I have been to many trade shows over the years, from the glitzy (CES) to the dorky (WinHEC) to the niche (Webmaster World). I have managed booth-duty, staffed press briefings, and tracked down press and analysts on-the-fly. And at each of these shows, I typically avoided the lame-ass schwag bags handed out to attendees.

But then, I attended my fourth BlogHer, which I now refer to the Shangri-La of Schwag. Quite honestly, no other show compares when it comes to sponsors handing out goodies, offering samples and trials, and tugging at heartstrings. Here are my highlights from last week’s BlogHer 08 in San Francisco:

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Voce Nation wanted to say thank you to the crew of cardsharks that joined us last week for the second annual Interop Poker Tournament. Voce, NetIQ, and Barracuda Networks hosted the event as a chance for media and analysts to escape the grind of vendor briefings and reporting, unwind with peers and have a healthy dose of competition.

Poker pro Mark Seif was on hand to provide pointers on how to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Check out Shamus McGillicuddy’s post on the event for a first person account of the tourney.

Larry Howard of Infonetics Research took home top honors and bragging rights for 2008. Will he be able to defend his title in 2009? You’ll have to join us next year to find out.

More pics from the event are on the voce nation photostream.

Staples recently dipped their foot into the social media waters in an effort to brand themselves as a personal data security and identity theft resource. They put out word of blogger events in New York City and San Francisco, featuring personal security and safety expert Bill Stanton, who is a contributor to NBC “Today” and Dateline.

The event was a sit-down between bloggers and Bill, who riffed on his experiences “stealing” identities to expose just how easy that is to do. (Bill is a great speaker, if you’re doing a high-profile event on security, find him and hire him).

Coburn Communications handled the event for Staples.

“As a way to generate word-of-mouth buzz among highly influential mom, young professional, and small business bloggers, as well as local online media, Staples enlisted Coburn to execute a blog-specific event in two markets – San Francisco and New York,” said Coburn’s Kate Tuller.

Basic PR approach: get the influencers in the same room with the products, deliver a controlled message, make them feel important and welcome, make it easy for them to talk about that message.

WHAT THEY DID RIGHT:
In addition to the star power, the Coburn people rolled out the red carpet. Great location, free food, drinks and a gift bag full of the products they’d talked about, such as a lock-down cable and anti-virus software. They introduced the concepts, wined and dined us, then provided product so that the bloggers could use them, and therefore increase the likelihood of an educated post to promote said products. Bill gave a short presentation, then fielded questions about security and knocked it out of the park with his encyclopedic knowledge of how people will try to rip you off.

WHAT THEY DID WRONG:
The purpose of this event was to bring out bloggers and get some online exposure. Yet my first email with questions about the event was sent Feb. 26, and I did not receive a response until March 10, two weeks later. That’s like fifteen years in internet time. Everyone is busy, but if you throw an event for bloggers, then can’t answer questions for two weeks, you’re missing the point. I had to prompt them three times for a response in that time period. And when I did get an response, they said they couldn’t answer most of the questions I asked.

Here are the list of questions provided to Coburn.

1. Where did you get the idea for this event?
2. What cities and why? Why not more cities?
3. Describe the need for an in-person event, as opposed to some kind of online event. We really only saw the shredder work, which could have been done with online video, instead of the expense of the face-to-face event. Tell me about that choice. Tuller’s Answer: Bloggers, as you know, love networking…it was a chance to provide them this opportunity as well as educate and provide useful information and products on identity theft, data loss, and internet threats. Face-to-face events are also better for relationship building.
   
4. How are you defining and tracking success? At what point will Staples say “this was money well spent?” This is the most important question for my blog — how does the customer (Staples) define when they got their money’s worth?
5. What does an event like yours, put on by a big company like Staples, say about corporate America’s valuation of “mom-and-pop” bloggers? There was no Scoble, no Technorati at the event, is that what you were hoping for?
6. Who’s idea was it to bring in Bill? Was this event a Coburn brainstorm, or a Staples idea and they brought you in to manage?

Tuller said she was not at liberty to answer most of these questions. Now to people in social media, these seem pretty harmless. This is basic information. Am I wrong here? Not at liberty to say who came up with the idea? What? Not at liberty to say why you’re targeting mom-and-pop bloggers? Huh? I’m not asking for secret Pentagon documents here folks, I just want to know more about the event … so I can blog about it … which was the point of the event in the first place, no?

