I’ve been lucky enough to go to quite a few conferences in the past few years. With each I learn something new. I’ve been to SEO, social media, wiki and technology conferences (I know, I’m a big geek), but BlogPaws was my first blogging conference. What made it all the more interesting is that it was the first conference that The Pet Wiki sponsored.

This might not sound like a big deal to most people, but for me it sure was. It meant that I needed to set up a 6 foot long table. I had never done that before. I don’t have a table cloth with a fancy logo just lying around to throw over a table, like a lot of the other sponsors did (they had obviously done this before). I had to get inventive.

Luckily I was traveling with my family. That’s right, I didn’t come from home, I came directly from a family vacation in Orlando (which was great, by the way). Everything that I needed to do for the conference I had to do on site. It was a bit nerve racking, but I luckily have the most supportive family EVER. They helped me come up with ideas for making the table fun and inviting. I am very thankful to them for helping me out. We pooled our resources and came up with something to be proud of.

The first thing we did was plan a bit ahead. I knew that I wanted to give stuff out at the conference. Since The Pet Wiki is an information and community site, I figured why not give out information? With the help of a very talented graphic artist named Ossa, we had bookmarks printed for “Why Do Dogs Bury Their Bones?” and “How Does Catnip Work?” They came out really nice.

Besides the bookmarks, I felt like doing a bit more. Ossa came through for me again (and on a very tight schedule) to make mini cookbooks for people to take. There are a lot of recipes for pets on the Wiki, so it just seemed like a natural choice. Now I thought of making a poster of what The Pet Wiki is, and how to use it, but instead I decided to put it on the inside cover of the book. I figured that people might pass by and look at the poster for a couple of minutes, but if they were to take the cookbook with them, they’d have the information there to read at their leisure.

I’m not sure if this was a good idea or bad idea, but I just couldn’t help myself. I used half of the book to promote my blog, Vegan Start. Veganism is something that I am passionate about, and I felt that pet people were the type of people that might be interested in alternatives to animal products. It seemed like a natural fit, and I hope that some people walked away with a little more knowledge and some very yummy recipes that they can make for their family.

With the cookbooks and the bookmarks, the table was still way too sparse. My brilliant daughter came up with the idea to let the animals do the talking. She created adorable posters with the animals asking the questions. Luckily she’s had experience in things like this before and knew exactly what to do. We bought poster board and she drew on them, glued them onto foam boards and cut them into interesting shapes to give more life to the table. They came out fabulous.

We also made 5 batches of sugar cookies and the girls decorated them with animal motifs. No two were alike. They came out so cute. At first I wondered why no one was eating them. I finally figured it out. Since it’s a pet conference, people were afraid that they were dog treats. Once we put up a sign that they were for human consumption, they started going. Most of the other tables had food for pets. I think that we were the only ones to have for people, so that threw them off a bit.

And of course we had a computer handy to show off the site. It was so exciting to be able to show off our new homepage. It’s been a work in progress forever. There’s nothing like a deadline for making it happen. I like working with talented people. I enlisted Ari, a very talented webmaster, that I used to work with. It was so nice to have it up and show it off.

I got so much great feedback from the conference. For people that were already familiar with The Pet Wiki, it was so nice to hear that people enjoy using the site. For people that didn’t know about it yet, it was great being able to tell them about it, and about how it can help them.

Besides all that, it was great seeing the people that I know from Facebook, Twitter and blogging. It was a great crowd of wonderful and passionate people. I look forward to doing it again!

On a side note, another great thing that I was able to do was to pick up a painting that I had commissioned from a very talented artist named BZTAT. I’d seen the progress that she’d been making on the painting on Facebook. Seeing it in person for the first time at the conference was amazing. Those pictures on Facebook just didn’t do it justice.

BZTAT spoke at the conference about a project that she is working on to spread awareness of the link between animal abuse and domestic violence. Okey’s Promise has been set up as a public art initiative that will be moved around to six different cities to help make people aware of this connection and what to look for to keep women and children safe. It’s meeting people like BZTAT that makes going to conferences like this so enjoyable and inspiring.

Wow, SXSW (South by South West) Interactive is over. The last 5 days have been so crazy and so amazing. I’ve been to other conferences before, but nothing has ever compared to this. It’s a conference on steroids.

The really funny thing about SXSW is that it’s not really a technology conference. The “Interactive” part was something that was added later. If you look on SXSW’s website, you can see that Interactive is the third tab, after Music and Film. If they are this amazing for tech, I can only image how amazing they are for music and film – the more established parts of the conference.

I’ve been to my share of tech conferences before. You might get one tech rock star for the whole conference, but here it was really hard to pick some of the sessions because they had so many of them, some of the sessions conflicted. I mean, how do you choose between Marissa Mayer and Matt Mullenweg? I went with my husband to the conference (he wrote a great blog post on The Best of SXSW) so at least I was able to compare notes after each session.

