I know the life of an event producer is extremely glamorous and lucrative hectic and occasionally thankless, but Aaron Hockley, photographer and blogger and one of WordCamp’s producers agreed to answer a few questions about event production, giving us the behind the scenes look at why anyone would want to produce events at all. (Besides the riches glory first pick of the morning’s bagels and cream cheese.)

What do you hope attendees will get out of the event?

My goal for WordCamp Portland has always been to bring together bloggers from a variety of backgrounds, businesses, interests, and skill levels. Put all of those folks into a room and everyone is bound to learn from each other and hatch crazy new ideas.

The life of the event producer seems glamorous. What’s something people don’t know about event production?

Glamorous? Hm. Probably the biggest thing that folks don’t realize is the amount of work that isn’t directly related to the speakers or the program that goes into an event. With WordCamp, we put together a lineup of some awesome speakers, but there are all sorts of other logistics and organization that must take place so that attendees get to enjoy the speakers and have a pleasant experience. Ticketing and registration is a big effort. We need to secure a venue that has space for the conference. We need both equipment and expertise for audio/visual issues. We need to have coffee, snacks, and meals for our participants.

We need to cover our expenses. WordCamps are kept affordable and ticketing fees only cover from 25 to 35 percent of the event’s budget, so we depend on some great local sponsors to cover most of the expenses. Someone has to make those connections.

Yes, there’s an accomplished feeling once an event wraps up . . . but (especially for a volunteer-run event like WordCamp), the event can happen only after a lot of work and money from a lot of people.

There are people who would love to start speaking at events. What should they know when applying to be a speaker that would give them an edge above the competition?

Everyone has to start somewhere (heck, I just started speaking at events in the last few years). From a topic/content standpoint, find something and demonstrate your expertise and passion. Before speaking, start blogging, podcasting, or otherwise demonstrating that you know your stuff. When you’re ready to speak, start by finding a small group with a low barrier to entry. We have a couple speakers this year at WordCamp who were chosen after giving great presentations to small user groups of just 15 to 20 people.

Another important tip is to pay attention to the rules and what is asked for in a speaker proposal. Supply all of the information that is requested. I had one speaker submit a page of information when I asked for a “one-line biography.” Speakers who can follow directions are more likely to be selected.

What are you most looking forward to at the September 18-19 event?

I can’t wait to have so many folks who are energized about blogging and social media all together in one room. We always attract a diverse and smart crowd. On a more personal level I’m glad that several friends from around the region and country are planning to attend; it’ll be good to catch up with them while they’re in town for the conference.

Want to learn more about blogging and WordPress? Check out WordCamp Portland!

These brands feed me useful and timely communications, special pricing based on my pre-stated interests and consistently deliver a quality product. And I am fiercely loyal.

But brands can take communications too far, much as a smothering date who calls too much, can’t seem to remember your favorite color, and continually asks you to pick up the tab. If it’s unacceptable in personal relationships, is it acceptable for a brand’s relationship with its customers?

Shouldn’t notes be personal?

Shouldn’t offers of affection be based on customer needs, not brand mandates?

Shouldn’t relationships grow over time?

Even Molly Ringwald had to roll her eyes when Ducky left her eight messages in one evening when all she wanted was one message from Blaine (it’s a name, not a major appliance).

What to do? What to do? Look at the customer database like a personal relationship. Would your best friend enjoy four invites to watch your home movies, or a quick note about sharing a great bottle of wine she mentioned to you a few weeks back?

Consider the following:

1. Value each name: the act of providing contact information is no longer a given, so treat each name as a person and foster the relationship.
2. Be considerate: people are busy. Don’t hit the database with one communication after another. Have rules on usage so the brand doesn’t build a relationship based on customer voicemail and junk mail.
3. Be informative: when communicating, give customers what they want. Avoid the temptation to over-communicate.
4. Be there: be available to support customers. Provide options in case there are additional questions.
5. Get smart: each communication is an opportunity to learn about the customer. Take each click or download and apply it to the record. Use it to create custom communications.

