“That was a great post. I can tell you spent lots of time on it.” – recent comment
Well, not as much time as you think and I have Yubby to thank for that.

Back at BlogWorld in Las Vegas, I met Vincent from Yubby [and Amsterdam!] as he and Daniel Honigman were exchanging contact information by bumping their iPhones. After I took this picture, I asked Vincent to do a video about how Yubby works. We used Vincent’s camera microphone. He then uploaded the video to my Macbook and it took me awhile to upload it to YouTube. Here it is . . . .

Although it took me a little longer than I’d like to upload the video, I started using Yubby and set up a KA review channel almost right away. And, everyone who checked out BlogWorld Expo’s site, saw Yubby in action. One person told me that the Yubby videos on the BlogWorld speaker page were the reason they came to BlogWorld.

How do you use Yubby?
1. Sign up
2. Create a channel
3. Search videos
4. Drag icons into your channel
5. Choose a style
6. Grad the embed code
7. Publish

Total time to publish a channel: as little as one minute. Here’s the BlogWorld Expo Yubby channel.

Tip: search for your name or keywords and see what comes back from 30 different video sources. Then, create, publish and promote your video marketing channels.

How do you use video in your marketing?

Disclosure: BlogWorld Expo provided complimentary registration to members of the media.

The opening keynote sets the conference theme. Kudos to BlogWorld New Media Expo for selecting Laura Fitton, aka @pistachio, to open the conference. Lucky for you – and for me, I took notes.

But first, my @pistachio connection. In spring 2008, Laura was live-tweeting a conference in Boston. I was following her. She mentioned the speaker’s name, which sounded familiar. I Googled the speaker and found that she was someone I knew from high school so I told Laura who started a conversation with the speaker. Thanks to Laura, I reconnected with someone I’d lost touch with. I’ve met Laura at several conferences. She’s a down to earth, brilliant type that truly exudes her gift and passion for communication and connection.

When I saw Laura on Saturday, I thanked her for her keynote speech. She apologized for making me get up early. Laura’s worth waking up for any day. You can follow Laura Fitton on twitter @pistachio and see what’s new with Pistachio Consulting.

Highlights from Laura Fitton’s 2009 BlogWorld Expo Opening Keynote

Laura encouraged us to embrace our inner [and outer!] awesomeness::her whole talk was about awesomeness and you and how awesomeness cannot be separated from you.

If you are putting your light under a bushel basket, something’s happening that only you can do.

Laura procrastinated when she did things out of fear so she promised herself that she will make no decisions out of fear.

If you don’t seize it, if you don’t let people help you, then something that’s important will be lost.

Awesome is not a private street. The more goofy she is, the more people like her.

Challenge and Inspire –
Awesome Foundation

What is Awesome?
Awesomeness is often overlooked by mainstream culture, which tends to rehash the same broadly appealing but mediocre creations. Thankfully, there is the web. Awesomeness is more the product of a creator’s passion than the prospect of audience or profit. Awesome creations are novel and non-obvious, evoking surprise and delight. Invariably, something about them perfectly reflects the essence of the medium, moment, or method of creation. Awesomeness challenges and inspires – Awesome Foundation

Twelve people together each donate $100 to silly, random projects. One Awesome Foundation winner invented a hand-held cotton candy gun that will coat a rotating human being in 1-2 minutes.

Everybody’s got to find their comfort level – go out to where your edges are.

What’s your superpower?

Laura’s superpower is: being really lucky. Be Lucky – it’s an easy skill to learn. Read The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman and learn how to maximize change opportunities, listen to lucky hunches, expect good fortune and turn bad luck to good.

Twitter is a lot about little tiny interactions. Twitter taught Laura to scan the horizon and realize the possibilities.

Want to change the world? Start simple. Believe in someone. Show them. Tell them.
Learn to not be afraid of who you actually are.

Be uniquely you. Talk about your passions.

Influence [was] attracting attention to yourself
Influence [is] providing attention and value to others

Additional Resources Mentioned in Laura’s Keynote
Umair Haque’s Awesomeness Manifesto

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation. – Umair Haque

Four pillars of Awesomeness by Umair Haque
Ethical production
Insanely great stuff
Love
Think Value

The think big manifesto by Michael Port

Laura’s Rules
I think the absolute central challenge in life is to learn to not be afraid of who you actually are.
1. be kind and fair to everyone.
2. don’t worry whether or not anyone likes you.
3. help people.
4. ask.
5. act. (get excited and share it)
6. love yourself.
7. love others. (try radical forgiveness)
8. gratitude for everything.
9. hope is your only hope. (and fear is your only worry)
10. be present.
BONUS: adversity is an opportunity: ask yourself, when something goes wrong, “what bullet did i just dodge?”

