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May 24

The Main Event of the day – Seth Godin in Salt Lake City

Today was the BIG day! The WordMob Street Team worked relentlessly to make it happen and today we had our big reward – Seth Godin came to Salt Lake to speak! It was an awesome event! He gave a great presentation that really hit home for me on several levels. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I want to provide some of the background details.

The WordMob team arrived at the Salt Palace between 11:00 and noon to help get all the little things in place. We had tables to set up, directional signs to get in place, books to prepare, registration tables to manage and a million other small things that made this happen. There have been easily over 100 and probably more than 200 emails exchanged with the street team on making sure all the minute details were covered. We had 2 group conference calls and I think 3 in person meetings. In all, I would estimate that over 200 man hours went into planning and executing to make this happen. It was a wonderful thing to behold and be part of.

The cool thing is, all that work was volunteered – nobody on the street team received any kind of compensation or anything to make this happen. So why did we do it? Because we wanted to. Seriously, everyone involved was committed to bringing Seth here. Really the only thing we all got out of this is being able to say “I was key in bringing Seth Godin to Utah” – and actually for all of us, that really is something.

Phil801 presenting Seth Godin in Salt Lake City
Me introducing Seth

The first hour of the event was for networking – which is always a catch-22, some people love and appreciate that while some people hate it. The last 10 minutes of that hour were for our sponsors – Overstock.com and 12 Horses presented for five minutes each. Then Seth got there and he jumped right into his presentation.

Seth Godin presents in Salt Lake City
Seth presenting

Right away it was clear there was a problem with the audio – there was a constant feedback coming through the mic. I started phoning people at the Salt Palace because I had no idea where the controls for the audio system were. It took about 10 minutes but I finally got to the right people and they sent someone down to take care of it. Aside from that, there were really no glitches.

I’m sure there will be others, but Phil Windley has a great LiveBlogging review of Seth’s presentation. Unfortunately, I couldn’t really take notes because I was back and forth a lot of the time making sure things were going smooth. Seth spoke for about 45 minutes and then took questions from the audience. There were a lot of really great questions asked, hopefully someone logged them somewhere.

Ash Buckles and I had pledged that we would become ‘Seth 2.0′ if people paid enough in sponsorship. After he was done speaking, Seth shaved Ash’s and my head! I’ll be posting links to the video and more pictures of that later! The video is actually really hilarious, Seth basically did an impromtu commercial while he was shaving – it was a riot!

Seth shaving my head
Seth shaving my head

Ash getting his head shaved
Ash getting his head shaved

This was really one of those ‘Great Days’ in my life. This was a lot of fun and I really appreciate everyone involved in WordMob for selflessly helping make it happen. There is another story that happens after the event, next blog post for that.

UPDATE: Ash has posted a video of the shaving! More coming soon.

2 pings

  1. Phil801 - Geek Blog » Thoughts on Seth Godin

    [...] full of himself, a re-hasher, or whatever. So, when we started this whole thing with bringing Seth to Utah and I was the one that made first contact with him, I wasn’t expecting much. In fact, I was [...]

  2. Phil801 - Geek Blog » First thoughts on The Dip

    [...] that things have settled down from the Seth Godin event, I’ve read “The Dip”, by Seth Godin, three times now – the second and third [...]

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