The Millennium Marketer

{Image Credit: Eric Doner}

Last Friday, I attended participated in the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association’s annual Board Retreat as a board member.

We are a group of committed marketing professionals now in planning phases to move forward with our mission: “Stay Connected, Stay Informed.” As the VP of Volunteers (fancy title for volunteer recruiting lead) I am responsible for replenishing the fuel to burn the midnight oil, or in other words, bring the team volunteers to help them drive their initiatives.

I left the day feeling really good about what we would accomplish within the next year and beyond.
***Update:Our team coach/retreat facilitator (who took the lovely picture) e-mailed me today to remind me that he didn’t just take a nice picture. Silly me–what was I thinking? So, to give credit to where credit is due, Eric did more than just take a picture. He facilitated us into the team exercises that got us to the point where we generated the ideas ourselves. That is the mark of a good facilitator, someone who gets other people thinking!” (Now back to my original musing…)***

Even though working virtually can give you great flexibility, I can’t stress enough the good feelings that come from actually meeting the people you work with. I doubt any of the jokes and discussions we shared in real time could be matched over phone conferences, e-mails and IMs.

Of course, the word “networking” is just as over-used as “social networking.” If it weren’t for SVAMA, I wouldn’t be able to refer to any real experiences…like when one board member good-naturedly confused two other members while introducing one of them during ice-breaker introductions.

We had a good laugh about it, and surely could not have had the same experience virtually.

Maybe this is also the reason for Lunch 2.0, Tweetups, Meetups and other non-virtual, non-owned and co-branded events rolling about vs. the traditional conferences and mindshare.

I spent some time today with my good ol’ friends, an old skool digicam Canon, a Slik tripod and Photoshop to make my picture avatar-ready. That is enough to make my Adobe Toastmasters friend (and current president), Naoki Hada, happy since I’m using the product that he works on.

This is all part of my moving and settling in to WordPress. I’ve also added a Flickr account, which I haven’t yet put up a widget for, but there’s a photo page tab now.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to see a few pictures from Web 2.0…once my blog roll is fully functional and my Flickr account is set up, then I’ll have a nice place to recognize & reward readers, as well as happily chase after new ideas.

Thanks all for following me on my blog journey.

I’m working with a family-style company recently and spent time with my family last weekend. These are the two main reason why I may have gone a little quiet the past couple of days.

I noticed a few interesting behaviors and reactions to web 2.0 platforms, software and collaboration. I have two stories to tell today about web 2.0 and SaaS applications. One of those stories is related to the growing trends in China.

Since Foreign Investment in China is a big issue…feel free to comment or ask questions about it.
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Well, I’m quite busy currently with some work initiatives, so this is going to be a short post. I’ve never really been into widgets so much because they are just too many spammy widgets inside of Facebook, but I went to a talk last week at the Web 2.0 Expo that got me thinking more about this as a social media marketing vehicle.

Netvibes is a pretty cool desktop and they’ve been able to make RSS feeds into widgets as well as make Facebook notifications and Twitter notifications part of the effort to aggregate content in one place.

So I guess I don’t have many thoughts on this other than to say that I think this is pretty cool. But what does this look like from a developer standpoint? What are the challenges in creating these little pieces of viral candy? I hope to look around more on this subject, but would love to hear thoughts from software developer people particularly who are offering widgets as a type of viral tool and what kind of involvement does it take for widget software developers to create simple & interactive code for widgets? How well does it work, and does it seem to spread well compared to other types of viral methods?

I rarely write about myself, who I am, or what I am doing in this world. As I visit blogs like Scott Monty, Seth Godin, Jeremiah Owyang, just to name the most recent ones, I realize it’s important to show aspects of myself to you, the reader.
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