How Twitter Can Make You a Better and Happier Person by Tony, CEO of Zappos.com

Disclosure: Thanks to BlogWorld Expo for granting me a media pass to share this coverage with you.
Image: Laura Fitton at BlogWorld Expo 2009 by thesociallens.com

How about you? What’s your super power? How are your sharing your awesomeness with the world?

At BlogWorld Expo, Steve Rubel talked about how to use technology to stream your business and your life from email to a site based on a platform called Posterous, pronounced päs-t(?-)r?s. Hope your find these note from Steve’s session to be helpful and informative.

Image: Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer introduces Steve Rubel.

What, exactly is lifestreaming? Here’s one definition . . .

Definition of Lifestreaming
The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelertner at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe “…a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream. Source: Wikipedia

Does lifestreaming replace blogging? [via Lifestreamblog.com]

Selective Ignorance – Attention drives commerce

We are in an era of selective ignorance. People are becoming media agnostic. They think: If the news is important, it will find me. People will go deep when they want to go deep.

On average, an individual in the US visits 111 domains every month and 2500 pages.

We’re becoming addicted to short-form content; this is the reason twitter took off so fast. Everything now is moving faster.

Steve referenced this post from Stowe Boyd written in March 2008:
Stowe Boyd: Beyond Blogs: the Conversation Has Moved into the Flow
People need to hear from three to five different sources three to five ways before they buy from you; repetition is critical.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer study shows that digital elites trust employees over executives.

Micropersuasion Paused for Posterous Postings

Steve started micropersuasion in 2004 and wrote every day for three and a half years. By 2009, he had 60,000 subscribers and decided to stop blogging on this site and move over to postuerous.com. Traveling without a notebook, Steve uses his iPhone to update and write posts from the steverubel.com posterous hub that pushes out to spokes on twitter and other places. Why?

“People are not coming to me anymore. I’m moving to where the conversation is.”

When Steve moved to posterous, micropersuaion contained 6000-7000 pages with a PR 7 [Google ranked the page 7 out of 10]. My question – although I didn’t ask it during the session – was how has the move affected Steve’s traffic. For the answers, I turned to compete.com.

Everything you do on posterous is portable, you can have your own domain and everything is backed up in email. Lifestreaming allows you to aggregate all of your content in one place. Steve mentioned Evernote as a tool to check out.

“You gotta be everywhere. It’s really hard, but you have no choice.”

Lifestreaming’s Three Solutions to Being Everywhere

Solution 1: Ubiquity and Embassies

In today’s era of selective ignorance, we have to be ubiquitous. We have to be everywhere. Lifeblogging is the next step. This is not a new concept. Senator Bob Graham took notes about everything that happened in his life for 40 years. Embassies collect and distribute information.

Solution 2: Multiplicity and Diversity
To sustain attention, we have to have different stories in different venues on the same day in different formats.
Examples:
Starbucks has lots of stories to tell on different platforms: My Starbucks Idea, twitter, YouTube
Center for Disease Control

Solution 3: Discoverability and Visibility

PR and marketing rain on people every day, so much so that they have to buy an umbrella. This is the primary way people will make decisions. Lifestreams do extremely well on Google with more searches inside more social networks.

Celebrities and Lifestreaming

Celebrities were built in an era of scarcity. In 1979, Andy Warhol predicted the future.

It’s the place where my prediction from the sixties finally came true: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, “In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.” Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Exposures (1979) “Studio 54″ source: Quotations Page

Now, we’re in an era where fame is abundant.
“In the future, everybody will be anonymous for 15 minutes.”

Celebrities who are successful will be more engaged one on one, like Tony Robbins.

There’s a Place for Digital Content Curators

In the future, people will be looking for digital content curators. Being a curator is a huge opportunity. People need someone to separate art from junk for them. Every niche will be served by a digital curator’s area of media reforestation. Valuable content that stands out always wins.

Disclosure: Thanks to BlogWorld Expo for granting me a media pass.

Other coverage of Steve Rubel’s Lifestreaming Session at 2009 BlogWorld Expo
Citizen Marketer 2.1 by Aaron Strout

Check out my 2009 BlogWorld Expo twitter coverage.

