SummitUp was an absolutely stunning event! The speakers were engaging and offered up some great tips and new strategies. I especially liked Brian LeCount’s break-out session on the power of Blogs and SEO. He made such a good case for making Blogs a central part of your strategy, that after seeing the data, it became a moment of “why hadn’t I thought of this before???” Another practical application “aha” was Lewis Howes’ emphasis on increasing search with your LinkedIn profile. I happened to make all of the recommended changes as he presented them live and saw my profile move up in the search rankings for my “key words” right in front of my eyes!

Kevin Dugan kept the images of cave animals dancing in my head for days, while Artie Isaac inspired me to un-plug and to breathe deeply. Love his advice to take 30 minutes out of every day to think & create. Bob Garfield captured my attention with his focus on the changing tides of traditional media and gave frank answers to the audience question of the future of careers in radio and other media. Lewis Howes kept me fascinated with his re-enactment of his pole-vaulting jump- I literally pictured him flying over the bar and landing safely onto the mat. Beautiful segue into success with LinkedIn, giving tips that are not widely known. Chris Brogan, as the finale, was a wonderful close to the day. He is so down-to-earth and one of the most authentically transparent “gurus” out there. Loved everything that he had to say about social media, especially the admonition that as companies, we need to “grow our ears” to be in tune with what our customers are saying. It is the customers who are controlling the brand message.

Loved your talk on Data Analytics- still trying to figure out that physics equation with mass and distance that you had up on the screen. Guess you will have to explain that one over a cup of coffee sometime!

Superb event! Thanks to all who put it together. Hope your cupcake made it home safely!!

Bravo to David and crew for pulling this together. I can hardly wait for next year’s event!

I know you were part of the mastermind team who deserves so many kudos for this event of the year! Thank you all!

I wished I could have duplicated myself so that I could catch all of the sessions, since they all sounded great. A big theme from the sessions I did attend was the need to start with listening.

I went to Roger Bora’s session, which was also piggybacked by the folks from Santino Day. I think it is awesome to have an attorney who understands social media and this space and can serve as a guide on things like branding and trademark protection. Roger provided some great practical guidance on using some of the free monitoring tools that are available.

After that session I went to Steve Phillips’s session on SEO. Steve did a great job providing some basic principles of SEO, demonstrating some of them with some concrete examples. He also fielded some great questions from those who attended.

Bob Garfield… if you didn’t love what he was saying, at least his slides were engaging. That one with the dog certainly was unexpected! I loved his presentation design: no bullets! Even if his message was not the most positive one, he did recommend we start listening better.

Lewis Howes showed us how basic principles of good networking and branding online can be accomplished using LinkedIn.

Finally meeting Chris Brogan in person was something I’d looked forward to in the several years we’d been connected online. One of the big themes of his talk was listening. Google “Grow Bigger Ears” and you’ll see why.

Events like this one take a lot of hard work to prepare and execute. Thank you again, David, and others, for getting this done. Happy Birthday, and keep on rockin’!