Red Chair Portland – Recap

… And we have lift-off.

First things first. I want to thank my partners and sponsors in Portland for making #RedChairPdx a success – not only the event itself, but the launch of the entire series: Ant Hill Marketing, Webtrends, and 52Ltd. With very little time compared to a lot of other events, and more importantly very little supervision, they were able to pull off the logistics and marketing that ultimately made these two days of training possible. Also HUGE thanks to everyone who registered and attended either (or both) events.

This is a video I made before leaving Portland:

So, to recap:

Thursday March 11 was Red Chair “Executive,” the full-day session that aimed to provide executive level delegates with a framework with which to bake social media into their business. We explored the nature of social communications, the difference between social media and socialized digital communications, the types of SM-build scenarios (centralized vs. decentralized), the phases of integration across the enterprise, what each phase entailed, working across silos, hiring and developing talent, building an IT ecosystem to foster internal knowledge sharing and collaboration, the customer support/community management/PR triumvirate, the legal underpinnings of Social Media usage for companies, how to manage Social Media from within every department while keeping all communications “on brand,” how to properly approach Social Media measurement, and lots. lots more. The session was held at downtown Portland’s Executive MBA center, which was pretty ideal, really. Centrally located, spacious, full A/V capabilities, etc. For this first event, we managed about 15-16 delegates, three of who flew up from California to attend. In terms of numbers, we expect that attendance will grow into during the rest of the year, but at a hard cap of 35 seats per session, hitting almost half that with our very first event – with no momentum yet – more than met expectations for the launch.

Friday March 12 was Red Chair “Studio,” held at the Webtrends headquarters, also in downtown Portland. This event was aimed more towards mid-level to account-level managers, and was essentially a half-day version of “Executive” the day before. Maximum attendance in the Webtrends training room was 36, and we filled 35 seats. So… Just one seat shy of being sold out. Again, not too bad for a launch. In this session, we focused a little more on management and measurement than build and integration. As with “Executive,” brilliant crowd. And a complex mix of specialties to boot: Copywriters, Social Media directors, agency account execs, digital strategists, PR professionals, content managers, creative directors, marketing consultants, etc. We even scored a quick preview of some of Webtrends’ new features and a demo of its pretty clutch Facebook capabilities. (If you haven’t looked into Webtrends’ tool yet, you should.)

“Executive” attendees all received a thumb drive loaded with the presentation. “Studio” attendees will be given access to the Day 2 presentation – soon to be posted to Slideshare. To anyone not in attendance, sorry, the presentation will be password-protected for now. For now, access to the information and the slides is granted to Red Chair attendees only. But don’t fret, now that we have proof of concept with the success of #RedChairPdx, Sessions are sure to come to a city near you very soon.

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