Customer relationships, just like personal ones, require time, dedication and fidelity.  Share the love.

In the next few months, I plan to interview several department directors at CMD to pick their brains about industry trends, research, and overall marketing experience. I’ll share with you what makes them tick, and what current trends are on the top of their minds.

Click below to hear a coffee conversation with Caryn Herder, director in the Strategies and Solutions Group at CMD.

Julie Ma interviews Caryn Herder

There is a mix of awesome topics and unusual approaches that I surely hope will make the cut for 2011:

Social Contests: Brand Loyalty Builders or Lazy Marketing?
Proposed by Kelly Feller of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence

Social Media Death Match
A hyper-planning communications director goes head to head with an off-the-cuff improv comedian in a battle to the social media death. This one promises to please!

15 Slides, Three Writers, Three Ways—One Hour
The “Rashomon” approach to presenting, I suppose.

Guerilla Research Methods—Live!
How do I get my boss or client to buy into doing research for my project?

Will News Apps Reinvent Journalism?
A group of experts will discuss the current state of news apps, emerging trends, and the future of professional news delivery.

What’s catching your eye?

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Here’s another article listing TweetDeck, an obscure FTP client, and an RSS reader I’ll never use. Next!”

Well, you are wrong. You’re wrong because I’m hardcore. I eat new apps and services for breakfast. My ADD is Level 18 with hundreds of hit points. So, here are some awesome apps and sites you probably don’t know about. Be warned: Your mind will be blown. Also, your friendly local IT people will probably hate you for installing (or wanting to install, as the case may be) some of this stuff. Not that it’ll damage your computer or anything, it’ll just increase their workload somewhat. I refer you to what my friends at Gartner were talking about a few years ago: The consumerization of IT, aka IT exists to serve the needs of the business, and you are the business.

Item  #1: Stardock’s Fences (Free, with a little catch)

Does your Windows desktop look like this?

If you answered “Yes,” then you need to do yourself a favor and install Fences. It’s free, and will help you group your icons and documents, to find what you need faster. As seen here:

You’ll only have to put up with one inconvenience: You need Stardock’s Impulse service to run Fences, and about once a week it will pop up a little message about a sale Stardock might be having. Considering Fences is free and I’m benefiting so much from it, I consider the sales messages a small price to pay.

Item #2: Copernic Desktop Search ($49.95 US)

This is another tool to help you manage information overload. If you’ve ever tried to search for an email in Outlook and waited, waited, waited for it to find something, this is for you. If you’ve ever had to find a document on your computer, or worse, on your corporate file server, it’s for you. Copernic creates an index of every word in all the emails and documents on your computer, and it uses it to quickly find anything you’re looking for. For example, a search through my Outlook inbox for the word “event” took two minutes to complete. Copernic had the answer right after I hit enter to search. I don’t even try to keep track of where files are on the network anymore—I use Copernic to search for words within those documents, which ultimately leads me to where the document is stored. You can even preview the document before opening it to ensure it’s the correct one.

By the end of the year, Copernic will have saved me from countless hours of lost productivity. Pull the trigger and buy this.

Item #3: Techmeme (Free)

People are frequently in awe of my amazingly deep and comprehensive knowledge of what is happening in the consumer technology and social media space. Really. I could tell you that I spend ten hours a day scanning obscure tech blogs, or that I have intricate filters set up in Google Reader . . . or I could just give up the ghost and point you to Techmeme (not pronounced tek-me-me). The site tracks a few hundred influential news sites for any stories that appear to be going viral. How many inbound links is a story getting? How many comments? The most popular and widespread stories make their way onto Techmeme.

Yes, it’s true that you’re not getting the news first here, but it does save you from having to spend hours a day scanning dozens of sites.

Item #4: Evernote (Free, paid option provides more features)

How do you take notes? Well, stop it, it’s not good enough. Evernote is a note-taking app on the kind of steroids that steroids take. Sure you can take notes with it, but it’s what Evernote does with those notes that is so remarkable. First, Evernote will sync your notes to cloud storage. From there, you can access your notes from its website using a web-based version of the program. You can also download Evernote’s apps on all the major mobile platforms as well as on Windows and Mac.

