Unchained Internet Marketing Notes – Overview

Random Thoughts
A day and a half since I left Unchained Orlando, but my head is still spinning.  Maybe it was Orlando – the home of Disneyworld – that added to the surreal nature of the experience.  If you haven’t been there, Orlando is beautiful in a Disney kind of way: everything is clean and bright and just a little plasticized.  Maybe the buildings all use the same 7/8 scale that Disney uses, or maybe Unchained was just oversized… hard to say.

Over the next few days I am going to share a few of the gold nuggets I panned from the rapid flood of information that was one long, intense, ecstatic day at Unchained.  But not today.  Today I am still sifting and understanding.  Today I have only themes and simple data – points of interest that do not connect into a greater whole.  For new information to infiltrate and impact our daily activities it must be processed and that is where I find myself: clarifying the headers, organizing the outline and slowly expanding the void with pages and pages of ideas handed to me while I was there.  Bloodhound Unchained in 36 hours.  A blur of activity, a multitude of speakers – each sharing freely and every last one of them speaking much too quickly for my longhand chicken scratch – and laughing.  Laughing so much at times my sides hurt.

Dark Theme Emerges
The one theme I find over and over again is most assuredly not on Greg or Brian’s agenda, but the results speak for themselves.  Allow me a few words on most of the speakers and tell me if you see a thematic element:

• we opened with Greg Swann discussing the Greeks and the disciplined violence that was the Spartans
• you had Brian Brady sharing the dark secrets of being a Ninja in social media marketing
• Teri Lussier warned of a fatal addiction to the Tweet drug
• there was Kelley Koehler exhibiting the cool, detached efficiency of a hit man targeting Google
• Mitch Ribak covered 100mph marketing and proved that speed does kill the competition
• we were exposed to John Rowles’ killer app
• and finally, Eric Blackwell explained how to make the organically grown poison known as SEO

Is it just me, or was there a message here?  A call to arms, so to speak, that our competition did not (or could not) heed.

An Outsider’s View
These notes and those to follow are “an outsider’s view from inside the pound.”  Why?  Because I have a lot more in common with most of you reading this than I do with the speakers with whom I shared a stage.  Take a look at the people who spoke at this event: SEO experts, SMM inventers, Tech giants and Real Estate innovators.  This is the deep end of the RE.net pool and I try to stay out of it.  My area of specialty (such as it is) might be called the Passion of Marketing.  In that regard I try to be a very big fish in a relatively small pond.  I am what you might call a disciple of the Dan Kennedy school: take everything they will give, devour it, digest it, apply it and use it… boots on the ground and skins on the wall and all that.  I share all this so you know where I am coming from when I tell you to invest in yourself, invest in your business and invest in the next Unchained event.   The fee is ridiculously low.  (If I were running Unchained the cost would be higher by a factor of 8.)  Since I am not running it I will gladly pay what they ask.  But if you go, remember this secret:

Get Inside the Pound
Here you go, the secret to Unchained: find a way to spend time with the people behind this thing.  Go to lunch with them.  Offer to buy them dinner.  Stalk them in the hallways!  I had the great privilege of bunking with Greg Swann, Brian Brady, Eric Blackwell and Teri & Jaime Lussier.  It was like TWO Unchained events at the same time and gun to my head (there’s that violent imagery again) I couldn’t tell you which gave me more information.  If you have the opportunity to attend the next Unchained and they offer “Breakfast With (fill in your favorite speaker)”… take it!  Pay for it!  Just bring your pad and your appetite and I guarantee you will double your return.

Filed under: MARKETING, REALTORS, WORLD OF 2.0, Social Media Marketing, Unchained