My first trip to San Francisco centered around Social Media Strategies Conference hosted by Daya Baran & his wife of WebGuild.org. I would highly recommend signing up for the Web Guild newsletter. It provides a high level overview of the trends in the tech & social media world. (Can I admit that I don’t regularly read Techcrunch or drink coffee? There is only so much time in the day).

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I was on a panel with Michael Brito of Intel & LaSandra Brill of Cisco. Our topic was building community at the enterprise level. In preparation I created a blog post listing the social media team’s accomplishments at Network Solutions. I had mentioned a video series that Network Solutions had made that is in the style of Lee Lefevre’s Commoncraft videos. The company that is making them is Creative Alliance

I also did an impromptu presentation on the business case for Twitter.

Presentation slides – Keynote by Dave Carter, CTO Awareness; Jim McGee (more coming on  his presentation which was really interesting in regard to people’s learning styles & adoption of technology)

Social Media in an Economic Downturn points of view by Dave Carter, CTO Awareness & Shel Israel

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We had a nice dinner & a few laughs at Mangarosa an Italian-Brazilian restaurant in North Beach. Shel & I got to know each other on Twitter & it was great to finally meet him in person! Dave Carter is next to him. Stuart Henshall is on my left. He has created a new Twitter app called Phweet.com

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Shel & Paula Hunt, VP of Marketing at H&R Block. Her interview at the conference resonated with me. She is engaging with her customers & building community! You can hear an interview that Francois Gossieaux did with her for a series at Marketing 2.0.

More photos from my travels are coming :)