Last week, on 6 & 7 April, I attended the ConnectNow conference in Sydney.

ConnectNow is a spin-off from the MarketingNow conference and it focuses on social media as a business, marketing, and communications tool.

I was fortunate to be sponsored by Melbourne Water to attend the event. Though, even if I hadn’t been, I would have gone there on my own anyway.

How Was It?

The conference was excellent and definitely worth the attendance.

The Good Bits

• Excellent speakers from around the world, all of whom are considered to be thought leaders or, at the very least, major successes in their own particular areas. 
• Excellent talks and presentations that excited, inspired, and seeded discussion. I particularly liked the talks given by Gavin Heaton, Tara Hunt, Darren Rowse, Gary Vaynerchuck, and Deb Schultz. More on all the talks in Part 2.
• Great attendees, all with their own social media experience that they could share.
• Great conference organization.

The Not-So-Good Bits

• Some talks could have been shorter or structured better. As someone who loves making presentations (and thinks he makes pretty decent ones) it irks me when people don’t make excellent presentations, particularly at events such as this. There were a few times during a 3-4 presentations when I caught myself thinking: “Okay…so you’ve made five great points in succession but you haven’t linked them together (at all) and, even after re-reading the notes I just took, I don’t see how they logically follow each other”. In most of these cases the presentations would have been drastically improved if the speaker had either (a) told a story to string the ideas together or (b) simply grouped and named logical content sections, summarized thoughts at the end of each logical content section, or simply written better slide headings.
• I wasn’t able to socialize/network as much as I wanted to because I was recovering from a bad cough and would induce a coughing fit if I talked for more than a couple of sentences at a time.

For More

I’ll be writing my thoughts (based on my notes) on each of the talks in Part 2.

Meanwhile, check out:

• Tweets from the conference via the #cnow hash tag
• The MarketingNow blog
• Information about the awesome new Berocca Twist bottles that were being spruiked (highly successfully, I might add) at the event