Once again, it is speaking season, or rather, it’s conference season and I am grateful to be speaking in a few different cities here stateside (still looking for some European opportunities so I might be able to give my wife a working honeymoon – just kidding honey, no work on the honey moon 😉

Thanks to my good friend, and fellow “air-man” Shel Israel, I am on a panel tomorrow talking about Blogging’s impact on the corporation at Frost & Sullivan’s Sales and Marketing MindXchange. I will be in Phoenix for two days, Monday and Tuesday Jan 14 & 15 but unfortunately no time to meet any of my friends from Social Media Club Phoenix…

On Monday February 4 I will be joining my brothers in arms at the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference. During lunch I will be one of several people (including good friends Jeremiah Owyang and Deborah Schultz) leading workshops on how companies can build closer relationships with their customers. My workshop will be based on how to move beyond the transaction to satisfaction – using knowledge to empower customers and turning customer support from a cost into an investment across the customer experience lifecycle. In short, I will be walking folks through my methodology for marketing after the sale – how to better educate customers so they get the most enjoyment and satisfaction from a company’s products or services.

Two days later, on Wednesday February 6, I will be leading a short interactive exercise at the ALI Conference on the use of Social Media for Internal Communications. The folks at ALI put on a great event I had the pleasure of participating in during December in New York – very glad to be participating again. There are so few good professional education / conference companies out there, it is nice to be working with a good one. Social Media Club members get a $200 discount by mentioning Social Media Club when registering.

I am really excited to announce that I have been invited to do the keynote at SoCON08 on Saturday February 9 just north of Atlanta, GA. Thanks to Sherry Heyl, one of the organizers, for inviting me down after seeing my ‘closing keynote’ at Josh Hallet’s BlogOrlando. I plan to go deeper into some thoughts I have had over the last few months that extend on my “Business is Personal (again)” presentation. Interestingly, a Wired article I read recently mentioning The Conversation Group’s Peter Hirshberg addressed this same issue. In the Wired article, Clive Thomson wrote “corporations are getting humanized and humans are getting corporatized”. Let’s hope and work for more of the former rather than the latter…

Unfortunately I missed the speaker submission deadline for Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo, but Social Media Club is proud to be a media sponsor of this great new event series. The next event is being held in Santa Clara from February 26-28, and if the prior event in New York is any indicator, this is a must attend event for any digital marketer. While I am unfortunately going to be out of town, friends of Social Media Club will receive 10% off the registration using discount code SMX10SMC. If you are in Silicon Valley or able to get there, you should make time for this event.

Whew… time for some rest so I can get some more client work done in the morning and some more writing for the book done…