I love TED. I have never been able to go to a TED conference, but I’ve watched plenty of videos of speakers from their website. Word of warning: If you start watching videos on TED, you can get sucked in and spend your whole day on the site. They truly have mind expanding stuff on it. But only the elite get accepted to attend a TED conference. It’s actually free if you get accepted.

SXSW is open to everyone. It’s not free, but it’s fairly inexpensive for the magnitude of what it is. I would call it TED for the masses. Where else could you find people like Marissa Mayer (Google), Matt Mullenweg (WordPress), Barry Diller (IAC), Steve Krug (Don’t Make Me Think), Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine.TV), Guy Kawasaki, Sen. Al Franken, Paul Reubens (Actor), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jared Spool (UIE) and Matt Cutts (Google). That’s just to name a few.

Not only was the Austin Convention Center full, sessions spilled out into the surrounding hotels. There were somewhere in the area of 40 sessions per time slot, making it nearly impossible to choose from. It’s not just big names, it’s also interesting niche sessions.

Of course, sometimes this embarrassment of riches causes problems. I had to pass on my idol Gary Vaynerchuk because there was a panel of Vegan bloggers at the same time. More on Vegans Really Rock on my Vegan blog.

I’m so happy that I just happened to fall upon this one. I’m going to need to come back again next year!

Gift Horse Contest

Running The Pet Wiki is a lot of fun. I get to try new things all the time. As an experiment, I decided to throw a contest. This isn’t the first contest that I’ve thrown, but a lot more thought went into this one than the last minute contest that I threw together when The Pet Wiki turned 1 year old. This time around we went with a “Gift Horse” theme. It was fun to create the graphics and figure out how to put them in the site.

Here are the things that I’ve learned this time around:

Press Release – I’ve never had a press release before. I probably have had other opportunities to create press releases, but I never did. There are a bunch of free sites to post them to, as well as pay sites. This time around, I went for free. The pay ones are supposed to be much better for SEO. Next time, I’ll try those as well.

Here’s the list of free sites that we came up with:

• http://www.prlog.org
• http://www.businesswire.com
• http://www.free-press-release.com
• http://www.1888pressrelease.com
• http://www.i-newswire.com
• http://www.your-story.org
• http://www.freepressindex.com
• http://pressexposure.com
• http://www.pressmethod.com
• https://www.pr.com

How to schedule post to Facebook with images – This one was a tricky one. There are a lot of services that allow you to schedule updates to Facebook statuses, but there is only one that I found that allowed me to post url’s with images. It’s a bit unintuative, but Sendible lets you attach images to the post. After you set up a regular Sendible account, here’s how to do it:

1. Click on the message tab
2. Select the account that you want to send the update
3. Just above the message area, there is an Add URL link, click it
4. Paste your url in the url box and click the Load Images from URL button
5. Check the image that you want to use
6. Click the Attach to Message button
7. Type what you want to say
8. Click the Insert Only button by the url link
9. Click the Schedule link (over the message)
10. Set the time you want it to post

Make sure to include the actual link in your post (Step 8). If you don’t, all you get is the picture without the url. I learned this the hard way.

Not the smoothest process in the world, but it works. I figured out how to do this for the contest, but there is no reason that I can’t use this all the time. It’s great.

Preposting tweets – I’ve been preposting a few tweets a day for a while now. I like to announce the new pages that get added to The Pet Wiki. My favorite tool for preposting is CoTweet. There are other tools that allow you to prepost, but CoTweet allows you to set up mulitple users and multiple accounts. It’s great for sharing. I used to use Hootsuite, but I found the frames annoying. It also bothered me that it stole the url – I consider that a very important part of branding. CoTweet also lets you plug in your bit.ly (url shortener) account and gives bit.ly stats right in the program. Hootsuite has ow.ly, and has its own stats.

Sending emails – I sent emails around Christmas time, but  wasn’t really happy with the way that they came out. This time around, I used MailChimp and I am so happy with the results. They made sending emails a breeze. I was able to use one of their templates and stick my logo and content in to make it my own. Really easy and really beautiful.

Blogging - The Pet Wiki has it’s own blog,  Omer’s Scratching Post, written by my cat, Omer. The little guy has been keeping his readers up to date for people to know what’s going on in the contest.

Contest sites – Besides posting to PR sites, we also posted the contest to some contest sites.

Prizes need to be relevant – I am looking for contributors. That’s the main focus of my contest. If I were to give a standard prize like a generic Amazon.com gift certificate, people who are not really interested in my site might try to get the prize, and I would not be in a position of creating a long term relationship with my users. I chose a great, inspirational horse book (is that the gift horse or the horse gift?)

That’s all I have for now. I don’t have incredible expectations for this contest, but it’s been a fun test and has expanded my knowledge of how to get things done. I can’t wait until the next one.

While that’s all fine and good, why would I bring that up in my blog? Because I was expecting totally different user behavior for The Pet Wiki on Superbowl Sunday than I got. Instead of the number of visitors being down for Sunday, it was up. I had incorrectly assumed that people would be too busy getting their game on to pay any attention to their pets. I guess I was wrong.

