opportunity to network with other Morgantown, WV area marketing professionals, to meet Jeff James or twitter with Skip Lineberg…but it should give you a glimpse of how you can be more effective in your own marketing efforts.

This is good news for everyone except Paul; he hates live blogging (with good reason – it’s hard!).  Maybe he’ll post a picture of himself with a frowny face here to complement the post.  It would complement his “oooh” picture from his live blog of the Southpointe, PA online marketing conference.

1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in how universities market and promote their sports programs since you started out at UConn?

The internet is biggest change. When I started at UConn in ‘93 the internet/email was in the very early stages (if we even had it all – I can’t remember ever using it at UConn in the beginning). Now, it is generally the first medium we think of when deciding how to best promote one of our games/events.

We still promote our events through traditional vehicles, but the internet is the one we think of first. It allows the most flexibility and the best opportunity to hit the most people during the course of a day.

2. How are you moving the WVU athletic department forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?

We are constantly looking at new ideas for our web site. Recently, we have started adding more video features to the site. We receive instant feedback with our web site via the traffic. We can see right away if something we did on there was well received. That is tougher with traditional television, radio or print advertising.

Most of measurement techniques are basic at this point. If it’s web based we look at the page views, unique users and or “click throughs” if it’s a pop up ad or something similar.

We are fortunate that we get most of our feedback about events by looking in the seats at a game. We can tell pretty quickly at a game if our promotion worked or not. I can expand more on this topic at the conference.

3. You mentioned in the last session that you’re moving ticket sales to an all electronic-based system in the near future and that you’ve experienced some resistance to that, particularly with older generations. If you could sit down with one such person, how would you explain why you’re moving these sales to online processing and why it’s a benefit to both them and you?

Great question. I still think it will take us a few years to become fully automated in this area. I think the benefits are the overall ease for the customer. No more waiting on the mail to arrive with the ticket application in there. No more writing out two different checks and sending them back. Click a couple of buttons, put your cc info in and you’re done. No filling out forms, doing the math on how much you owe. It’s all right there.

4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?

Facebook and MySpace I think are extremely interesting applications. It’s amazing to me how many students/people use one or the other. As I mentioned at the Charleston event, I think people have to be careful with this as well. While it can be a great marketing tool (both individually and for groups), people that post to and speak to our athletes about their image and how much one picture on their Facebook page could change the perception of them that is out there.

That said, they can be valuable promotional tools. We had interns post events on both sites this year in an effort to attract people to a soccer game, wrestling meet, etc…

5. You’ve now had the opportunity to speak at one city (Charleston) and listen to a couple of the sessions. Do you think this is the type of event marketers in West Virginia can use to their benefit?

I think these events are great. I think it is invaluable for marketing people to get out of “their world” and share ideas as often as possible. So often I think busy executives get hung up in their day to day duties and don’t have the time to think on a bigger scale. I know I do. It’s amazing how much more creative I feel after sitting in a room with a bunch of other marketing people and throwing around ideas. I think these conferences are outstanding and will only get better as they get more and more participants!

6. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Morgantown and Charleston?

Both have so much to offer. Charleston is great because of the multiple ad agencies, gov’t groups and just the fact it is the capital. Morgantown because of the obvious draw of the University. But, Morgantown gives you more than just the Univ. It has been one of the few areas in West Virginia that continues to grow and thrive. Construction continues at an unbelievable pace. More and more students are coming to the Univ each year only leads to more and more growth in the business community.

Morgantown and Charleston are both vitally important to the growth of our state. I think bringing bright, energetic, talented people together (as these conferences are doing) will benefit not only the individuals, but also the cities in this state and the state as a whole!

Two down and two to go. First up of the remaining Next Generation Marketing Conference series that have so far received some rave reviews from those who attended the Charleston, WV and Huntington, WV events last week, is the Morgantown event this Thursday. That’s the 22nd of May.

The Executive Workshop should roughly follow the same agenda as the first two events.

Besides the main speakers and organizers of the event, Skip, Justin and Jeff, we’ll have the return Brad Howe (who enjoyed speaking at the first two so much he wants to do it again) and another member of the Snowshoe team to add their marketing wisdom to proceedings.

So, with the guest speakers really enjoying themselves and the crowds thus far having a whale of a time, you’d be advised to sign up now if you want to attend the Morgantown Next Generation Marketing Event this coming Thursday.

As promised, here is a link to the emotional archetypes slides Jeff had in his Sticky Stories presentation yesterday: Emotional Archetypes.  The second slide was not included in the Huntington presentation, so you folks (thanks for all your suggestions, M.E.!) will want to check this out, too.

Jeff, in one of his common strokes of genius (dang your brilliance, Jeff James!) added in logos to show you examples of where well known brands fit in along the emotional archetype spectrum: Outlaw (Harley Davidson), Explorer (Land Rover), Regular Guy / Gal (Miller Lite), and so on.

So now we ask you – what archetype do other companies represent?

CAMC Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Pellegrin was our lunchtime marketing Rock Star. She spoke to the sold-out crowd at Next Generation Marketing in Charleston about a day in the life of a CMO and the high-level view of the fit for new marketing in the overall marketing mix. http://MarketingGenius.blogspot.com