If you missed last nite’s #Blogchat, here is the transcript.

I’ve been so excited about the lineup for October that I could barely wait till today to get this post up!  We’ll have TWO amazing co-hosts plus #Blogchat will have its first sponsor!  Here’s the lineup:

October 3rd – Brian Clark (@CopyBlogger) Co-Host on “How to Create Compelling Content For Your Blog”.  Brian will teach us how to create content that is not only search engine-friendly, but that also engages our readers.  And he will also show us how to improve our headline writing, including making them more interesting, but also consider SEO implications and making them more ‘shareable’ on social sites.  Brian is an absolute genius at improving boring headlines, as well as creating more interesting content.  I cannot wait to have him join us so we can learn from him!

October 10th – SPONSORED #Blogchat – Grant Griffiths (@GrantGriffiths) from Headway Themes will join us to discuss “How to Choose a Template For Your Blog”.  This will be the first sponsored #Blogchat, and it will be broken into 2 parts.  The first 30 mins will focus on discussing which elements you should consider when choosing a blog template.  Then in the 2nd 30 mins, we’ll discuss if you should go with a free blog template, or if you should purchase a premium template such as the one Headway offers.  This would be the perfect opportunity for #Blogchat participants to learn more about what premium blog templates offer, and to ask Grant any questions you have about Headway, such as its price, features, and support.  Or if you’re undecided if you should stick with a free template or go with a premium, we’ll try to help you decide!

October 17th – Shannon Paul (@ShannonPaul)  Co-Host on “How to Respond to Comments on Your Company Blog”. Shannon has one of the most extensive corporate social media backgrounds on the planet.  Before taking on her current role as Social Media Manager for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, she helped shape the social media strategies for WeSeed and the Detroit Red Wings.  She’ll be joining us to tackle a topic she’s been successfully dealing with for years, how companies should handle and respond to comments on their blog.  She just wrote a fabulous post detailing how to handle this, with a bonus slideshare deck!

October 24th – TBA

October 31st – OPEN MIC ON HALLOWEEN! Holy crap this might be more awesomeness than I can stand.  We’ll have to have some fun with this, maybe show up in our favorite monster avatars?  Hmmmm….let me think on this.

Seriously, is that one incredible line-up, or what?  Now I wanted to close with a word on sponsors and co-hosts.  If your company is interested in sponsoring a future #Blogchat, then please check out this page for more information.  The 2nd Sunday of every month is reserved for sponsorship, with November the 14th being the first available slot.  All sponsorship slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis.  If you want to reserve a slot, you’ll need to contact me at least 2 weeks before the slot you want, so we can get your payment processed, plus I want at least a week prior to properly promote your sponsored #Blogchat.  The link above has more information on topic matter, but for the most part, I am looking for topics that will promote your company/offerings, but that also address topics that #Blogchat participants need help with.  Check out the topic for this month’s sponsored #Blogchat above, as an example of what I am talking about.  And also think about ways that your sponsorship could also benefit #Blogchat participants.  Maybe a 10% off coupon, or a trial subscription to your site/service.  If your sponsorship creates value for #Blogchat participants, then it will benefit you by creating goodwill with and positive reviews from #Blogchat participants.

Now, as for Co-Hosts.  As #Blogchat has grown in popularity in the last few months, a lot of people have started asking me if they could co-host a #Blogchat.  Moving forward, #Blogchat will have one co-host a month, on the 1st Sunday of every month.  Currently, I have November’s co-host booked (And it’s another amazing co-host, I can’t wait to share who it is!), and am talking to a couple of people about co-hosting in December and January of next year.  So if you are interested in co-hosting, please understand that we’ll need to come up with a blogging topic that you can teach on that makes sense for the #Blogchat audience, and also understand that the earliest you could join as co-host would probably be January of 2011.

That’s it! Once again, thank y’all SO much for coming every week to #Blogchat!  The bar just keeps getting higher but I think we’ll have an awesome November in store for y’all as well 😉

Last week in Dallas I led a workshop at #Optsum called Think Like a Rockstar, that looked at how rockstars connect with their customers and turn them into fans.  And what companies can learn from rockstars in cultivating their own brand advocates.  I included several examples of how rockstars connect with and embrace their fans.

But a couple of days ago I realized that I left out one of the best examples of a rockstar embracing his fans.

By the late 1960s, Johnny Cash’s career was on its downward slide.  His constant problems with drugs, as well as the fading popularity of country music, had conspired against Cash to leave his star shining at a flicker of what it had once been.  That’s when fate intervened in 1968 in the form of a California prison.

In 1955, Cash recorded the song “Folsom Prison Blues’, a song that was immediately popular with inmates across the country.  In fact, many of them would write to Cash asking him to perform at their prison, and Cash actually did this several times over the next decade.

“John looks as mean as they do, and they identify with him”, Cash’s wife June would later explain.

Still, a decade later by 1968, Cash’s career needed a jumpstart before it drifted away.  This was when Cash made the bold move of requesting that his label allow him to perform another prison concert, but this time he suggested that the label record the concert as an album.  His label at the time, Columbia, agreed, and Cash along with The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three as well as June, went to California to rehearse for the trip.

