We don’t normally do trip recaps here on the blog because we would end up writing something almost every day. Okay, we really don’t travel every day, but it sure seems like it sometime. This trip was worthy of a shout-out.
I was invited by Doug Groppenbacher, the President-Elect of the Scottsdale Area Association of REALTORS® (SAAR), to take part in the Technology Symposium that SAAR had last Friday. I had a 25 minute or so intro for the day, and then I moderated a panel on blogging with (pictured below (thanks Dru)) Steve Belt, Dru Bloomfield, and Jay Thompson. (Yes, THAT Jay Thompson. ) All in all, the day went perfectly. The audience had lots of good questions, and they went well with the prepared questions I had. SAAR will have videos up of the panel and I’ll share them here if I can. There are more pictures of the panel in Dru’s photoset, including my awesome He-Man slide. I then had a nice lunch with Dru, Irene Hammond, and John Wake, where we discussed generational as well as gender differences in social technology usage.
The next morning, I took a bunch of Phoenix/Scottsdale bloggers out to breakfast to answer any NAR questions for them and so I could ask some questions of them. I never pass up an opportunity to learn more about the industry from the practitioners hitting the ground every day. Besides the three people on the panel I’ve already mentioned, we were joined by Artur Ciesielski and Joanna Zajusz, Christoph Schweiger, Jonathan Dalton, Patrick Mahony, Craig Frooninckx, Max Chirkov, and Heather Barr. It was a great discussion where I learned a lot and hopefully imparted some knowledge as well. I even got my geek on by talking Perl and Ruby with Craig! (By the way, next time I go to Scottsdale, I’m going stay at the Valley Ho, where we had breakfast.. The retro aspect of that place really got to me.)
The whole trip was filled with a great group of people really passionate about their industry and in using internet technology to reach out to and work with consumers.
Keith, We are very grateful that you took the time to come to Scottsdale. Excellent info. Great networking. Symposium participants are asking for more. Thank you.
It was great seeing you Keith, and your presence and sharing at the symposium was valuable.
The Valley Ho is indeed quite retro and cool. You can almost sense the presence of Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin and the boys hanging poolside.
I’m curious what was involved with the bloggers symposium? I run two businesses (one of them is in my signature) and the other is a Online Marketing company. I’m interested if there is a video of the blogger-related talk as I’m always curious how different businesses leverage and market their blogs.
Canspaza,
It was posted online a few weeks later and I blogged about it at http://blog.realtors.org/crt/2008/05/13/saar-technology-symposium-blogging-panel-video-posted/