How do you think lifestreaming would work for you and your business?

Note: This post contains dramatic videos – plan to stay for awhile.

My trip to KÀ began with a brief email exchange . . .

ME: Thanks so much for making this offer. Last year I found out about it a few hours too late. I’ve never seen a show in Vegas, but I love theater, magic, dance and drama. Thanks for letting me know what is open.
JESSICA BERLIN [Cirque Du Soleil]: Thanks for your email. Hmm….if you like theater and drama I think we should put you in to see KA. There is a 7 and 9:30 p.m. show. Which do you prefer? Also, will you be bringing a guest? Let me know and I will arrange the tickets for you.

And, that’s how I got my first theatrical review assignment. [No photography is allowed; image copied from KÀ site.]

Disclosure: Cirque du Soleil provided two free tickets in exchange for a review to BlogWorld New Media Expo attendees like me.

This is my first review of any type. Why did I accept the tickets?

1. Although this was my fourth trip to Las Vegas, I’d never taken the time to see a show.
2. I love theater and have always wanted to write a review.
3. This is the kind of freebie I can’t pass up!
4. I wanted to pass on this promotion strategy to my readers: who can you invite to your event that can cover it for you?

Wondering how Cirque Du Soleil manages social media? [via Lee Odden and Online Marketing Blog]

Thanks to Marcia Hansen from Allstate for taking me up on my offer of a free ticket. We met up at the theater at MGM, got in line and walked into a huge auditorium theater. My first thought? What a HUGE venue! [One source I saw tagged the production's cost at $150 million.]

KÀ Production Facts

~ Every seat in the KÀ theatre has speakers built into the headrest for customized sound effects.
~ The video projections in KÀ are an intricate mix of computer-generated effects and human input that turn the performance space into a cinema screen.
~ Approximately 1,300 hours went into the making of each of the human-sized crab puppets.
~ There are 160 harnesses (of 21 different kinds) worn by the KÀ performers.
~ The Spearmen’s shoes are created to look like they are barefoot, with molded rubber toes affixed to a shoe base.
~ For the beach scene, the sand is created using 350 cubic feet of granular cork from Portugal.

Greeters, dressed like KÀ characters, showed us our seats. One had a bright red wig.
I said: I like your hair.
She said: Thanks! I just put it on tonight!

Settling into our seats, we watched the fireballs bursting from the stage.

Having no idea what to expect – after all, this was my first Cirque du Soliel experience, I interviewed Marcia and a new friend we made, Sharon Miller from Qube Global Software, about what to expect. I asked if I could video their review after the show. They said yes – here it is:

My review?

This is a show that blows your mind. To get ready, I watched KÀ’s trailer, but that didn’t prepare me for the live experience.

For me, the show was imaginative beyond belief.

My favorite elements:
• Costumes – there’s something about costumes that draws me to theater. I love seeing how characters play out in the clothing, shoes, hair and makeup.
• Batons – yes, batons. After going to Purdue and watching the All American Marching Band’s post band-camp show, I thought I’d seen every style of baton twirling, but this was different: elegant, smooth, enchanting [maybe the music had something to do with it.]
• Shadow play – enchanting and childlike, two characters and four hands together put on a play within a play
• Acrobatics – known for seemingly impossible moves, this show boasts aerial, wheel and well, multiple, demonstrations of amazing feats that had me holding my breath until the act was over
• Music – bold, dramatic and showy, the music underscored the story line
• Hydraulic Wall – think about a plane that moves from level to angled with people on it and add in a chase scene with spikes – got it?
• Pit – from fire to smoke coming up to people going down, the pit holds a place as a character all its own
• Staging – columns ring the stage as centers for drumming and more aerobatics, archers poised on railings before they rushed the stage, which gave me a close look at the costumes – the slippers had rubber toes
• Pictures – before the show Aurora took pictures of Marcia and me – very nice, but at $44 not a must-buy

This show is not for people who: scare easily, don’t like loud noises, need a story line with dialogue, like literal drama or musicals and fear indoor fire and fireworks. A friend told me she likes to watch Cirque du Soleil clips; a few minutes is enough for her.

Hint: Take the Get Cirqued Quiz to see which Cirque Du Soleil show you’re in the mood for.

Would I go back? Absolutely and next time I’d take my family with me. KÀ is the pinnacle of a theater experience. I can’t wait to tell our high school theater department about it.

