Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Attending Good Experience Live

Attending Good Experience Live

I’m in New York today and tomorrow for the Good Experience Live (Gel) conference. I’ve been trying to explain what this conference is about to people this past week, with varying degrees of success. Here’s what the Gel organizers have to say:

The purpose of Gel is to explore what it means to create a good, meaningful, or authentic experience.

The theme is “good experience”: how it’s created, and what it means in art, society, media, community, business, and technology.

I’ve never attended Gel before, but I’m assured it’s the kind of conference that refreshes and inspires, sending you back to your work with new ideas and the energy to implement them. Which all sounds pretty great, and also like a tall order!

The thing that intrigues me about this conference is the focus on the user, the idea that the customer is the point of what you’re doing. I haven’t been to business school, or gotten an MBA, but it seems to me that most businesses people lose this point early on. I studied journalism in school, and there was plenty of focus on editing and reporting, but none of my professors ever let me forget that I was writing for someone, and that they better be able to understand what I was saying. Say what you will about the media, but they almost never lose site of the fact that they are nothing without readers and viewers (critics call it pandering). I’ve always regarded that training as an advantage I have over other Web designers and authors, so many of whom do great work but forget the user in the end. And, of course, it’s an attribute shared by many successful bloggers.

I’ll let you know what the conference is like over the next two days. Things kick off today with a variety of hands-on experiences conference attendees registered for a couple weeks ago. I’ll be part of the Nosh group:

Myra Alperson, founder of NoshNews, will take attendees to Sunnyside, Queens, one of the most polyglot neighborhoods in NYC. While sampling Colombian, Romanian, Salvadoran, Lebanese, Turkish, Irish and other specialties on this route, you’ll also learn about one of New York City’s most intriguing communities. Includes a visit to Sunnyside Gardens, the first planned garden community in the US.

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 04/28 at 09:44 AM • Not About Blogs