After missing the first two Startup Weekends in Boulder (including the first Startup Weekend *ever*), I was finally able to sneak away for a weekend and join in the fun…

Eric and I are both into technology and we love our gadgets, but until recently we really haven’t been that into mobile stuff. (This could have something to do with Eric putting his last two phones through the washing machine…)

IMU wrapped up with presentations on old-school email marketing campaigns and web analytics and both speakers managed to provide meaningful suggestions, tips and tricks for small, medium, and large businesses.

Inbound Marketing University kicked off with two presentations focusing on the fundamentals: getting started with a blog and SEO basics. Both presentations were excellent introductions to the topic and I know that I’ll be using them as quick reference guides the next time someone asks me “Should I be blogging? How do I get started?” Here’s my summary of these first classes…

I didn’t make an actual count of Chris’ mentions/celebrations of other people’s ideas, products, and successes, but based on my rough notes I think he was getting pretty close to his oft stated Twitter goal of 15:1 (their stuff:your stuff)…

Although the information presented in this session was valuable, I would have rather visited the LinkedIn Learning Center and/or the Facebook “About” page to learn more about these topics. Having someone try and walk me through basics and setup steps via PowerPoint is just painful for me. If it’s helpful to you, then maybe you’ll enjoy this one.

David packed a ton of useful content into this presentation, but if you can only see the slides you’re missing at least half of the story. There’s a reason this guy speaks for a living! This was, by far, my favorite presentation at IMU.

The community guy praised others, the marketing guy told stories, and the SEO guy pounded us with data. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised! Rand’s slideshow (below) is packed with helpful information and I know that I’ll be spending some more time digging into it in depth. In the meantime, here are a few of the highlights…

My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)

Your lead generation efforts have really paid off and you have a full database of people just waiting to hear from you, but maybe not buy from you, not yet. What do you do next? Continue blasting them with email and phone calls? Or, maybe you’re ignoring them altogether? Brian Carrol from InTouch gave us another idea during his IMU presentation – you should nurture those leads through your pipeline.

Welcome to my new digs! I’ve completed my move to Wordpress.org and will be taking down my site at Wordpress.com in the near future.

I managed to carve out an hour yesterday for a “strategy and governance” webinar and I’m actually glad I did. Stacy Wilson of Eloquor Consulting (@stacylwilson) and Greg Reinacker of Newsgator (@gregr) walked us through the topic and provided lots of useful case studies, checklists, and best practices, as well as – surprise, surprise – demos of Newsgator products…

Now that I’ve moved to grown-up blogging software (thank you, Wordpress!) I’ve been doing some tech-gardening to centralize my content, make sure all my URLs point to the right place and that my profiles are at least somewhat consistent (yeah, still working on this one.) And as part of this process, I’ve been reexamining some of the tools in my collection (arsenal?) to decide if I should use it or lose it. Since blogging’s on my mind, I’m going to start with this question – if my blog platform of choice is Wordpress, then where does that leave Tumblr and Posterous?

The exam results came in and… yay! I’m now an Inbound Marketing Certified Professional and am ready to help you put a complete set of inbound marketing tools and practices into use at your company.

Yesterday Chris Garrett posted his list of 22 social media tools with notable brand examples and after reading it I thought it would be nice to have a list of local (Colorado) companies as examples as well.

Two of the best ways of building your online reputation are providing your own original content and adding your comments to others’. This takes you out of your isolated, comfortable bubble, and demonstrates that you’re willing to participate in and continue the conversation. Commenting is a cyclical process, though, and as I personally experienced last week, follow-up is critical

Technology can make some great improvements in our lives – automating or “one-click”-ing tasks, saving time and money, and providing some entertainment along the way. If you’re looking for tools that are somewhere between the casual home user (”too little”) and the enterprise (”too big”), however, you can easily be overwhelmed by all of the “stuff” that’s out there and find your way to the “just right” solution. Here’s how I used my Goldilocks thinking for my most recent challenge: selecting a small business CRM.

We all know that Twitter’s starting to reach the mainstream (um, Oprah?) and has been seeing significant growth over the past couple of years, but with all of that growth comes such massive amounts of noise that you can start to feel like you’re being pecked (or tweeted) to death. Here are a few ways to save your sanity:

"My friends and I went to see Lyle Lovett at Red Rocks last weekend and it was (as usual) an awesome show. For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Lovett, I’m not sure I can give a quick explanation – he’s an unusual character, but an amazing musician who typically tours with his 10+ member “It’s not big, it’s Large” band with a musical style that’s probably best described as quirky Texan. Watching Lyle and his band perform reminded me of how important, valuable, and fun it can be to build a community around something you love to do. Here are seven things I learned:"