Archive for September, 2008

After all of our preparation, the IzeaFest Conference this past weekend went extremely well. The event had some of the worlds top bloggers, marketing experts and internet moguls in attendance. Below is a brief summary of some of my favorite speakers and their accomplishments:

• Michael Brito is a strategic social media marketer with 10 years of online marketing experience. He currently works for Intel managing their consumer social media and has held previous marketing positions at Yahoo!, HP and Sony Electronics. He is a really cool guy as well. We had a few drinks and hung out different times during the weekend. He also mentioned that he liked GroupTable, my start up, and even posted a link to it on his facebook account. Thanks Michael!
• Brian Clark is a new media writer/producer, entrepreneur, and recovering attorney. A ten-year-veteran of Internet publishing, Clark has racked up millions of dollars in sales thanks to a mix of online educational content and direct response copywriting. He built three successful offline businesses using online marketing techniques before switching to a producer model that involves building, monetizing, and occasionally selling online media properties. His blog Copyblogger has over 37,000 subscribers and is one of the most popular in the world according to Technorati. I ultimately want to make moves like he does. He is also very down to earth and knowledgeable.
• Jeremy Shoemaker went from unemployment to eight figures in only four years, Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker is a blogger’s “American dream.” Starting with absolutely, no capital he educated himself and began building ecommerce sites to earn revenue. During this time he started blogging his experiences at Shoemoney.com and then used the blog to spring board new companies like Auctionads, which had one of the most impressive launches of any online advertising company ever. Jeremy continues to launch new startups and also chronicles his adventures on his blog. Oh yeah and he had a $134k adsense check in one month…that’s unbelievable
• Neil Patel is the CTO of ACS, a search engine marketing firm located in Orange County California. ACS is a full service firm that specializes in web strategy consulting, online marketing, search engine marketing, buzz/viral marketing, social media optimization, brand management, community building, design and development consulting. He is a very successful, young entrepreneur. Not to mention he is funny as hell. Def someone I could see myself hanging out with if we lived closer.
• Loren Feldman is the President of 1938 Media. Loren directs the overall operations of the company and is responsible for corporate development and strategic planning. Prior to founding 1938 Media, Loren founded and published NY Hotshot magazine and was a creative director at MusicVision, an interactive advertising agency, where he developed online advertising campaigns for companies such as Nokia and Scion. He has to be the funniest video blogger on the web. Check out this video he produced of him and Jeremy Shoemaker. He also produced a funny video called Where are All the Black Tech Bloggers, def controversial, but I thought it was funny as hell…I decided to screw with him a bit and introduced myself to him at the party Thursday night and said Hi Loren…I’m a black tech blogger. Good times…lol Ne way he’s doing his thing and def has my support.
• John Chow is the founder and CEO of TTZ Media Inc., an advertising network that provides shopping comparison banners to its affiliate sites. He is also the creator of John Chow dot Com, one of the most successful personal blogs on the Internet. John is best known for showing the power of blogging when he used his blog as an income case study. He took the blog from $350 per month to a over $30,000 per month in just over one year. Check out his videos at our office and on the scavenger hunt they are funny as hell.

There were a lot of other great people and speakers I met at IzeaFest as well. Here is a short list…Tamar Weinberg from Mashable, Steve Spalding from how to split an atom and groove shark, Sean Livingston (He was the MC for the event and did an awesome job!), Johnathan Dingman (Really cool kid, owner of fireside media), Merlin man who is a great speaker and entrepreneur, and Lena West a successful entrepreneur and marketing consultant. One more speaker I’ll note is Scott Allen. Though I knew Scott before, he actually did the design for GroupTable, he gave a good presentation during the blog make over session. There was a significant amount of other speakers there and all did well. Those mentioned above were those that I had a chance to meet and talk to or left a lasting impression on me. (Sorry if your excluded…I’m sure you rocked!)

Besides the conference, there was an izea party basically every night Thursday-Sat, we even had open bar on Thursday and Saturday. Below is a picture of my girlfriend Lindsay and I at the party Saturday night.

After the conference was over on Saturday we also had a scavenger hunt called IzeaHunt. I was a team leader and we had to do all kind of different things. You can see John Chow’s post & video about IzeaHunt here.

As I said the event was really a big success. Extra props to Ashley Edwards, Ted Murphy and all the speakers who really made the event an unforgettable experience.