In other words, you can access your notes bloody everywhere! But wait! Evernote indexes your notes so you can search them super-easily (just like Copernic, above) and (this is my favorite thing ever) if you save a picture in your notes, Evernote will OCR the document for words—making it possible for you to conduct searches based on words in your picture’s notes!

What are your amazing apps or services?

Okay, that’s enough of spilling my secrets. Do you use any amazing apps or sites? I’d love to hear about them.

And given the volume of job seekers out there, it must feel like swimming upstream. Our recent job posting at CMD drew many candidates, but only two made the final cut for interviews at the agency. And of course, there can be only one who is hired.

These days, it seems like the planets have to align in order for both parties to find the right fit. Are you feeling that way, too?

This happens to be on my mind because Melissa Lion and I are going to speak to bloggers at Portland’s WordCamp in September about translating their skills into the workplace. It occurred to us that we shouldn’t work from our assumptions about job hunting in this environment. We need help from you—the bloggers and job hunters of Portland—so that we can directly address your very real concerns.

If you’re in job search mode, what’s weighing on your mind? We want your burning questions, especially the ones from bloggers.

• What did you really want to ask that hiring manager, but didn’t bring up for fear of objections?
• Have you been in a situation where you and the hiring manager had very different expectations?
• Have you had a good experience lately? What made it good?

Leave your question in the comments section here, or if you can fit it in 140 characters or less, we’ll take it on Twitter too. The really juicy questions we’ll take with us to the WordCamp discussion this fall. We’ll also let you know where to catch the live stream of our Wordcamp session if you’re not able to attend in person.

OK, let’s have it. We want to hear your top questions for hiring managers.

The amount of product giveaway at BlogHer is somewhat obscene–you should have seen the women vying for the chance to take home the Toy Story Mr. Potato Head toys!

So when 2,000+ women bloggers come together for the annual BlogHer conference, what are brands doing to stand out in the crowd, attract attention and tap into bloggers’ collective online influence? Check out these examples of a few of the brands and event sponsors that stood out to me:

Shine from Yahoo! – The Shine booth was a nice example of gathering user-generated content from an event. They asked women to share their story of reinvention–be it a new career, weight loss, love, etc. Women who had compelling stories were selected to tape video interviews complete with hair and makeup pampering. The videos were not only uploaded to Shine, but also were available to the bloggers to embed on their own blogs. I noticed a few other brands, including Walmart, used similar concepts.

Chevy Volt – Just like at SXSW, Chevy Volt sponsored the event’s Internet Cafe, a place where bloggers could charge up their laptops, netbooks and smart phones in between conference sessions. I thought this was a great example of connecting the brand to its key messaging while also serving as an excellent conversation starter among the spokespersons and bloggers in the room.

Ubisoft Just Dance 2 – Standing out in the crowd can be challenging, but it’s much easier to do when the crowd is at your booth! Ubisoft set up a stage for a dance-off to showcase their new Wii game, Just Dance 2. This served as an excellent product trial experience not only for users, but for the many spectators, too.

White House | Black Market – At an event like this, the value of swag cannot be overlooked. And the swag bags from White House | Black Market were seen everywhere! So much so that event attendees were using these bags more than the tote bags provided by the conference itself. It’s the high school clique mentality here–if the cool kids have the cool stuff, everyone else wants it too.

P&G – The “booth” for P&G was actually a 1500-square-foot house (larger than my apartment!) built on the show floor with each room showcasing a different household product. There was a lot going on in this house … product giveaways, contests and more. Despite the cool factor of this display, the product messaging from each room was lost on me by the time I left the booth.

The relationship protocol between bloggers and brands is still being defined, and questions abound regarding these cultural rules as the relationships between the two evolve. But for now it’s clear that brands are taking full advantage of getting their products in the hands of the stereotyped mommy bloggers.

