Conference

So conferences are crazy things! Drinking, music, slides and conversation – not in priority order, but after the event there is apparently a ramp your Technorati authority. The Conference Authority Impact (CAI) is a fairly interesting phenomena which appears to increase your Technorati authority just for attendance, more or less.

So here is what I’ve noticed: spatially relevant’s “authority” went from minimal to horribly mediocre in just days, with NO apparent justification. Oh wait, I know why this may have happened. A bunch of people linked the attendee list and created “blog reactions” which have since my last point of reference raised my technorati authority.

The CAI might just be an interesting thing to understand.   What is the credibility of any social media benchmark?

So back to being an opportunist….

So I’ve think there are 3 things I have decided might theoretically extend the CAI: Write (novel), payback (appropriate) and provide a little visibility to the lessons learned directly or indirectly from the event. This is an indirect post.

Conferences as an Authority Generation Strategy

Conferences aren’t just a narrowcast placement opportunity for sponsors, but apparently for the participants as well. Most of these folks hopefully descended on Chicago with products to position and promote. Events represent a promotion channel for the participants’ product, their blog. Apparently not only can brands become humanized, so can bloggers.

So as you think about attending a conference, it might be important to develop an outreach plan to manage the lead nurturing cycles which could deliver increased authority, visibility and a follow up plan on how to use the CAI spring board post conference.

At the end of the day it appears conferences are essentially promotional channels for hocking your brand/blog and sharing tip, tricks and links from others in the room.

With CAI potentially being a real thing, I’m gonna plan a little better….   I’m contemplating logo swag for the next conference and an iPhone giveaway for the most insightful post on currency fluctuation.

Question: Is Authority Generation an expected, warrented or unintended by-product of attendance? Curious, as I’m not sure I did anything new except write a check, eat a bunch of room service and meet some folks.

…Another consideration could be that Technorati’s authority algorithm might need a change.