The great thing about Content Marketing World was having been there for the first and second years’ events only to have an even better experience the third time around. Hats off to Joe Pulizzi, Pam Kozelka, Robert Rose, Joe Kalinowski, Cathy McPhillips, Michelle Linn and the entire CMI team on a fantastic conference. I’ve seen and heard nothing but glowing reviews about it.
There were so many moving parts to the success of the event from great keynotes by Jay Baer, Jonathan Lister of LinkedIn, Jonathan Mildenhall of Coca-Cola and the big one, William Shatner, who surprised everyone by having relevant marketing stories to tell. The networking was great (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and House of Blues) and it was a pleasure to connect with friends, clients and make many new acquaintances.
With attendees from all over the world and both pre-conference and post-conference workshops, there was a lot of content marketing education happening for a lot of eager marketers. It’s very satisfying to be involved with an industry that is moving so quickly and reaching so many.
TopRank Online Marketing was well represented at the event including my business partner and President of TopRank, Susan Misukanis, Account Manager Alexis Hall and Account Coordinator/Social Media Katie Bresnahan.
Audience for my “Future of Content on the Search & Social Web” presentation.
Our objectives for Content Marketing World included: creating greater awareness and thought leadership for TopRank, meeting new potential clients, meeting existing clients, meeting potential employees, gaining social and media coverage, creating content, a tiny bit of competitive intelligence, researching new tools and vendors and of course, gaining new insights and education.
If companies only viewed events in this way, they would go so much more value from their investment. All I can say is that we did pretty well on all of them. If I could have brought more of our team, I would have.
Cision Blog: Content Marketing World 2013 A Dat Driven Analysis – The top Twitter handles mentioned during the conference included: @JayBaer, @Mildenhall, @CMIContent, @CocaCola, @WilliamShatner, @JListerCA, @LeeOdden, @JoePulizzi, @LinkedInMktg, @LinkedIn – Wow!
Here’s a video of me talking about the phases of content marketing maturity during my “Future of Content” presentation. It was taken by Matt Gentile, Global Director of Social Media at Century 21 Real Estate.
Uberflip Blog: Rolling Content: #CMWorld Hall of Fame Speakers – A very clever app for rich media content that made “Rolling Stone” style magazine covers out of some of the speakers.
Trinity P3 Blog: Content Marketing World 2013: Insights from Lee Odden (Liveblog of my presentation by Craig Hodges, founder and CEO of King Content.
Of course we promoted the Content Marketing World event with a few posts on everything from how to get more out of a conference as a speaker or attendee to a preview of my presentation.
But the big pre-event announcement of course was the launch of the 36 Content Marketers Who Rock eBook featuring some of the top content marketing experts and speakers. The eBook included tips on how to “rock your content marketing” performance from some real content smarties that ranged from Jonathan Mildenhall of Coca-Cola to Pam Didner from Intel to the Godfather of Content Marketing himself, Joe Pulizzi.
There have been over 42,000 views of the ebook on Slideshare and many of the people I ran into at the conference had seen it. A number of speakers asked why they weren’t included and at least two speakers mentioned it during their presentations. We also created a Pinterest board, List.ly and Paper.li to support the eBook. Will we do another one next year? We’ll see!
Overall, it was a very well run, organized and promoted event. There were plenty of networking opportunities and it was awesome to see quite a few of our clients in attendance and even speaking. Thank you to our friends at Kapost for hosting a very nice dinner on the last night of the conference which included our clients LinkedIn (Jason & Deanna) and Concur (Amy).
And speaking of “speaking”, the speakers I saw at Content Marketing World were all invested in creating a lot of value for attendees, which was refreshing. I look forward to being involved with the event again next year.
If you attended Content Marketing World in Cleveland this year, what were some of your favorite experiences?
Lee we enjoy your enthusiasm and commitment to our industry. Looking forward to having you back on #BBSradio soon.
Thank you for the mention, Lee! Love that (almost) everyone in your audience photo is smiling. Can’t wait to dive into the links you shared and the eBook!
Thank you very much Lee for the amazing post. Its insightful as always. Looking forward to have some more interesting posts from your end.
Hey Lee- thanks for the mention. Really enjoyed your session as usual.
Great point by King Content that the future of content is visual. We totally agree!
Thanks for the kind words and great review Lee — still can’t believe that in my 3 years at CMI you and I haven’t had a real in-person conversation (hope to remedy that before CMW 2014 or hopefully before). Thanks for your continued support of CMI, and congrats on all your success!