Portland Web Innovators – Demolicious!: An Event Review

Portland Web Innovators – Demolicious!

When: Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00 pm, although I started the pre-event an hour before at It’s a Beautiful Pizza, and ended the it with post-event drinks at The Side Door for another two hours.

Where: CubeSpace.

What It’s About: Demolicious is a chance for 5 local developers to showcase their latest projects (top secret or otherwise) over the course of 10 minutes.

Amber Case captured the event in a writeup so thorough, I may as well stop my review now and let you read hers.

Here’s what she has to say about it:

[Demolicious] basically means that a bunch of innovative people in the room, watching, sharing, and presenting prodigious pre-beta/beta/live web projects. Good stuff. Gone is the era of stale doughnuts and flatlined agendas. This stuff is groundbreaking, interactive and sweetopian.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: If you have more than two email addresses, join more than two social networks or web services, and rely on your RSS reader for delivering news, Demolicious is for you. The services that were demoed were interesting, but the presenters did spent time to talk about the underbellies.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: If MetroSeeq’s Wheel of Meals doesn’t simplify your lunch decision making process, I don’t know what else will.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
So much technologies, so little time.

Legion of Talk – Gary Vaynerchuk on New Media, Personal Branding and Promotion: An Event Review

Legion of Talk – Gary Vaynerchuk on New Media, Personal Branding and Promotion

When: Tuesday, July 1, 2008, 7:00 – 8:00 pm, with the actual finish time at 8:30, and further conversation with the speaker continuing at the front porch until at least 10:30.

Where: Wieden+Kennedy

What It’s About: Gary Vaynerchuk was the first among many speakers on Legion of Talk: a new series that plans to bring influential thought leaders to Portland to share their wisdom—for free. Legion of Talk is Eponymously put up by Legion of Tech, the kind folks behind such events as:

• BarCamp Portland
• Ignite Portland
• Startupalooza, and
• Legion of Tech Happy Hour (a.k.a. BarCamp Meetup)

Anyway, Gary Vaynerchuck (henceforth shall be known as “Garyvee”) spoke about the importance (and ability) of doing what one loves best in the social media era. The street is rough hewn but so wide open that everybody can carve a niche for themselves to succeed in it.

It goes without saying that one also has to act fast.

The talk was around an hour and a half, wherein Dawn Foster of FastWonder Blog has an excellent writeup that you should read up.

I decided to boil it down to a few principles, complete with snarky remarks.

Here we go:

1. Find a subject. Make sure you love it.
   Specificity and generality doesn’t matter as much as passion.

   Caveat: as a rule of thumb, specific subjects work better than general ones.

   For example: making a video podcast about the second season of Alf is better than making one about TV shows from the 50’s to 90’s. Again, this should be taken with a grain of salt.

2. Commit time to build it.
   This goes without saying, but the only way to be great is to be patient. Garyvee spoke about the fact that the facet of work that is both unglamorous and unknown to most people is all the emails he answered and posts he make in the thirteen hour when he’s not recording winelibrary.tv—that he did everyday.

   The idea is this: find a subject that you are so passionate about that your work feels like nonwork.

3. Be sincere in your intent and execution.

   In a world of overabundance, where “the ‘long tail’ becomes the tip of the iceberg,” authenticity wins. Always. This is not to say that you should stop thinking strategically, but that you should be brutally transparent about everything that you do. In Garyvee’s own word:

   I wet my bed until I was 10 years old. Better to say it now rather than have other people say it for you.

   At the Q&A session, he further demonstrated this principle when he squarely dismissed a long winded question about how one could strategically use the social media to promote oneself under hierarchical corporate constraint (the operative word being “strategically.”)

   In his own words:

   Just give me what’s real.

   Translation: be brutally transparent, or die.

   I believe that this is a principle that many advertising and marketing folks should, but failed to embrace. Forget the need to “strategically manage,” “damage control” or “monetize” the medium. Stop asking “how can we push our brand to more people” or “how can we buy social media.”

   Instead: start with the right intent and a great product, be nice, and get ready to get real. The result will surprise you.

   [Shameless self promotion: If your brand, company or studio is ready to do this, let’s talk.]

4. Stop consuming and start producing.
   Did you know that 99% of web users only lurk and consume content? Garyvee attested that he read few books, watch no TVs, read little blogs, but makes over 500 winelibrary.tv episodes, answers every email personally, and comments on numerous forums. And he did these every day. In other words, he minimizes his consumption and maximizes production.
5. Love your community.
   Garyvee’s said many times during the talk that he was gifted (or, in a way, cursed) with the ability to care for other people more than he cares for himself.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: The principle Garyvee talked about applies to every field of knowledge, from design to development, advertising to art.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Attendees got out of the door while proclaiming “[insert appropriate expletive here.] Nothing should stop me from doing what I love for a living” inside their heads.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
In the end, passion + authenticity wins.

Portland Lunch 2.0 v4 @ Wieden+Kennedy: An Event Review

Portland Lunch 2.0 v4 at Wieden+Kennedy

Where: Come on, now.

When: Monday, June 30, 2008, 12:00 – 2:00 pm

What it’s about: This time, it’s different. Instead of freestanding, you have comfy amphitheater seating. Instead of spontaneous connections, you have “dates”: someone from the agency that you paired up with and burned a DVD full of your inspirations for.

As a result, communication moved at a more relaxed pace. The last Lunch 2.0 at Vidoop, if you recall, was a race. I got into a new conversation with a new person every 3–5 minutes, and didn’t even end up eating half a sandwich (thankfully, I didn’t miss the bacon wrapped date.)

My passion is to meet as many likeminded folks who play in the intersection between creativity and technology as possible, tell their stories, and connect them with people who can inspire. So, while doing it fast-paced was great, being able to talk to your new friends (who you may not meet at Beer and Blog or Portland Web Innovators later that week) without being rushed or overwhelmed by ambient conversation is also important.

(And, frankly, the swags was quite good. @missburrows had a bag containing, among other things, 50+ pink stickers with dog breed acronyms on them.)

Technicality: ☝
Translation: Frankly, the only technical skill you need is DVD burning. The “package” that everyone picked up two weeks before the event contained your “date”’s bio, along with a blank DVD that you ought to fill with anything that you think the said date will enjoy.

Interestingness: &9757; &9757; &9757; &9757; ½
Translation: Half star is deducted, because the game Rockband should’ve been projected on the overhead screen and ampitheatre’s sound system, so the whole agency may inadvertently bask in pure 80’s power rock bliss.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Pace change helps forge new connections.