Top 5 Meetings and Event Blogs
Informal rating of the 5 top meetings and events blogs. Mike McAllen asked his events and meetings network what blogs are they reading and these are the top 5. If you want a full list of all the blogs he received then check out Events and Meetings Industry Blogs
Welcome back to the Meetings Podcast. This is Mike McAllen from Grass Shack Events and Media. And I am back in the country. I was out on a little quick vacation to Spain which was a wonderful experience, Barcelona and Madrid, wonderful places. If you ever get a chance to get out there, please do. What else is going on? We are very, very busy at Grass Shack. We had a couple of Wells Fargo shows last week which went really well.
I was in Barcelona for them so I didn’t get to attend either of them, but our teams were out there working on them hard and the client very happy, so that’s good. Jon went out to Toronto. And he’s working on his CMM with MPI. I think it’s MPI he does that with, so he is now Mr. Strategy, so it’s interesting. He’s too busy to be on the podcast. I’m kidding. He is actually right now, actually he is studying more. I guess he’s taking a test for it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he’s done. It’s going to take him a little while to get that done.
And of course we have the … our Avforplanners.com is rolling along. We are changing the website, making it work. We did a little – we’re working with developers to get the whole back end working. And it’s pretty, pretty fun. It’s fun to be part of a start up. I don’t think we really talked a lot about it on here on the Meetings Podcast but I thought we might just start. Basically it’s a simple survey service for audio visual.
We have worked with it with Wells Fargo and Association and a couple of other companies. Basically we get three bids from Av companies and we give the client a simple survey of the equipment and the price and of course the labor, so they can see exactly what they’re getting. We are on their side. We have nothing to do with who gets hired. We just are part of the whoever is the organizer or planner, we are on their side to make sure they’re getting the best deal possible for their meetings so they can concentrate more on the engagement of the audience and the content. So that’s kind of fun coming down the line. So let’s get today’s show.
Today’s show, I put out – to my network, I put out a push to see what events and meetings, blogs are out there and who’s reading what. I spent a lot of time over the years now working on the Meetings Podcast for Grass Shack and Meetings Podcast when it was a standalone podcast, but it’s really our blog also. And I was kind of wondering what other people are reading these days. And so I sent it out. I got probably around 80 different sites.
And they are on the Grass Shack blog if you want to look them up. I asked a lot of people, their names and who I got it from, who I got the different names of the different blogs from are on the site too so you can go back and check it out and ask questions of those people about the blogs if you want to. So I came down with the top five meetings and events blogs. I was thinking this should probably be an end of the year thing, the top blogs of 2012, but I think it’s probably good just to get it out there.
So if you are interested in reading up on more blogs, check out that blog post. And then here’s the top five. So the first one which got the most votes by not many, but it got the most votes is MidCourse Corrections . And that is our friend Jeff Hurt. I haven’t talked to Jeff in a long time but Jeff and I worked on the Event Camp stuff when we started the event camps. And I see him once in a while. He’s a presenter. He, when I met him was doing this MidCourse Corrections . And then it was bought by Dave Lutz and I think they started Velvet Chainsaw which is a company that helps improve meetings, conferences and education. The blog itself is a very, very popular, it’s a great one to read. Jeff’s a great writer. He’s opinionated and he’s very Jeff. So check that one out. That is the Jeff Hurt – the URL is jeffhurtblog.
Number two is from a company called Icon Presentations and it’s their blog, it’s called Sound n’ Sight. It’s headed up by Jenise Fryatt who’s been on the show here couple of times. And I think she’s set up to be on it again coming up next week which is kind of cool.
What they do, Sound ‘N’ Sight is — basically Icon Presentations is an audio visual company that is owned by Jenise and it’s in Palm Springs. I think I already said that. The blog is kind of like a cross section of lots of different things. They have a lot of guest posts and a lot of different topics, very interesting blogs, so check that one out.
The next one is The Event Manager Blog, Event Manager Blog is Julius Solaris’s blog. He’s also been on the show I think a couple of times. He does a lot of – he has a very interesting template on his site. If you want to go check it out, it’s eventmanagerblog.com. He talks a lot about technology startups and very popular also. And I think he is in – gosh, I don’t know where he’s living right now, but I think he lives in Italy. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. But check that one out. Julius has a lot of cool – a very cool stuff to read about. The last one I just read was about all these new startups for the event industry. So, that of course interests me with our Av For Planners stuff, so check that one out.
Number four is Conferences That Work . Conferences That Work is Adrian Segar’s blog. It goes along with his – he has a book called Conferences That Work . Check that one out. He has a different way of doing meetings to facilitate meetings, kind of interesting, so check that out.
And the fifth one is a tie between Planner Wire – Planner Wire is done by written mostly by Keith Johnston. And he’s written for all kinds of magazines, but it talks a little bit – he’s an interesting guy. I don’t know him personally. I’ve never met him in person but I’ve read his blog for a long time, so that’s a very popular blog, talks about the industry and check that one out.
And it was a tie, the fifth place with Fork in the Road which is Michelle Bruno’s blog and website. She talks a little bit about innovation and meetings, social … she talks about social media, social networking, so check her blogut. She was tied. So that’s the top five, actually six.
There’s three honorable mentions I wanted to point out. There’s Liz King Events . Liz King Events is out in New York City. Liz has been doing a lot of speaking as of late. She also does a little – not a little – she does a event camp type thing called PlannerTech which is a smaller talking about event technology, pretty interesting. I just watched her on hybrid – talking about hybrid meetings on with John Pollard of Sonic Foundry on for a webinar. She did a very good job. Her blog has a lot of guest posts also, so check that one out. That is Liz King Events .
The other one I wanted to point out to an honorable mention was Sue Pelletier’s Face2Face . I’ve been reading Sue’s blog for a long time too and people really liked it.
A new one that I haven’t really read is I might butcher his name but it’s Jeffrey Cufaude and his blog is called Idea Architects. Check that out. That’s one of the honorable mentions he talks about. He’s kind of I want to say kind of a Jeff Hurt more of that kind of leaning towards talking a little bit about learning innovation, learning in the community around events, so check those out.
So that’s it. Those are the five big ones and the honorable mention. I wanted to get a quick podcast out so people could hear it. If you have any ones that I haven’t mentioned, please share them with me. Put them in the comments or shoot me an e-mail at meetingspodcast@gmail.com. You can always catch me at @mmcallen on Twitter. And I’d also like to hear if there’s anybody you’d like me to interview for the podcast. Got to get back into interviewing a little bit. Those seem to be the podcast that get the most hits, downloads. We had several hundred – a little over a thousand something downloads which is for the IMEX podcast which we did.
We went out there and we were sponsored by IMEX to go to the IMEX show. And we got more than a thousand downloads which is kind of deceiving because of the that nowadays like applications that are on the mobile devices which a lot of people listen to the podcast from, they download it once. Like Stitcher is an example. They’ll download it once and then they stream it from their own service. So it’s deceiving, so we got a lot of, lot of hits on those. And it was mostly the ones that we did the interviews with, so check those out if you haven’t too. They’re posted on iTunes and on our feed if you want to take a look at it.
So thank you again. And I look forward to talking with you all in the future. Not all of you, but if you can give me a call, I’ll talk. So, thanks and bye-bye.