What has been tremendous for me about eComm was the sheer energy and enthusiasm of everyone. I had not even thought about a 2009 but by conference day two I was bombarded with other's plans and ideas towards 2009. It seems a community has formed and decided to help build a 2009.
I'd like to ask everyone for their understanding that I am not as quick as normal for another week, maybe two. I pushed a bunch of family and business issues until post-conference to deal with. As many of you know I put both my family and business life on sudden hold for five months to ensure we had a conference in March. There was no company, branding, nor did I have event experience so it was a very tall order. What I did have though was clear-cut vision. Now post conference I know that everyone thought the event was fantastic (via surveys and the many kind people who walked up to me to tell me so) and the start of something completely new.
There are two areas I would have liked to have been quicker at - uploading of event media and some post-event postings. On the media front (audio, video, slides) things are in a processing pipeline. On the posting front, it will have to wait a bit due to the issues I mentioned.
But there is one post I can not leave any longer. A post to say a big thank you to Andy Abramson and his team at Comunicano. When Andy found out that I was putting together a new conference as a successor to ETel all on my own, he waded in to help. He assigned tasks to his great team members at his PR agency Comunicano and said that it would be without charge (there was no money so this was awesome). At the time I did not know Andy, only knew of him, so I really did not know what to expect. Lots of people had made promises, some of them very grand indeed. Andy promised very little so I did not expect anything and I mentally wrote it off along with many other promises. Cut forwards four months later to the conference, Andy and his team had done more than anyone to build up attendees, press and sponsors. It was completely unexpected. He promised very little yet delivered concrete results above anyone else.
When I arrived at the conference the first thing I did was to thank Andy and his team. I was gobsmacked that without much noise his team had just consistently kept working to a set routine over the months and got results. I told him it was completely unexpected, the sheer volume of help. Andy simply replied that he under-promises and over-delivers. Nuff said.
