Boarding Party

Announcements Rock

You know what’s awesome? The opportunity to work with great people. I love that I spend my days with guys like Justin Levy and Colin Browning figuring out how to educate and equip business communicators with the latest and best stuff we’re learning. Further more, I’m so thrilled that I get to work with the pirates on events, as well as with David Meerman Scott and Paul Gillin. So what’s more awesome than that?

Taking on More

We’re thrilled to report that New Marketing Labs has acquired the Inbound Marketing Summit event from our friends at Hubspot. Going forward, we will rename our events to be the Inbound Marketing Summit. The name New Marketing Summit will be sunk, and a burial at sea will be had. (Apologies to those who commissioned tattoos after last year’s event, because you felt it was so awesome. I have a carnation design that hides it well!)

What’s In It for You?

So, who goes to these types of events, anyway? Marketing and PR and advertising types are the typical attendee, though we seem to get more and more C-level and president types, too. People come to learn how to get more business using the online tools like social media, email marketing, video, social networks, and things like that. We get both agency types as well as people from companies like Kodak, Dow Jones, Wiley Publishers, and all kinds of companies you know, who also need to know about the tools and strategies, just like you.

If you’re going to come, it’s a pretty damned good show. Ask someone like Richard Reeve or Susan Kang Nam or I’m not sure… some more folks, if you want to ask around.

Our mission, should you want to know it, in 2009 is: strategy into action. That means we’re going to bring you into the event with your questions, your marketing challenges, your interests, and give you the entire spectrum of information. Instead of just talking about how cool blogs and things are, we’ll go right deep to the “actionable steps” level. We’ve got great speakers, great authors, great practitioners, and we want to share everything they know with you.

Hold off on registering for a few days. I’ve got a special announcement there, too. Seriously. Don’t do it for like… another day or two.

Speakers for the April 27th-29th Inbound Marketing Summit (so far)

The first Inbound Marketing Summit event last year in Boston featured speakers like David Meerman Scott, me, my PodCamp co-founder, Christopher S. Penn, and mister Seth Godin, to name just a few. It was a kickass event. (That’s a technical term). Want to see who’s confirmed so far for San Francisco in April?

Here’s who’s up (so far) in April 2009:

• Tim O’Reilly
• Loic LeMeur (Seesmic and LeWeb)
• Tim Street (French Maid TV)
• Tim Marklein (Weber Shandwick)
• Jessica Berlin (Cirque Du Soleil)
• Microsoft (name to be announced)
• Harley Davidson (name to be announced)
• Bryan Elliott (SoCal Action Network)
• Patrick Chanezon (Google)
• Jason Falls
• Brian Solis
• David Meerman Scott
• Paul Gillin
• Me
• and plenty more.

And that’s just so far…

I’ve begged some other great people to come and speak as well. We’re closing in on that soon-ish.

Cool Sponsors

There’s no party without the sponsors, so I’m always excited that we get to work with friends who also happen to run businesses we care about and support. You should know something about this: I am very picky about who collaborates with us on the event. All of these sponsors offer some product or service that I personally feel is useful to this space. They’ll be coming to our events and you can ask them every hard question you want. Kick the tires. Bug them. Challenge them to serve your needs. That’s why they head out to the events.

Sponsors for our San Francisco event in April (so far) are:

• HubSpot
• Blue Sky Factory
• BrickFish
• Cision
• Powered
• PR Newswire
• Sitecore
• HiveLive
• R2integrated
• Radian6
• Socialcast
• SocialText
• Visible Technologies
• And you? (Ping Colin Browning)

(If I missed you, please just tell me, and I’ll fix it.)

Just One More Thing

In case that’s not enough of an event for you (because hey, we’ve merged two together), let’s add this bit of news: Jen McClure from The Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is hosting her 5th Annual New Comm Forum as part of a larger offering with us. I went to this show last year up in the Sonoma Valley, and it was a blast! Jen’s audience really matches with what we’re doing, and so we think we’ve got a nice mix with bringing everyone together in the same place.

Speakers at Jen’s event so far include Shashi Bellamkonda, me, Adrian Chan, Vanessa DiMauro, Laura Fitton, Susan Getgood, Paul Gillin, Shel Holtz, Shel Israel, Alan Kelly, JD Lasica, Geoff Livingston, Jen McClure, Gaurav Mishra, Katie Paine, Brian Solis, Todd Van Hoosear, Dr. Mihaela Vorvoreanu, and many others.

Okay, Another One More Thing

Do you think that open source software relates to this space? I do. How can companies innovate fast enough to be competitive? Where will tomorrow’s great services come from?

Bill Washburn has an extensive experience with open source software, and with the OPenID Foundation. We’re pleased to present a new event, OpenBox, that will take place on Tuesday the 28th of April at the same venue, alongside our other events. I’ll talk about that more later, but I wanted to give you the heads up that we’ve got something for your CEOs and CTOs to do while the CMOs hang out with us at the Inbound Marketing Summit.

So there.

We’re growing. We acquired the Inbound Marketing Summit because we want to get all you bright people in the same room at the same time. We are likely going to find other events that match our interests and build relationships with them, as well. We’ll have another announcement about that exact thing coming up very shortly.

Any questions? Thoughts? Am I going to see you in San Francisco, or will you be coming to Dallas or Boston, or our soon-to-be-named next event?

Photo credit, Hubspot