Ok, I have to applaud ChannelAdvisor.
First, I was extremely impressed with the ChannelAdvisor team. Everyone from the company seemed intelligent, engaging, and passionate. It reminded me of my early days at VarsityBooks.com (now VarsityGroup) where the team was like a family. Is it the the North Carolina buttermilk biscuits & gravy? The hiring practices? Scot, Michael, what’s the secret?
Second, the conference itself was very well organized and packed with high quality speakers (I’ll fill you in on my presentation in a bit). While I’d be pissed if I had to manage another PPC account for a client, I was impressed with the MSN adCenter demo. It’s not a game changing event, but MSN is at least moving in the right direction. Jupiter was well represented by the usual suspects…shocking to hear that eCommerce is growing. I enjoyed hearing the analysts perspective – Jeetil Patel (Deutsche Bank), Mark Maheney (Citigroup Smith Barney), and Shawn Milne (FBR) spoke about eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Google, and some smaller players (I’ll post some of their comments later today).
Finally, the attendees of the conference just seemed to get it. I’ve been doing internet marketing/business development for 10 years…I’ll toot my horn a bit and say that I’m pretty damn good at it, too. So I like to have conversations that challenge me…that put me out of my comfort zone. Also, I like to learn new and innovative practices from others. While this doesn’t happen every interaction, it definitely occurred the majority of the time at the ChannelAdvisor Summit.
[...] at October 2nd, 2006 Now that I’ve recovered from my peeing in my pants JOKE at CA’s summit, it’s time to start speaking/moderating at conferences [...]