london, nostalgy and the fuel conference

On June 13th, 2008 Henriette Weber wrote:

I am in London! - one of my favorite towns in the world !- and each time I am over here, I swear I will move back ( which I would - but not with a 4 year old daughter)... It's very nostalgic for me to be in London ( especially since Thomas and I are on a mini-honeymoon). This was where we fell in love, and we have so many memories attached to this place...

I have been to my first carsonified conference today called "Fuel Conference" and I was really happily surprised. Most of the speakers came with really good in put and some of them didn't and even though that Carsonified did a great job of putting together the show ( with EXCELLENT speakers - by far the best programme I have seen in ages) some of them fell though...

It really gets to me, that people, still, at web conferences, in 2008, decided to get on stage and deliver salespitches. Worst yet, there was a guy at the fuel conference who wasn't a microsoft employee, but who delivered a microsoft salespitch that left me with a foul taste in my mouth. Poor guy. Poor Microsoft. I would claim that the incredibly horrible-non creative .net salespitch he did on stage was turned into badwill - for microsoft - but especially for the guy who made himself look .. well extrem-ely bad in front of 150 "-if-not-trendspotters-then-frontmovers".

Apart from that.. Fuel was great, it gave me more input than any other conference has done for the past year ( and I have been to quite a few).. So congratulations to the Carsonified team - you have won me over... Next time, if it's really important to have the sponsors salespitch at all ( I am hoping that by soon it won't be)... have them do it themselves... It was so NOT interesting to hear about microsoft pushing these products to the crowd with a chap who really did a bad job presenting them...

If I should say one thing to all the sponsors of web conferences in the world: DON'T ASK FOR SPEAKING TIME IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT... if you just are going to pitch products, 10 minutes will give you badwill instead of goodwill..10 mins will ruin you reputation that you have build up in the coffee breaks just talking to people.
My advice: be present... on the online tools and be present by talking to people at the conference...
We're tired of everything else, and we're tired of being marketed to in the old school way...

[presence, london, nostalgy, honeymoon-thomas, love, carsonified, fuel, fuelconference, speaker, salespitches, input, trendspotters, online-tools, frontmovers, microsoft, social media marketing, social marketing, marketing, social branding] [6 comments]