When you shine the spotlight of measurement and profitability at social media promotions, most of the time people retreat into the shadows. The culture of openness and transparency is embedded throughout social media, yet we still find companies using the tools without embracing the spirit.

Is this Coburn’s fault? Probably not. They are a vendor. Is it Staples fault? Probably. Staples is old-school big business. The concept of answering simple questions and not just regurgitating what they tell people to say must be very frightening and confusing to them.

I would have read more about the corporate culture on a Staples blog, but oddly enough … I couldn’t find one. So Staples apparently doesn’t have to understand social media in order to use it to sell stuff.

DOES IT SELL STUFF?
Staples won’t say. That’s a shame. The event did seem to produce some hits in the blogosphere, as evidenced by the IceRocket.com blog search below. I searched for “Bill Stanton” and “Staples” and came up with six hits. Not exactly a viral explosion, but not bad at all. Coburn got the blog hits, and that’s the first step because you never know when a message will resonate and be picked up in other places.

So I’ve never really considered the whole ‘press release vs. social media release’ debate an either/or situation. The way I see it, there’s arguably utility and merit in both formats, as there are gaps and drawbacks. Frankly, I’m not convinced either approach is really the best way to think about news distribution on the web, and well, maybe for that reason alone, I think there’s still room for experimentation.

With this in mind, the Voce team did an experiment of our own recently, something we’ve been calling the “press release page.”

Conceptually, it’s pretty simple: We “announced” a partnership two weeks ago. There was a press release which we distributed over the wire, as well as an accompanying web page (i.e., the press release page) we created to augment and contextualize this news. I’ll explain both things here…

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It’s getting harder and harder to find examples where social media does, actually, sell stuff. One area where it is NOT hard to find examples is in publishing. Now I’m a bit biased here, as I landed a book deal with Crown Publishing specifically because I sold a few thousands books on my own using nothing but social media (so this is a simultaneous full & open disclosure, combined with a shameless self-promoting plug — the best of both sides of social media in one fell swoop).

But outside of the unique success stories of social media rags-to-riches stories like David Wellington and David Wong, let’s take a look at how a big-time publisher used it to sell books.

Now right off the bat, our example blurs the lines, because the example is RULE THE WEB by Mark Frauenfelder, published by St. Martin’s Press. If you haven’t heard of this guy, he’s a co-founder and regular blogger for BoingBoing.net. If you haven’t heard of BoingBoing.net, put down your abacus and stable the horse, it’s time for you to get caught up. BoingBoing.net is arguably the most-read blog on the planet (and since we only know of blogs on this planet, that makes it the most-read blog in the universe … nice work, Mark!).

So clearly, Fraunefelder (pictured at right) is a digital native with a big following of other digital natives. Even so, St. Martin’s didn’t rely on that alone to sell the book.

“We built a dedicated Web site for it,” said David Moldawer, editor of RULE THE WEB. “We used a blog to offer the same advice as the book, as well as a live podcast with interviews and a traditional, short, regular podcast with Web tips.”

They built the blog with TypePad, and hosted the podcast with BlogTalkRadio. They tried leverage Fraunfelder’s name along with the book’s website to multiple channels.

“We did extensive blogger outreach, both to people in our personal networks as well as to bloggers in the lifehack/Web tip arena,” Moldawer said.

RULE THE WEB peaked at #2 on Amazon’s “Computers & Internet” list, and hit #51 overall.

When it comes to these results, it’s impossible to tell if social media links happened because of the book’s content, or because of Frauenfelder’s status as internet royalty.

“It hit those peaks when the book was mentioned on sites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders,” Moldawer said.

And, of course, Fraunfelder posted about the book on BoingBoing.net, but the big sales peaks came when other heavyweight sites talked about the book.

“While Mark’s own posting about the book on Boing Boing certainly also boosted sales on Amazon, the mentions on the other Top 100 lifehack sites definitely had a sharper effect,” Moldawer said. “The lesson, which many of us already know, is that having other people talk about you is always more effective than talking about yourself.”

And don’t forget the obligatory video book promo on YouTube. The one listed here generated some 13,000+ views.

JUDGEMENT: DOES IT SELL BOOKS?
Hard to say. Frauenfelder would have sold a boat-load of books with or without the extra efforts by St. Martin’s Press. The spike charting on Amazon that coincided with online media mentions in Lifehacker and 43Folders, however, does point to a strong correlation.

