Some blogger I am, I didn’t even mention that I was going to go to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Well, I did. And it was great. And you should have been there.
But now onto my point and why I used the above photo in this post.
Las Vegas is like Podcasting. Sure, it is pretty well established. There are very professional, glamorous, and dare I say elegant examples already in place. There are, of course, some "not so good" examples too – we’ll call them coolers – which inevitably show themselves in such a place. But there is a fact which rings true and ever clearer in my ear now that I’ve attended the New Media Expo this year; it is still getting bigger.
Both Las Vegas and Podcasting are continuing to grow at a rate that seems fairly hard to calculate with any metric other than potential. I was really happy to hear Gary Vaynerchuk say in his keynote speech on the first day of the Expo that people need to exercise patience and work hard to achieve their goals in podcasting. And that mantra ran right through until the very last day.
People were very, very excited about the new tools, gear, the growing community and seeing each other’s faces – but more importantly they see that they can build a viable commodity all on their own, so long as they’re willing to work at it.
I was there, of course, with the Viddler team including Rob, Donna, Kyle, and Brandice. We all had a great time sharing a booth with TubeMogul, meeting up with tons of Viddler members, and helping people set up their customizable Viddler players.
For weeks prior to the Expo we helped the New Media Expo team by setting up the video portion of their official site. It ended up being a big hit for both the Expo and Viddler, and anyone not able to attend the Expo. We consider video at these types of events to be the most powerful form of media for a backchannel. If you’re going to a conference, organizing one, or would just like information on how we put this together, be sure to drop me a line.
On the very last day Kyle, Brandice, and I created a show on-the-fly called Two Minutes at New Media Expo. We did this by doing 2-minute interviews with as many people as we could on the last day of the Expo (which only went until 1 o’clock). In that short amount of time we interviewed nearly 30 different expo attendees, companies, and even Kings. We have a bunch more episodes coming out so stay tuned! How did we do all of this? I’m planning on writing a post called "How to build a video podcast in 24 hours.". If you don’t see this by the end of next week yell at me.
I think I can speak for the entire Viddler team when I say that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves at the New Media Expo this year and that we’re looking forward to the next one. Viva la New Media Expo!