Thank You, Social Media Conference NW!
It really does take a village to put on a conference of this magnitude and some people need to publicly thanked and recognized.
A huge thank you to all of our terrific speakers that took time out of their busy schedules to be here and help us all learn more about how we can use social media in our businesses and organizations. Their participation has made this an awesome event!
And we want to thank all our in-kind and financial sponsors. Without their participation, the registration fee would have been much, much higher. Many were seen today serving as staff.
Also, we want to acknowledge some of our partners that have gone “above and beyond” what they originally promised to make things work because things don’t always work out easily the first time:
- Dave Fisher with Fidalgo Networking installed the Wi-fi today in the theater and the classrooms
- Mark Knittel and crew with Data Doctors provided the IT support
- Matt Barnhart and Shari Burk with Pivot Lab created our image, branding, and design of the website and all of the collateral and a special branding strategy session.
- Amybeth Hale, Suzi Tonini, Heather Dalberg, and Tenzing Kernan helped us to create and execute the social media interactive activities today
- Emily Salle worked on website and helped in the social media bunker today
However, there are two individuals that not only helped us with the 2008 conference but are really responsible for raising the bar on this one. And that is Matthew Dunn and Aaron Booker.
Matthew came to us in 2008 when the first conference was just an idea and offered to help. And help we needed. As he guided us through the content stage, we quickly learned he really knew this stuff and asked him to be the dinner keynote speaker. Matthew mentored us, again on this conference. And even though he is extremely busy with his new start-up, he still found time to answer lots of questions and point us toward out-of-the-box thinking.
Aaron volunteered to video blog before and during the 2008 conference. As a result, Aaron and his crew’s activities in 2008 put this conference on the social media conference map and made promotion for this conference much easier. This year Aaron challenged us to create the social media interactive activities and the concept of a social media bunker.
And last, but not least, if we had a Most Valuable Player Award this year, it would go to Raksha Rathnam.
Raksha has been our social media voice on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin for the last three months. She was also responsible for the organizing and managing all the social media interactive activities in addition to a multitude of other tasks. Raksha picked up the work of three people in the last three weeks and much of it as a volunteer on her own time just to make sure things got done.
And finally this conference has been a team effort of TAG and the CEV utilizing the strengths of both organizations. It has been a great partnership!
On behalf of TAG and Western Washington University’s College of Business and Economics,’ Center for Economic Vitality, we want to thank our village and everyone for attending.