Have you seen KÀ? What did you think? How can you compare your business performance to Cirque Du Soleil?

image: shutterstock.com

In about a week, I leave for my third BlogWorld and New Media Expo Conference in Las Vegas. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with friends like Artist Tara Reed from Oregon, Carlos Hernandez from San Francisco [if you'll be there, please leave a comment or tell me "I'm going to BlogWorld!" on twitter] and a complete cadre of folks I haven’t seen since the last one. Not to mention all of the Chicago folks I hang out with regularly. In getting ready to go, I’m sharing a revised article I wrote about conference PR with an updated focus on personal branding.

Want to get the most out of your conference or seminar experience?
Almost all of these conference PR tips work for seminar planners as well as attendees. In this article you’ll learn how to hack out the hype, evaluate speakers, calculate your return on investment and market yourself before, during and after the conference. Whether you’re an event planner, a speaker or an attendee, you’ll learn how to make your conference experience more valuable.

Hack out the Conference Hype
Have someone you trust read the sales page and registration site. Ask them what they think they would get out of the experience. Google the speakers and check their track record. Remember, a one-time success story is like getting recipe for one dish that can be made one time by one person. Check out presenters on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and twitter so you can make a personal connection when you meet them. For authors, read their reviews on Amazon. Reading a book may be more useful than traveling for 3 days.

Examine the speakers’ products onsite or online before you buy them at the seminar.
It’s okay to plan to buy the speaker’s products, but be prepared for a sales pitch. Most of the presenters will offer a money-back guarantee that lets you return the materials if they’re not what you’re looking for. It’s better to find one person you can relate to than to buy two different products from completely different perspectives that promise the same results. Trying to run on two tracks is confusing and distracting.

Calculate the return on your time and money investment.
In addition to your registration, travel, hotel, meals and any products you plan to buy, budget time and money both for a promotional presentation piece for your company and follow up contacts via email and direct mail. Will you lose revenue if you’re away? What do you expect to take away that makes you more money – partnerships, products, knowledge? Does the return equal your time and money investment? If so, how long will it take for you to see a return?

Set Intentions Before You Enter Your Registration Information
If you can’t come up with at least five good reasons to attend, don’t go. Plan your presentation pitch and your follow up offer. Dress the part. If you’re attending a relaxed weekend at a retreat center, you’ll pack a completely different wardrobe than the only you need in Vegas at that snazzy trade show. Overdress a notch or two and you’ll be taken more seriously.

Pace your networking, learning and relaxing.
Choose the top 3 actions you need to take from each session and implement them as soon as you get back – preferably, to your hotel room. Get approval from the organizer and the speakers before sharing any content information. Some seminars do not allow video or audio taping. Many request that information be used for your personal purposes only. Why should someone else attend the seminar if you’re already told them all there is to know about it? Stay up late to network one night and go to bed early the next.

Begin following up before you check out.
Send in your testimonial to conference organizers immediately. Write and send postcards to the ten most important people you met. Call them when you get back to see what they thought of the seminar. Out of all the hundreds of people I’ve met at these events, only one person called me. Will I remember them? Of course. On these calls, don’t sell anything at all. Use the time to get to know the other person better and see what they picked up as being important and relevant.

Follow up Tips
Carry a pen to write on business cards [ okay to use your iPhone instead]. When you make a connection you’d like to keep, ask if your new friend is on Facebook, Linked and twitter. Then, make a note on the card. You can go back to your hotel room and add them to your networks that night or early the next day. Don’t worry about acting too fast. As your networks update, people will notice.

Take Pictures and Videos with People You Want to Be Associated With
Pack the best conference digital camera with digital audio/video [affiliate link] loaded with a mega storage card and fresh batteries and follow these tips on how to look good in pictures.

Know How to [Really] Use Your Phone
Last year, two days before I left for BlogWorld, I got a new phone. But, I didn’t know how to use it. Make sure you know how to update twitter, check email, upload pictures, live broadcast and do anything else that you want to do. Although I didn’t install a twitter app, the GPS function saved me when I got lost in the desert.

Form a Posse
You don’t have to take one with you, but you can round one up while you’re there. Talk on twitter before and during the conference. Invite people to dinner on LinkedIn. Post a message on Facebook. You have people. They’re looking for you. Gather them.

Written for Wired PR Works by Barbara Rozgonyi, founder of CoryWest Media
To request permission to reproduce or republish this article, contact connect AT corywestmedia DOT com.

How do you maximize your personal branding at conferences and events?