Those mentions, though, are more PR than social media initiatives - if you count Lifehacker as an established media outlet, which I do. Getting a post in Lifehacker is not a “social media initiative,” - it’s the same things as a New York Times book review, an established media source talking about a product.

Voce has been selected by AlwaysOn as the official press organizer for the upcoming OnMedia event, scheduled to occur on January 28-30, 2008 in New York City. Please visit the conference website for more info on this year’s event. We’ll be updating this blog with select pieces of conference coverage, live from the event. Much more to come, stay tuned!

Podcasts are the wave of the future! They will kill radio dead. They will kill TV dead (okay, that’s a “vidcast,” but roll with me here). They are the cornerstone of user-generated media that will unleash an avalanche of talent upon the world! Die, evil global big media, DIE!

Oh wait, sorry — that mantra is from 2005. And, let’s be honest, that prediction ranks right up there with the 49ers winning the Super Bowl this year. Gobal big media seems to be doing okay. At least that’s what Rupert Murdoch told me last week right before we bumped fists and he said “word is bond.”

So podcasts haven’t taken over the world, not just yet — but do they sell stuff? For niche companies selling niche products to niche demographics, the answer seems to be “yes.” One case in point is Skeptic Magazine, which has turned a sponsorship with the podcast Skepticality into a circulation-increasing endeavor.

Skeptic Magazine is a publication of the non-profit Skeptic Society, an organization that promotes critical thinking and espouses the values of science as opposed to myths, magic and charlatans of all makes and models. Skepticality is a podcast that, no surprise here, covers the same content. Hosted by Derek Colanduno and Robynn “Swoopy” McCarthy, Skepticality was heavily featured very early on iTunes when the iTunes podcasting page came online. The show quickly generated a large following, with an estimated 18,000 listeners tuning in to each episode.

Daniel Loxton is the editor of Junior Skeptic, Skeptic Magazine’s sub-title that promotes critical thinking among younger readers. Daniel was a guest on Skepticality in January, 2006.

“I stumbled across the show through iTunes in about November of 2005,” Loxton said. “I liked it right away: it was fun, personal, smart, and noble. So, I wrote the hosts just to let them know I appreciated what they were doing. They then invited me on as a guest. That gave us a social contact we wound up building upon later on.”

Social contacts through social media? Who’d have thunk it? The concept of podcasts as information distribution started to circulate around the Skeptic Magazine staff, and Daniel suggested a sponsorship of Skepticality.

“I knew that launching an original new podcast would stretch our resources, and that we had many other important projects we wished to pursue,” Loxton said. “Our goal is outreach and education, so getting into the podcast market successfully could carry a risk that for-profit companies might not recognize: we could take audience away from the other skeptical podcasts.”

So instead of creating a competing podcast, Skeptic Magazine sponsored Skepticality.

“It was amazing to me to get the validation from Skeptic,” Colanduno said. “To me, Dr. (Michael) Shermer and Skeptic Magazine were in my mind the standard for how it should be done. Very little bashing on people, and well put factual information with little to no spin of any sort.”

BUT DOES IT SELL STUFF?
So everyone is making nice-nice here, but what’s the bottom line?

“The honest answer is that we don’t exactly know,” Loxton said. “We think it does sell stuff, but we’re too small an organization to invest heavily in market research.

“We receive tons of positive feedback from listeners, many of whom tell us they subscribed to Skeptic after listening to the show. This suggests, anecdotally, that it is reaching people. More substantially, the duration of our alliance correlates with a period of healthy growth across the board: for the show, for our online sales of books and lectures, and for Skeptic magazine subscriptions. The problem is that we’ve made other improvements to our editorial content, our web presence, and our wider media presence, so it’s difficult to tease apart the variables.”

Hard metrics aren’t available, but the marriage of independent podcast and established magazine is a perfect fit for Loxton’s marketing checklist.

“Skepticality gives us the capabilities we wanted in the first place,” Loxton said. “It gives us the chance to distribute audio educational content for free, worldwide, and to better address topical concerns; the chance to introduce our work to the original audience of Skepticality, and an additional platform for promoting our other efforts and our other allies across the skeptical world.”

Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport … remind me again why I’m here?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Oregon, and Medford is a nice place, but it’s not one of the top 10 cities (or, let’s be honest, 20 or 30) that come to mind when you think of where you’ll end up on a tech media tour.

Portland? Maybe. Seattle? Sure, especially if you’re a software or e-commerce vendor and want to catch the eye of the local 800lb gorillas. But Medford? You’d be better off calling the remotely located journalist, analyst or influencer instead of traveling in and out of municipal airports without any direct flights to your next stop, right?

