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As many of you know, I just went to Chicago to attend the 2008 AMA Leadership Summit. Just about every one of the 78 AMA chapters sends representatives to this annual get-together. We have a ton of meetings, talk in the hallways, break bread together, drink cocktails together, and learn, learn, learn.

This year, I went as our chapter’s incoming President-Elect. With me were our President (Jean Conover of TradeMark Media), our Secretary (Amanda Koellhofer of SolarWinds) and our VP of Programming (Robyn Milder of Red McCombs Media). Also joining us was Stacy Armijo of Pierpont–she was our President two years ago and was a presenter at the summit this year.

When you have three straight days of back-to-back meetings and networking events, it’s hard to come up with even a semi-coherent list of takeaways, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

1. The smartest person in the room is not you. No way, no how. That other person you’re talking to, or that whole group of persons…now, they’re smart. All you have to do is figure out how to transfer their smartness to you. Sometimes it takes one or two questions, and sometimes it happens during an idle conversation while waiting for a cab. But it will happen if you let it happen.
2. Anything is possible if you’re clear on your values. Don’t make the mistake of setting goals for an organization before you’ve figured out your core values. It’s okay if you only have a few, or if you’ve just got them in your head–but you have to have them. You can’t build an organization or put together an action plan without values.
3. Every opportunity is a threat, and vice versa. Same goes for strengths and weaknesses. When you run a SWOT analysis, don’t be fooled! Those little lists don’t just stay in their static little boxes. They tend to jump around a bit. You say you’ve got a really strong sense of humor among your board members, and that’s a great strength? Maybe one day it’ll be your greatest weakness, that you just can’t get serious about anything.
4. Running it like a business really covers a multitude of sins. As executive board members, we are trustees of the organization, much like you as an executive of your company are a trustee of the company’s bottom line and profit margin. Although we are a non-profit, that is not an excuse to run the organization into the ground. We have to run it like a business–watch expenses, price our products with enough margin, communicate effectively, and so on. It also means that we have to behave like a business–communicating with integrity and candor internally and having a customer service mind set with our members and prospective members.
5. Don’t forget to have fun. The best brainstorming happened during off hours. We came up with some dandy ideas for themes, events, and what not while enjoying cappuccinos post-dinner. More than once I found myself trading war stories with people in the hallways and wishing I had ready access to paper as we laughed and reminisced. Once you let your hair down a bit, things start happening!
6. It’s the people that matter the most. I cannot tell you how happy I was to see certain people. Some I hadn’t seen in two years. Others I hadn’t seen since last year’s Crystal Awards (when several of us convened in Houston to judge their entries). No matter what, my fealty is not so much to the nebulous concept of AMA or to “marketing” but to these people. They are part of my network, my practice, and my life. I’m grateful for that.

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I hope you weren’t one of the 500,000 IIS sites hit with a SQL injection attack over the weekend. For all of us, regardless of platform, we need to remember to sanitize all input before we allow data to touch our databases! Especially in this day and age, when it seems that everything lives in the cloud.

Read the whole story over at Wired.

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Combine Twitter and the traditional startup pitch…and you get the TwitPitch.

The Twitpitch is the invention of Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant. Boyd had plans to attend the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, but was having trouble scheduling meetings with startups. To address this problem, on Tuesday he posted on his blog that in order to make things simple for himself, he was posting a schedule of times when he was available for meetings. He added that he would not accept email-based proposals for these meetings, only Twitpitches.

Read the full piece hereand watch this space carefully. There will be plenty more things crushed down to 140 characters for easy digestion in our snack culture, for example:

• Serialized summaries of books, movie plots, and other longer-length media.
• Summaries of web APIs and web services.
• Summaries of news headlines (already in clear evidence).
• Anything related to “breaking news” or “emergency information” — perhaps government channels for security information?
• Summaries of opinions or issues, with or without links (more and more of this!).
• Live sampling/surveys of reactions to panels, speeches, workshops (sanctioned, not guerrilla).
• Replacing blanket emails with twitter channels — thereby removing the reply-all evil in the world.
• Games that play out in real life — think of those annoying games held by radio stations involving asking people at a mall if they are the guy with the $10,000 certificate.
• Some kind of advertising will have to take effect here…a retail store using twitter to broadcast deals, but not being confined to a zip code or locality. Hmmmm…
• Integrating with time-tracking applications, RFID, mobile devices, warehouse inventory systems, hmmmm. This is all content too!

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Paul Walhus of Spring.net interviews me about SxSW 2008 and other subjects.

See the interview.

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For all of you who are feeling despair about having to sell an intangible service or a product with an extremely long sales cycle, please drop what you are doing right now and read the following story. I won’t even comment on it. Go ahead, scram. Go read it now. Then go out there and sell something.

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