MIMA Summit - Another Successful Event

Kudos to all that gave effort to the 2007 MIMA Summit held yesterday. I thought last year’s Summit was a success, but it was noticably more packed this year. I heard from a couple people that attendance almost doubled.

A couple quick notes:

Bret Busse from Evantage gave a great 30-minute presentation to P.I.M.P. your analytics reports. The acronym is “Planning, Imagery, Messaging, and Presentation”. His analogy was parallel to MTV’s “Pimp My Ride”. The premise is to pimp the reports to tell a story that makes marketing directors actually excited, rather than just providing normal graphs and charts. I thought that Bret Mentioned the session might soon be available to MIMA members, although I could be wrong.

Jason Fried, founder of 37Signals presented what wound up being a somewhat controverial keynote. A main point of his was that productivity soared when you were separated from teammates, thus allowing you to get in a zone.

I see both sides of this. At my last job, I loved the in-house comradery and the fact that I could look over my cube and ask a question and get it answered, even if it disrupted my co-workers workflow. ;) At the same time, I did not like going in on Saturdays to “zone in” for six hours knowing that no one would interupt me.

An unoffical count showed twelve current FindLaw employees and seven ex-employees were in attendance. Good times had by all.

Just as important, happy hour after the event:

I was able to talk to many familiar faces and got to meet a few new people, too. There’s a good number of people I did not get to meet and hope to next time.

Ending note, everyone did receive a really cool schwag bag to take home including a PC camera.