Anyone who knows me can tell you that I do have a propensity to talk a lot. It’s who I am and what I do. But lately I’ve been given a few chances to do so to a bit of a wider audience.

Last weekend I spoke at the Product Camp unconference. This is a conference where there are no attendees, everyone is a participant. So at the suggestion of a product manager friend of mine, I offered to talk about Delivering Products in a Software as a Service (SaaS) World. As it turns out there was a bit of interest in this topic.

I really enjoyed the talk, it generated some good discusion. Not suprising, and in true unconference fashion, I learned quite a bit also during the talk. This was a great first experience in leading a discussion at a conference – and it was a lot of fun.

I’ve actually been invited to talk on a panel this August as well. I’ll be speaking alongside a colleague and friend, Mike Rundle at Social Media Fresh down in Charlotte. I was invited to speak there based off my experience of writing applications for social networks. This would be related to my work with idek.net and more recently pici.me.

So if you are interested in social media and how it can be a benefit to businesses – then please check out Social Media Fresh. And if you are coming then be sure to check out the Social Media Tech Panel.

I recently had another article of mine posted in an industry pub. This time it was an article about standards for html email rendering published in Marketing Profs. Ooooh Exciting! Right? Ok, I get it, it’s not really that exciting. But it is important.

Here’s an analogy, because I’m a big fan of those, imagine if every type of car ran on different gas. I’m not talking about different octane, like 87, 89, 93, I’m talking about different types of gas. It would make the cost of gas so much higher because each gas company would have to make so many different types of gas. That would be silly, so much wasted time and effort. If there were just one type of gas then the companies could optimize their process to create one better grade of gas at a cheaper cost.

Well, right now email marketer have to do something similar. They have to try tailor their messages to work in all sorts of different email clients: Yahoo!, Outlook2003, Hotmail, AOL, and two of the worse Outlook2007 and Gmail. If emails rendered the same in more of these clients it would make things a lot more simple.
The impetus for this article was the email standards site, email-standards.org. A great site and a great movement. BTW, I love their project to get GMail to notice them, project grimace, which I contributed to!

I just got a little more PR for myself and Bronto yesterday. An article I had written this summer finally got some airtime. This time over at DMNews, the article was on the main page yesterday, along with a shot of my mug. This one is a fun review of bounce messages, likening them to ice cream flavors. I think it’s worth a read, if only just to see mention of Moose Tracks and Ben & Jerry’s in an article about the technical aspects of managing rejected email messages. Check out the article – 31 Flavors of Bounce Messages – the article isn’t up anymore, but you can check out the original blog post at Bronto.

I was pretty psyched (and I still am a bit) when this got picked up. I hadn’t been blogging here long when I wrote this article, but I thought I would go out on a limb and write something different, just to see if it would get noticed. I guess it worked.

As the title states, it’s nothing more than that, but I’ll take what I can get.

So here’s the deal, a blog post I wrote got picked up (and then re-written by me) to be featured in imediaconnection, an interactive media and marketing site. The article is titled The best way to expand your email list, which was their choice, not mine. This article is about using the forward to a friend functionality to grow your list.

I’m not sure I’d endorse it as the best way to grow your list. I do think it is a great way to add like-minded people to your list, but it’s effectiveness does limit it’s overall usefulness.

As I said in my last post, this is all part of the continued up tick in PR for Bronto, and I’m happy to ride that wave and contribute to the growth.

Update: More plugs (just cause I can) – my article got mentions from a few of the people that I admire most in the email blogosphere – Tamara Gielen (at the top) and Mark Brownlow (down at the bottom).