Personal Demacracy Forum: a day late

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend the Personal Democracy Forum conference in NYC and while I should have been live blogging like most people in attendance I sided for going analog and blogging about it a day late.

Tom Friedman was there; nothing new here, turns out the world is flat and we have so much potential. Tom seriously needs to get over the idea of a carbon tax but he did say something interesting during his remarks, "whatever can be done will be done," it is just a matter of if you will do it or it will be done to you.

Eric Schmidt from Google spoke and got a few laughs over dealing with China and their "Great Firewall." He really is a pretty normal CEO for such a phenomenal company.

But the treat of the day for me was hearing Seth Godin speak and the man truly inspires. While he stuck with his "permission based" marketing he grabbed my attention when he suggested that "we can't just keep branding everything and yelling it at people." Seth went on to say that we should be putting out anticipated, personal and relevant messaging.

I think there is a lot of "branding" for branding sake in our current culture and I agree with Seth that to truly reach people we need a unique and almost invited approach. Instead of creating a new brand why not find those consumers that are actually looking for you and reach out to them in new ways. Maybe as professionals this would make us uncomfortable, after all it is something new. But when we look at results and notice that product evangelists are far more important than the casual consumer.

If we determine to approach our outreach in this way then defining exactly what the new anticipated, personal and relevant messaging looks like becomes our next fun task.

Next year: live blogging.