It’s been a very busy couple weeks running around, working the phones and promoting the Social Media Marketing Summit that we hosted last week at during the Online Market World conference in San Francisco. We were very pleased with the turn out and I tip my cap to our Program Director, Lisa Picarille who put together a great group of speakers for the conference. You can catch Lisa’s re-cap of the conference on her Lasting Impressions blog.

It was very cool to hear and see all the different ways individuals and companies are learning to experiment and innovate with online social media, community building and new ways to network, engage, share information and make business fun. I found the conference to be full of enthusiasm and passion from speakers like Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency, Shel Israel who is working on a worldwide project called the Social Media Global Report, Brian Solis from FutureWorks, Erik Hom of Ticketmaster and Karl Long from Nokia. And the list goes on. It was also great to see some familiar faces in the audience like Linda Woods from PartnerCentric, Thomas Rose-Bolden from TaxBrain and Michael Chin of KickApps.

One take away from the conference is that you shouldn’t be daunted by using social media for business. The most important thing is to start experimenting with the existing platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and don’t hold back on imagination. Edward Terpening from Wells Fargo presented a case study about a video competition and showed one of the winning videos with a rap about the Wells Fargo stagecoach. It may sound quirky, but it was entertaining, funny and best of all it was user generated content.

I really enjoyed the conference and it’s one of the few events I was able to take in all the content without have to work at a booth in the conference exhibit hall.

We still have a few ad placements available in the upcoming Issue 24 of Revenue, due to be published in early November. To confirm availability and pricing, please follow up with our ad sales team this week.

Upcoming conference bonus distribution includes Ad:Tech New York, PubCon Las Vegas, Search Engine Strategies Chicago and Affiliate Summit 2009 Las Vegas. Ad creative deadlines are coming up on October 17.