You can — but you’d be doing your public relations program a huge disservice.

Yes it may happen one day, but it’s going to be a long while before technology replaces the importance of face-to-face meetings. I’ve had clients in the video/videoconferencing space over the years and I admit I’ve sold my share of, “with XXX service, you don’t need to kill yourself on a red-eye flight to New York or Tokyo.” After 9/11, I also remember believing that these technologies would finally flourish as people thought twice about traveling when they could pull off get-togethers using the latest virtual meeting platform. That may in fact have been the case for some, but I know people who never stopped traveling for the simple reason that they wanted to sit across from their audience, look them in the eyes, read their body language and react accordingly.

Making the effort to see someone in person also sends a strong message. People like Michael Arrington may yell at you for sleeping on their front porch, but they hopefully still recognize the effort and will let you make a pitch. This is even more the case the more remote the location.

People you visit in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Washington, D.C. know you’re probably meeting with other folks during the same trip. But who else are you going to be meeting near the Medford airport? The other journalist living on the banks of the Rogue River? There could be dozens of tech influencers in the Rogue Valley for all I know, but it takes a little extra work to get there — and that means something when you sit down and tell your client’s story. If nothing else, you’ll know what engages the audience and what doesn’t. You’ll get to shake a hand and pound the table to make a point. You simply can’t replace that.

So that’s what I’m doing in Oregon, and I don’t mind it one bit. I don’t mind a successful meeting with good people in a beautiful place. And if you think I’m wrong, hey, that’s great. It means the security line at the Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport will be one Valley geek shorter, and you’ll wonder why your PowerPoint-delivered story via Polycom fell on deaf ears.

I got suckered recently (a subject for another post) into a cheesemo teleseminar on media trends. In it, one of the brilliant speakers proclaimed with confidence that the world’s media still operate within a 24-hour news cycle. Heh? What world is that? It ain’t mine jack….in mine, the news cycle takes 90 seconds:+1 second to hit publish

+2 seconds for a blog to refresh

+3 seconds for feed readers to update

+4 seconds to email, link, tag, rank, or rate a blog post

+5 seconds for readers to form an opinion and/or leave a comment

+1 minute for Technorati to register a server ping, crawl and index a blog post

+8 seconds for alerts, watchlists and saved searches to propagate

+4 seconds for a blog post to plateau, amplify or disappear

+2 seconds for this cycle to repeat from the beginning

+1 second to realize the world’s changing… 

In the Fall of 2006, long before the historical CNN-YouTube Democratic Candidate debate, before Barely Political’s Obama Girl took center stage, and before Hillary Clinton’s user-generated campaign song contest - sources including the New York Times and the L.A. Times already predicted the upcoming 2008 election to be the “YouTube Election.”

Having been a political fanatic since age seven, I was enthralled by the Democratic candidates’ CNN-YouTube Debates (I’ve already watched it twice on TV and hundreds if not thousands of YouTube videos). Who could blame me? I laughed, I cried, I almost threw something at the screen on numerous occasions. The debates had all the makings of classic good television created by ordinary people just like you and me. CNN’s “Your voice to be heard in historic debates” and “It’s all about you” plugs rang true since, in my opinion, the user generated videos outshone the candidates by a long shot. I laughed at the funny voice computer generated snowman with a serious question and the Red State Update. I cried at the tough questions on health care and the father who lost his son in Iraq.

My fascination with CNN-YouTube’s revolutionary platform goes beyond the “good TV” aspects provided by the user generated videos, though. What makes a difference is actually the power this format to bring potential voters into the center of political discourse, a majority of which have previously been left of the democratic process. New technology has clearly created an opportunity for individual voices to be both seen and heard from around the country. Although the debates represented a marriage of traditional media (i.e., Anderson Cooper) and “new media,” it’s clear that political candidates are increasingly realizing the importance and persuasive power of engaging with the public via new methods of communication, social media, and social networking.

The online world has changed drastically since the last presidential election. Back in 2004, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and wikis were either just getting started or didn’t exist at all. Now virtually every candidate has a presence on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. John Edwards, for example, is a member of 23 social networks, Barack Obama has gone mobile, and 15 of the 19 campaign websites have blogs. I can’t wait to see the role these new forms of media will continue to play in how we elect our leaders in E-lection 2008. Stay tuned…

/ Ann Marie Warmenhoven