What surprises me more than just being high traffic for a Sunday was the fact that I didn’t really do all that much to drive it. I’ve been working at creating internal links on pages to make the pages easier to navigate and to make it more friendly for SEO for the last few days – nothing that would have impacted this past Sunday, and spent very little time on Social Media. I’ve spent more time tweeting other people’s pages than my own. While that may build trust in the long run, which leads to brand loyalty, which leads to traffic, I have no idea what went on this past Sunday.

Even when I look at the pages that got the most traffic, I don’t notice anything strange. If there were a spike in a certain page that could help explain it away, I could understand, but the percentages were still the same for the most popular pages.

Don’t get me wrong, I like traffic, both explained and unexplained. The problem is that the unexplained type is really hard to reproduce. Since I’m kind of new to the pet content field, maybe I just don’t realize that this is the norm instead of the exception. I know that I was also pleasantly surprised on Thanksgiving to see a growth in traffic. Christmas and New Years were down, as expected.

I take the numbers that I see very seriously. I try to correlate what I do with what effect it has on the site, but sometimes I’m just left wondering.

They say that the job of the future will be in statistical analysis. With the ability to collect so much information, the need for people to make sense of it all will be way up there.

Maybe what I need to learn from this is that football really is a very animalistic sport. Maybe because the Colts are a pet, it made more people think about their pets and they went on the site more. (Sarcasm – I don’t really believe this.) I guess that I’ll wait until next year and check out the numbers again before I draw any conclusions.

What kind of numbers did you see on Super Bowl Sunday? Hopefully better than Peyton’s.

Home Sweet Home

After figuring out what color to paint my office a few weeks ago, I finally got down to the job of actually painting it. If you read my post on “What Color Should I Paint My Office?“, you should already know that I chose blue for its ability to enhance creativity.

I was lucky enough to get my son involved in this endeavor. He went the high road and I went the low road. Here are my room-painting take-aways:

• Talk to someone in the know: Especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. When I went to the hardware store to buy paint and all the painting accessories, I immediately went for the new fangled brushes that were supposed to be all the rave. The guy behing the counter told me to get a roller and a couple of plain brushes, and there was no need for anything else. I got both. The newer ones dripped paint all over the place. Find mentors and listen to them.
• Make your own mistakes: Using the brushes that were supposed to be better winded up costing me a lot of extra time, but if I didn’t buy those brushes, I’d always be wondering what I was missing. It’s good to make mistakes. That’s what caused people to grow.
• Duets are more fun than solos: I really enjoyed painting with my son. I could have done the whole thing by myself, at least I’d like to believe that I could have, but sharing it with someone else made time fly by.
• Open a window: Airing things out is always a good idea. This goes way beyond painting. When you feel like you are getting nowhere on something, take a walk and get some air. Clearing your head will give you new perspective.
• Touch it up later: The most important part of any project is getting it done. It won’t always come out perfectly the way you planned, but you can always make it better later. It’s better to get something out and fix it, than to not release anything at all.
• Savor what you’ve done: All in all, I have to say that I’m pretty proud of myself (and my son) for the job we did. It’s more than OK to give yourself a pat on the back for your accomplishments.

With all this blue around, I’m feeling pretty darn creative. For my next project: landing page redesign for The Pet Wiki. Now I’m ready.

I, like many other Americans, have been enjoying my weekly fix of American Idol. I live in Israel, so I usually don’t get to see it until Saturday night. I usually try not to know what’s going on until Saturday night, but this time I couldn’t help myself. Besides, being on both Facebook and Twitter, I knew that I was bound to find out anyway, so I threw caution to the wind.

Kris Allen won. Everyone was surprised. Well, almost everyone. After Danny Gokey lost last week, I told my husband that Kris was going to get most of Danny’s votes, and I guess I was right. Danny and Kris have similar singing styles and they appeal to the same crowd. Warning: This is only speculation – I have no evidence.

On the other hand, looking at Google search results from the past few years and trying to figure out a winner doesn’t seem to be the way to go either. Mashable published an article yesterday called American Idol Winner: Can Google Predict the Results? No one said Google knows. If you were to follow years of search results, the pattern would predict that Adam Lambert was a shoe-in.

Adam is a lot more colorful than Kris. I have to admit that I did look Adam up on Google, but not Kris. I didn’t vote, but if I would have, it would have been for Kris. I just like the way that he sings better – less screechy.

Another thing that I find pretty amazing is the amount of anger that people have that Kris beat Adam. Maybe it’s because Twitter has just gotten a lot more mainstream and everyone can let their feelings out in 140 characters or less, but I really felt the anger and shock from the tweets right after the broadcast. Tweeple seem to be big Adam fans. Either that, or the Adam fans are just more vocal.

This has been the most successful American Idol ever. Even with the ecconomy going down the drain, American Idol is more than holding its own. It’s a sensation that is growing. Perhaps it’s because of all the financial uncertainty that people want to believe that they can come in off the street and belt out some tunes and become loved by millions. It’s a belief in a dream that anyone can make it.