Utah Tech Spotlight Events

Local Review: Utah First Friday (Guest Post by Jason Alba)

Posted by Steve Spencer

Article posted on Feb 07

As I have often said in reviewing local events, it is hard to really say that an event is good or bad in some respects, as it really comes down to rather or not you are really the target audience or not. As such, I asked a great friend of mine, Jason Alba from Jibber Jobber to help me out a bit. I know Jason often attends and has spoken highly of the Utah First Friday events. As such, here is a review of Utah First Fridays from Jason (Thanks much Jason!!):

I went to the Utah First Friday meeting at the Miller Center last week. The featured guest was John Arnold, flown in from Denver. John works for Constant Contact, wrote E-Mail Marketing or Dummies, and regularly gives seminars in Salt Lake to help businesses get more out of their e-mail marketing campaign.

I needed to go to this presentation for several reasons:

As an author, this was one of my first opportunities to see how a “big” author does presentations. I have a bunch of presentations this month in Silicon Valley and I really wanted to see John – he does this all the time, he has a Dummies book… I figured he’d be an excellent example to learn from.
I’m presenting at UFF next month, on March 7th, and I wanted to get an idea of what the quality of the presentation would be. At the very least, I wanted to know what I would be compared with.
I’m always looking at different marketing techniques to incorporate into my own business. I figured this would be an excellent opportunity to hear from the expert on something that I think is kind of boring, but I know companies are using it effectively.
I’m always curious to see what kind of people end up at a First Friday meeting. I’ve been about five times now, and the mix is always diverse. I wanted to see if that’s changing.

Regarding the presentation style, it was great. Definitely the type of caliber you hope to see at an event like this. The audience was engaged, and at the end with Pat Vaughn asked if there was any interest in learning more from John almost half the audience raised their hands.

Two things I found interesting. First, he only had one book for sale. I’m sure it gets old lugging around a bunch of books for sale. He did have a slip you could fill out to get an autographed copy. I’m not sure I’ll do that. Second, he gave away $20 in a little experiment/contest. The guy that got the $20 didn’t know he could keep it – this was actually pretty cool.

Regarding the content of John’s presentation, it was really good. He basically had five main points and shared examples, stories and “how-to’s.” I don’t remember any examples that were similar to my company, but just hearing the specifics of what other companies are doing, and things that he thought was cool, was good to hear. I think I’m on-track with what I’m offering. His examples had a more local, store-front appeal to them but still it was good stuff.

Regarding the people, I didn’t actually get to do much networking. The roads were horrible and I ended up quite late. I recognized a buddy, who introduced me to Carl Baumeister, CEO of Fruition Consultants. This was all the networking I did

I would actually like to hear about e-mail marketing from Twelve Horses, seriously. John is going to be more at the beginner, small business level, the Dummies. Twelve Horses is doing stuff at the huge company, very interesting stuff that goes beyond the basics. Not that I’m as big as those companies, but I want more leading edge information.

Overall, though, I was glad I went.

If you come next month, March 7th, you’ll see me present on LinkedIn. I’ll even have a few books with me, if you haven’t picked one up yet. Hope to see you there!