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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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YHPAA (pronounced ya-paw) is the Young Hispancs Professional Austin Association. They had an entrepreneurial panel on Wednesday April 9th. I was on the panel along with Becky Arreaga of Mercury Mambo, Nora de Hoyos Comstock of Las Comadres, and Carlos Esteves of CGE Inc., a local construction firm.

We talked quite a bit about running businesses, and took questions on finding funding, how we got the idea to start our businesses, what our biggest challenges were, and what we do different if we were to start over again.

Funny enough, most of us agreed on a lot of things. Becky spoke for all of us when she said that if she had really known about all the challenges in front of her, she probably would not have even tried to start her company. Nora talked a lot about the power of relationships and networking. Carlos focused on the personal challenges of leaving a high-tech career to start a construction company. As usual, I roamed around quite a bit, mostly talking about things like “excellence” and figuring out your passion.

I’ve been promised photos (I saw the flash going off!) so once I have them, I will post here.

UPDATE: Here are the photos.

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Recession looms, and yes, its more than just some media-inspired (or pundit-inspired) conspiracy. Anyone who has studied economics for more than 5 minutes can tell you that attitudes and behaviors of market participants can have lasting effects on the market itself. In other words, if everyone is scared, it turns the marketplace into a scary place.

Here are three things you can do to get through any recession.

1. STOP THE PANIC MINDSET. Stop rushing about. Stop flip-flopping. Stop making erratic decisions. Stop sampling. Stop the sudden changes in direction every week. Instead, talk to your customers. Find out what they need. Find out what is killin’ them. Find out what is at the heart of their problems. Then offer to help them fix that problem or remove the pain. They will love you for it.

2. Leverage the Web to the hilt. It’s much cheaper to run a blog than to run advertising. It’s cheaper to publish white papers and host a podcast series than to try to get a superbowl ad. It’s better to run free online workshops than to churn out endless amounts of swag. Its easier to leverage your LinkedIn community than to try to cold call 1000 strangers, 80% of whom don’t want to talk to you. It’s more profitable for you to optimize your web site and get incoming links than it is to buy a ton of banners somewhere.

3. It’s time to look within…so do it. What processes can you improve internally? What training do you need? Is it time to slow down a bit? Maybe take a few days off? It sounds counterintuitive, but when things slow down, give yourself a break. The market will pick up in six months or a year, and you’ll be back in the thick of things. When that time comes, are you going to be refreshed or are you going to be whipped?

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About a week ago, I asked my colleagues and network on LinkedIn:

How do you keep marketing and sales moving forward during a downturn/recession?

I was curious to see what they had to say about it, because there’s lots that can be learned from our colleagues. In any case, there were a ton of enlightening responses. My favorite was from Brian Massey who basically said, don’t assume that your clients will participate in a recession–you have to know if they are or not.

That’s basically the answer I got from a lot of folks…..you can only make good decisions if you have good metrics and data. You can’t just guess. You can’t just be erratic. You can’t just wander from one thing to the next in hopes of making something work. Customers in a recession are like customers at any time–if you give them value, and present the case properly, they will buy from you.

Here is a collection of answers to my question on LinkedIn.

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It’s been called a “train wreck” by journalists, attendees, and bloggers.

What am I talking about? Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday.

Part of the problem was Sarah Lacy, or at least her reputation. It’s a bit troubling for a journalist to be well known for pulchritude as well as professional snaps (with one magazine breathlessly calling her “the hottest reporter in technology”).

Part of the problem was Mark Zuckerberg, who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site. I don’t think any reporter could have gotten him to open up on anything of substance.

The biggest part of the problem was the audience, and most importantly, their unwillingness to continue consuming an irrelevant discussion.

There they all were, with all their technological prowess, many of them sending Tweets out about how boring and off-track the keynote was. Those tweets not only bounced around the Internet, but were of course consumed by many people in the room.

Others who were liveblogging the event as it happened, with their Macbooks perched on their laps, added to the pressure cooker. Soon you had a virtual echo chamber: all the tweets and liveblogs collided with everyone reading the tweets and blog posts, and pretty soon you had a bunch of people already frustrated by the presentation rise up in rebellion.

To the casual observer, it looked like there was one presentation happening on stage, but an audience paying attention to an entirely different event at the same time.

Okay, check that. That’s precisely what was happening. Of course, interviewer and interviewee were unplugged and had no idea what was happening, except for a dawning realization that something was off kilter.

Eventually, the room hit some kind of tipping point (and boy do I hate these squishy terms, but they seem appropriate) and the virtual wall was breached. People in the crowd started to grumble, and then one person shouted “Talk about something interesting!” to everyone’s laughter.

Then came time for Q&A. All that pent up hostility just came out. Sarah, perturbed by the antics, said “Well, send me an email if you think I’m doing such a bad job!” which prompted the guy at the microphone to say, “What’s your email address?”

More laughter. More heckling. It finally wound down with a whimper and we all moved on to other sessions, but I could see others continuing the conversation via cellphone, Twitter, and liveblogging.

All of this stuff was eventually picked up on Digg, and then someone at Wired blogged about it, and then the story crashed into the Technology Press at large.

The event had become a media firestorm (albeit in a small niche) in the time it took to walk 100 yards to the nearest restroom and back.

Not to put the fear of God in you, oh marketers, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what the new generation out there is doing all the time.

They buy your stuff, talk about it, blog about it, tweet about it. Some of them aren’t even waiting to buy it. I’ve seen them tweet and moblog (mobile blog) about stuff while they’re in stores. Taking pictures with their cameraphones, uploading mobile video, liveblogging.

Whereas earlier Internet users planted a firewall between events and their online discussion of same, that era’s over. For this new group, it’s all one big hairball, with the virtual discussion often overshadowing the real world event they are covering.

Why is this so important to you? Imagine a world in which journalists from all spectrums of the media universe focused not on politics or the marketplace or human events, but on their reactions to the same.

Cogent coverage of the news item itself would diminish in favor of an ever-growing palimpsest of thoughts, feelings, echos, and tagents based on the news item. Clear thinking on any given subject would become a Gordian Knot of cultural dimensions that only the most savvy could interpret.

How do you as a marketer navigate this kind of world? RELEVANCE. That was the single biggest lesson of the Zuckerberg-Lacy fiasco. Lack of relevance caused a lot of rebellion.

These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.

Some might say (as I did right after the event occured) that these young ‘uns need to learn some manners–after all, not many of them would think to take a cell phone call in the middle of the event (okay, maybe some would). Nor would many of them have the guts to just walk out, or jump up on the stage and yell out “WTF! OMG, U R so l4m3″ or whatever the equivalent is.

But really, in the long run, the audience is right. They came expecting one thing, got something else, and didn’t lie down and just live with it. They knew they had an empowering technology at hand, and they wielded it to turn the tables on the whole power dynamic.

In sharp contrast to all this was the earlier session by Jared Spool. He spoke on using magic and illusion to help design great user experiences on the Web.

He peppered his talk with humor, some magic tricks, lots of great details, and a clean slide presentation that drove home important points. No 38 bullet points per slide. No kitschy backgrounds. No stupid transitions or zooming animations.

In the end, he tied the magic tricks in with the idea that web sites must have “delight generators” because that is what takes an experience over the top.

He got a standing ovation at the end, and about 100 people lined up to offer up their business cards so they could be signed up for his user experience newsletter.

Thus endeth the lesson.

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