Peel me a Grape :: We make things work

I attended the IIA contress today (Thursday…). I hadn’t been before.

Joe Newell talked about Ammado. They’ve done a great job in penetrating the global market. I was a little bit surprised that ‘Donate Now’ wasn’t a feature introduced earlier. Although that just says that the community alone was enough to attract hundreds/thousands of not for profits and charities.

Barry Meehan from worldwidecycles impressed me. He came across as being incredibly down to earth and genuine. Sharing great experiences about how he’s using blogging, flickr, youtube to build a community around his business. His attitude is very much – add value to your community, and it will reward you in return.

Dell came across very well as innovators in customer engagement. I still dread few things more than having to call their call center, and their main store website is sucky…. Dell employ many people with job of contributing to their various customer engagement sites, and conversations emerging elsewhere on the web.

Bebo talked about some interesting stuff they’re doing – particularly with what you might call online interactive social television, Kate Modern, The Gap Year etc.. Interesting that some of these shows which started online are now being shown on traditional tv channels. Powerful ideas, and great revenue models – i don’t buy it – plenty of kids/teens do.

I ended up at the conference because I started working for IGOPeople about 2 weeks ago. CEO Campbell Scott presented about some of the trends behind the IGO idea and a few stories about what people can achieve on IGOpeople when it’s launched. I felt it went great – and I’m looking forward to launching out beta later this year. Mixed feelings on twittersphere – better than no feelings ;)

There was great consistency in the messages people talked about – consistent to the theme of the conference: ‘Beyond Websites: Business Uses of Social Networking and New Media’. Next year I’d love to see a little more diversity, in both the talks and the audience they attract. Kinda tiring hearing the same thing again and again for the day.