One of the main focuses of the rehearsal time was to learn a song called Greystone Chapel, a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley.  Cash performed two sets at Folsom Prison on the morning of January 13th, 1968.  Both sets closed with Greystone Chapel, and featured Cash performing for hours just a few feet away from hundreds of screaming fans, some of who also happened to be murderers.

Yet when this concert was released to the public, it instantly became a huge success.  The energy at the prison on that day was electric, and Cash fed off that and gave the performance of his career.  The performance and album revitalized Cash’s career, and resulted in what many rock historians view as one of the greatest performances of all-time.  All this happened because Johnny Cash was willing to embrace his fans, even if it meant going to prison to do so.

But companies aren’t always so willing to embrace their fans if they don’t approve of their behavior.

In 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz became the darlings of the internet with a series of videos where they dropped Mentos candies into Diet Coke, then filmed the geysers that resulted.  The videos went viral and brought instant internet fame to Grobe and Voltz, and sparked imitators all across the world to start buying Mentos and Diet Coke for their own ‘experiments’.

But the two companies that make Mentos and Diet Coke had decidedly different reactions to this sudden fanfare.  While Mentos completely embraced this playful activity (and the surge in visibility that it gave their candy), Coke all but chided their customers for ‘playing’ with their product, when they should be drinking it.  Eventually, Coke realized that their customers weren’t going to stop ‘playing’ with Coke, and tried to launch their own version of these videos in the form of a contest on their own site.  Of course, the popularity of this move paled in comparison to the original videos created by Grobe and Voltz.

Yet on the other hand, Mentos scored a big payday as a result of the videos, seeing sales spike 20% in 2006, the largest such increase for the company at the time.  Mentos realized that ultimately their customers were buying and enjoying their product, so they embraced them for doing so.

How far would your company go to embrace its fans?

Pic via Flickr user PearlyV

At one point on Thursday during her session at Optimization Summits in Dallas, CK mentioned a type of technology and how marketers could utilize it effectively.  Then she mentioned another, and the audience was so enthralled that an hour-long discussion on just these tools commenced.

Was she talking Twitter?  Facebook?  Blogs? Hell no, she was talking QR codes and Geo-Fencing.

Want more? Chris Penn was talking email marketing, Geno Church was talking creating customer evangelist movements. Even those of us that did discuss social media, did so in the context of combining it with other areas.  Jason Falls talked about improving the SEO of your company blog, I talked about learning from rockstars to use social media to cultivate brand advocates.

This is one of the things I loved about #Optsum, Tami put together a stellar speaking lineup.  Yes, I am probably biased since I am friends with most of these speakers, but I learned something new in EVERY session I sat in.  And you have to remember that most of these speakers I had already heard before.  But they brought something completely new to the table for attendees, and gave them a completely new way of thinking about improving their marketing efforts.  In fact I would rank the speaking lineup at this event on par with Social South 2009 and the first Digital Marketing Mixer in 2008 as being the best group of speakers at any event I’ve attended.

The sessions were all engaging, and the speakers made a point of getting the audience involved.  Most of the sessions were fairly well-attended, even though there were up to 8 tracks available for some slots.  More on that in a moment.

The content was top-notch, and the speakers were excellent.  At the end of the day, that’s probably the most important factor in determining if an event was worth your time.

Here are the things I didn’t like about #Optsum, and I want to mention these to help other event planners in organizing similar events.  But I should point out that Tami has been interacting with attendees and based on their feedback, will likely improve most or all of these points for the next event.  Which is another reason why Tami rocks!

First, #Optsum was running alongside Brainstorming, which is a much larger event aimed primarily at the Apartment industry.  #Optsum usually had 4 tracks going at once, and if Brainstorming did as well (as it did for much of Thurs), then attendees had to choose between EIGHT tracks, assuming they bought tickets to both.  I noticed higher attendance in the sessions on Friday, and I am sure this factored into it.

Second, I hated the layout of the hotel.  It was absolutely huge, so big that it covered two adjacent blocks.  Which meant that knowing that the session you wanted to go to was on the 1st floor wasn’t enough, you also needed to know which side of the street on the 1st floor it was!  Which made for a LOT of running around.  And the directions posted in the hotel weren’t very helpful and the maps were very hard to read.  This wasn’t really Tami’s fault, it was a byproduct of the Sheraton just being too damn big and confusing.

Other than those two areas, the event itself was wonderful and at $500 or so for admission, it was an absolute steal of a bargain for attendees for 2 days of learning.  And I have to say that Tami and her team did a fabulous job working with me as a speaker to get me to the event on time, on coordinating all my travel, and everything.  In fact it was probably the best experience I have had so far with event organizers.

Below is the deck from my Think Like a Rockstar workshop.  I was proud to say that the session was very well-received, and the deck itself was the biggest I’ve ever made.  If you attended, thank you SO much for doing so, I was thrilled with the turnout, I believe the room was full by the time the session got started.

All in all, I would heartily recommend #Optsum to anyone that is considering it, and if Tami asks me to speak at the next one, I would accept in a second.  It was a wonderfully informative and valuable event, and I honestly didn’t hear one negative word about any of the speakers or sessions, which is actually quite rare.

If you attended #Optsum, what did you think?