FOOA Recap

Lots of people have been emailing to ask how the Future of Online Advertising (FOOA) conference has gone here in New York over the last couple of days – so I thought an update was in order.

Overall I’ve found it to be a very worthwhile experience – both as a speaker and attendee.

While this is the first time the team at Carsons have run this event they managed to get 500 or so people to come along and pulled together a worthwhile event. I’m sure if one was to ask the team if they could improve that they’d list of a few things that they’d like to work on for next time – but despite a few minor glitches I thought it was well worth attending, that they put together an event that has been very successful and that will be a good springboard into future versions of the event.

A Personal Downside
My main regret from the last few days has been suffering from the flu. This dampened my first couple of days in NYC (I spent most of them in bed) and left me feeling pretty exhausted for the actual conference.

Networking
The highlight of the event for me has been the networking opportunities and the chance to meet many ProBlogger readers. There are too many names to mention in a post like this but I would like to thank everyone for their encouragement, welcome and hospitality over the last couple of days. I’m looking forward to catching up with many of you again tonight at the ProBlogger meetup.

My Presentation
I arrived in New York with a couple of days to recover from the trip and to put the finishing touches on my presentation – only to get sick. So to be honest I did get to my session today feeling a little daunted. Ryan (the organizer) asked me to focus half of my talk upon Advertisers and half on Publishers/Bloggers. Considering the sessions were 30 minutes long (and I needed to leave 5 minutes for questions) it was a challenge to work out what to focus upon.

What I decided to focus upon was two questions that I get asked a lot by ProBlogger readers:

1. From Bloggers – ‘How do I find Advertisers to directly sponsor my blog?’
2. From Advertisers – ‘How do I engage Bloggers?’

I get both of these questions regularly – to the point that sometimes I feel a little like a ‘dating consultant’ or ‘matchmaker’. The result is that the title of my presentation ended up being:

‘Bloggers and Advertisers: Dating Tips from the ProBlogger’

I gave a couple of lists of tips – one for bloggers and one for Advertisers on how to ‘court’ or ‘pickup’ the other. I’ll post the presentation later so you can see my points.

I guess you’d need to ask those in attendance what they thought of it (I’m sure there will be some blog posts about it floating around – one I’ve found already is here) however I felt it went over reasonably well. I wasn’t really able to go too deep into the topic in within the time constraints – but hope that something I shared was helpful. My only regret was that my presentation was the second last one (on a warm Friday afternoon) and many had understandably gone home already – that’s the luck of the draw though.

What others are saying about FOOA
There are quite a few people who were blogging and photographing the event that you might like to read if you want to see what others thought and what other presentations there were.

• CenterNetworks – numerous posts on the different presentations here, here and here
• AJ Vaynerhuk – heaps of posts (too many to identify one by one but here’s AJ’s FOOA category)
• Pause – summary of Day 1
• The Digital Perm
• Manage to Change
• Paid Content and again
• Successful Blog
• Serge the Concierge
• Just Make Money Online
• Rajiv Doshi
• Marker Blog
• Fleeing The Social Scene and again and again and
• Jeff Louella and again
• Friolous Motion (and again)
• Behind the Buzz (loads of posts – check the FOOA tag)
• Lots of Flickr sets here, here, here, here, here and here