As @juliey and I gear up for our Wordcamp Portland presentation in September, we’re focusing equally on the quality of our information and the quality of our presentation. Here are some tips we’re keeping in mind as we prepare:

1)      Dump the notes.

Granted, reading notes is a great way to avoid the audience, but it does not make for a dynamic speaker. If you must have notes, just write out a few bullet points and leave that paper on the podium.

2)      Know your ending.

The worst thing a speaker can do is go on too long. Know where you’re going to end, and end it there.

3)      End before the time limit.

See above.

4)      If you mess up, say, “Oh, I messed up.” Or, “I forgot to tell you this.”

The audience wants you to be human. Even though you’re the expert, they still want you to be real. They want a connection. Nothing makes you seem more human than humility.

5)      Listen to the audience.

Pay attention not just to what they’re saying, but also how they’re acting. Are they shifting in their seats? Gathering up papers? Chatting to one another? These are all signs that you’ve lost them. Time to change tacks. Try asking for questions or begin wrapping up.

6)      Have fun.

Smile, relax and enjoy yourself and the audience.

Are you ready to get on the mic? If so, leave a comment and let us know some of your favorite speaking tips or some great speaking opportunities in your community.

Here in Portland, we have some terrific opportunities for users of social media to meet up. My favorite is the weekly Beer and Blog that happens every Friday from 4 to 6 at the Green Dragon. This ostensibly began as an opportunity for people to get help with their blogs, but it’s transitioned into a group of people getting together and chatting. They have guest speakers and often people sponsor that day’s beer and french fries (bless those fine people). New people are always welcome and for old-timers like me, it’s a great place to catch up with friends.

We also have Ignite Portland, and any number of un-conference-camp camps. The faces become familiar, and over time, the people walking into these events must feel like Norm felt walking into Cheers.

People aren’t using social media just to meet casual friends. According to Marta Kagan’s deck, What the F**k is Social Media NOW?, one in six marriages last year were between people who met through social media. Conversely, the London Telegraph says that one in five petitions for divorce cited Facebook. Social media hath given, social media hath taken away.

I love the variety of people you can meet through social media. As a kid growing up in San Diego, I listened to radio station 91X. Robin Roth was the voice of 91X and my personal hero. While helping a client grow his Twitter following, I stumbled upon Robin’s Twitter profile, added her as my friend and before I knew it, we were making plans to hang out when she comes to Portland. Robin Roth was the closest thing San Diego had to Siouxsie Sioux. I still freak out when Robin @replies me.

As social media becomes more prevalent, our personal and professional networks will expand. We’ll have the opportunity to meet more people, make more friends and broaden our own interests.

Oh, and get married. Though I’m not married yet, when the day happens for my boyfriend and me, we’ll comfortably fit into that one in six that Kagan’s talking about. Thanks, Twitter!

What about you? What real life relationships have happened thanks to social media?

Melissa Lion: Will Condé Nast be able to pull up out of print media’s death spiral with a new revenue model? The New York Times article, Condé Nast Is Changing Its Blueprint, explores the possibility.

Sarah Biedak: Facebook has launched Facebook Questions, a Yahoo! Questions-esque service. This could be useful for seeking community feedback and research.

Darcie Meihoff: I have two favorites this week. Have you considered inviting a guest blogger to your blog? Get some helpful tips from HubsSpot’s recent post. I credit @DaveAtNorth for this one: a 14-page article from The New York Times, The Web Means The End of Forgetting, explores how your digital past is never forgotten and can haunt, or help you. Enlightening and a little frightening.

Erik Sebellin-Ross: New Forrester research shows that Foursquare doesn’t have a big enough user base to warrant its use in marketing efforts. Outside of major cities, sure . . .

Stefanie Week: Content is king, but only if it’s free. A new USC survey shows that zero percent of those polled would pay for Twitter. I think I’d have to agree.

Julie Yamamoto: Mashable reveals how to send an audio tweet.

Julie Ma: Having a case of writer’s block? Clarabela Media’s post, Nine Sites Every Freelance Writer Should Bookmark, will get anyone’s creative writing juices flowing.