Yesterday was day two of the Geekend conference in Savannah. Having been to five small presentations and heard two keynote speeches, I can tell you it has absolutely been worth the money. Just two marketing tips I got from one of the event’s sponsors – not even an official presenter – may turn out to be worth what my company paid to send me.
I won’t bore you by recapping all the techie details, but I’ll share a few interesting things I heard yesterday.
I got to hear a presentation by a representative of Change.org, a site where people can band together online to take social action. He told a story of an author who got censored by his publisher, Scholastic, after he submitted a story about a fourth-grader who has two mommies. They refused to publish the book, saying that’s not the image they want to project of their company. People got on Change.org and created such a protest that not only did Scholastic apologize and publish the book, but they also promised never to censor an author again.
The same presenter told us about trying to make an overseas long-distance relationship with his girlfriend work using Skype and a site called “YouPorn.” To avoid this blog being blocked by a lot of online content filters, I’m not going to link to YouPorn, but you can look it up if it sounds interesting to you.
I learned that while unloading a truck for a charity event, Paula Deen got hit with a ham in the face. “It was a ham-tastrophe,” she Facebooked.
Cell carriers are looking for creative ways to hide their towers. AT&T paid a church $12,000 a year to install a cell tower in its steeple. They also paid the church’s electric bill.
I attended a panel comparing Drupal, WordPress, and a commercial CMS called ExpressionEngine. Dammit, I forgot to brag to people that WordPress.com and Matt Mullenweg sponsored my BBQ team. That’s some serious geek cred right there, and I failed to capitalize on it.
Our keynote speaker was the Chief Digital Architect for NBC Universal. He told us the story of how their current Fan It site came into being. I had no idea TV had become so interactive. Fans of The Office can become “employees” of Dunder Mifflin and complete tasks for the company. Fans of The Biggest Loser can take the same challenges as the contestants, and keep an online food journal and weight loss blog. Fans can earn points which can be cashed in for real-life goodies like T-shirts. Very cool. NBC recognized in 2006 that the Web was evolving, and they better evolve with it.
I decided to skip last night’s official after party, and tour Downtown Savannah on my own. I had dinner at an Irish pub, where the guy sitting next to me at the bar called me “ma’am” by mistake because of my long hair, then bought me a beer to apologize. Long hair pays off sometimes. Then I walked south to a dive bar called Pinkie Master’s, where I had several cans of PBR and ended up chatting with a cute nurse. I meant to walk back north to check out a dance club I found on Google Maps, but I was having such a good time at Pinkie’s that I decided to stay there. Pinkie’s is about the size of my living room and kitchen combined. Apparently a lot of politicians go there. They have an autographed photo of Jimmy Carter. If you go there, bring cash, because they don’t take credit cards.
About to head back for day three. Tonight’s keynote speaker is the founder of TwitPic, the site that lets you post photos to Twitter. He’ll discuss how it started as a weekend project that he never expected to amount to much. When he exceeded his wildest expectations, he quickly had to learn how to run and scale a rapidly growing company. After the keynote, there’s an after-party at SEED Eco Lounge, an environmentally friendly nightclub. (I’d link to them but I’m getting a “Warning: this site may harm your computer” message from Google.) The club seats about 27 and there are 600 Geekenders, so they’re blocking off Montgomery Street for a huge block party.
Heading out… as always, you can follow @paulryburn on Twitter to keep up with my activities today.