Did you make it to IZEAFest? If not you missed a great event. We rocked the house with awesome discussions by Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney), John Chow, Merlin Mann, Neil Patel, Loren Feldman, Stephanie Agresta, Brian Clark, Tony Hung, Steve Spalding, Tamar Weinberg, Dingman and Sean Bonner to name a few. It was basically a who’s who of the blogosphere. I was so happy to see our Posties chatting it up with the leaders in our space, the networking opportunities alone should have made it worth the trip. I think Shoemoney said it best in his tweet:
If you weren’t able to attend the event we also streamed it live via UStream. The chat from the stream was presented on big screens placed on the stage, allowing remote viewers like our friend Andy Beard to participate despite being thousands of miles away.
We have received close to 20,000 views of the session videos so far. The content is excellent and our speakers really did and incredible job. In addition to the educational sessions we also revealed some important updates to SocialSpark (see previous post titled “IZEAFest SocialSpark Release”), as well as a new social app called CloudShout. All attendees were given an alpha key to take it for a spin.
The videos are available on UStream in an archival. You can check out Saturday’s keynote video and slideshow from Merlin Mann below.
While all this is plenty of reason to have been at IZEAFest, the icing on the cake–literally–was IZEAHunt. That’s right…a multi-team scavenger hunt through the streets of downtown Orlando, featuring human sundaes… see what you missed?
I was happy to be on a team with Alex Schek of FayerWayer.com, Cass and Heather from Beautiful BC.
Congrats to the Mommy Blogger team of Alli, Colleen, Deb and Marisa who each took home $100 home dept gift cards for winning IZEAHunt. They beat out other bloggers including John Chow to claim the championship title. However, John might have got the last laugh when he visited our office and raided our t-shirt supply.
There are a ton of posts out there about the event. Here are a few you should check out:
My IZEAFest “Hangover”
IZEAFest Rocked
IZEAFest Party
IZEAFest First Day Sessions
IZEAFest :: The IZEAHunt
Scavenger Hunt – IZEA Style
You can see all the photos taken at the event by checking out Flickr. We would also love it if you uploaded and tagged your pics on our facebook page. If you have a crazy photo with me in particular please upload it to my facebook page. There are so many posts out there that I can’t possible include them all, help me out by using the trackbacks below.
All and all I am very happy with the event, but I am very interested in your feedback. What can we do better? What did you like? Who was your favorite speaker? Would you come again if we did it next year? Who would you like to see speak? Please leave a comment and let me know.
