jory the connecter

I had great fun last night talking with Jory and crew from BlogHer, the women’s blogging network. They had a get-together after the first main day of the Blog Business Summit.

I got to meet Jory, Elisa, and Kristin, who is new to the team. I also got to meet various of the bloggers.

After drinks and hour d’oeuvres, we had dinner with a whole slew of folks there for the summit. I got to talk a fair amount with a bunch of interesting people. Mark (he is on the left in the picture) had great stories to tell of his 12 businesses he has built.

I didn’t get to here that much about what Anna does as Director of Marketing at GiveMeaning, but we need to get together so I can hear more. And, this tells you how on the ball she is, I got an email from her at 1:59am this morning. So after the last of us left the restaurant around 11:30, she must have went to her hotel and started contacting everyone she had met. As I said, I need to hear more.

I got to talk with Jim who runs an early stage venture capital fund.

I met others as well, and a few people had run out of business cards by the end of that day. I expect I will hear from many of them next week.

Here are the take-homes from this event:

a) Talking with people in other businesses about what they have been through and hearing advice on your own business is really really fun.

b) You don’t have to have a lot of years in business to tell a good story.

c) If you have not checked out BlogHer, then you are missing the boat. So go read about it. Right now.

d) Everyone should be blogging. Really. You don’t know how much it is hurting you that you are not blogging right now. Get started at Blogger.

e) It is fun to work for a company where people are impressed with the clients. I had not heard of our client AmericanStationery.com before I got this job, but everyone else has. And it means something to them.

f) Most of the BlogHer women are married. Tough.

g) I need to be at the BlogHer Business ‘07 in NYC, and probably so do you.

And to get back to the title, thank you to Jory for inviting all those who hang at BlogHer.org. A great night, more good contacts, and probably more than a few good new clients. Thanks!

why we settle for poor marketing

Fear and lack of imagination. Read Seth for yourself.

Where else does his logic apply?

learning without teachers

I stole this blog title from Brough. We are talking about a guy who put internet computers in a playground in India to see what would happen. Short answer: kids with little to no education can teach themselves how to use computers, without any help from the experts.

Guy Kawasaki (whose books you should be reading) mentioned this in his blog, where I got it from. So what’s it mean?

We really don’t understand how learning works. At all. Another blog author mentioned that it would be better called “unschooling”- the idea that teachers (the professionals, anyways) tend to get in the way more than they help the learning process.

So what this means for client services is… well, I am not sure. Let me think about it. But the idea and the fact that it started happening 7 years ago is so cool I had to tell you right away.

Okay, how about this for the takehome: try not to get in your client’s way. Now, if I could just figure out how to do that with my clients…