Last week Voce sponsored Ignite Portland 3.

Over 750 people packed into the Bagdad Theatre to watch 13 speakers talk for 5 minutes each on various topics. Each sponsor is given a moment on stage, so I proudly shared that Voce is looking for some Northwest brands to fire up.

IP3 was a great event for us to sponsor as Portland has one of the most attended of the Ignite series. Originally started by O’Reilly, Ignite has now spread to cities throughout the world.

We are looking forward to following this sponsorship with an event in Portland (Legion of Talk) where we will bring in Voce clients to share their successes and challenges with PR in social media. Stay tuned for more information about these bridge building events!

On Friday I’ll be attending/MC’ing BlogPotomac in the DC area. This latest un-conference is being organized by Geoff Livingston with some assistance from Debbie Weil. I’m glad to say many of the session leaders are longtime friends and colleagues and I look forward to the discussions.

I feel flattered that the event has followed the BlogOrlando model I started a few years ago. If I have my facts right I think Geoff returned from BlogOrlando this past year and said, “Let’s do this in DC!”

A number of other locations/events have sprung up in the past few years: BlogSavannah, SoCon, BlogPhiladelphia and BlogCarolinas to name a few. I’m glad the BlogOrlando concept has spread as it has. However, my original inspiration for BlogOrlando was BlogNashville which took place in 2005…seems like so long ago.

I hope to post some photos from the event and perhaps a recap, but I imagine most of the comments will come on Twitter.

Speaking of BlogOrlando, we’re holding our first planning meeting on June 26th.

Our own Matt Podboy is attending the OnHollywood Conference in LA the next few days. Usually, LA and Matt make an interesting combination.

You can follow his real-time commentary on Twitter.

Voce Nation wanted to say thank you to the crew of cardsharks that joined us last week for the second annual Interop Poker Tournament. Voce, NetIQ, and Barracuda Networks hosted the event as a chance for media and analysts to escape the grind of vendor briefings and reporting, unwind with peers and have a healthy dose of competition.

Poker pro Mark Seif was on hand to provide pointers on how to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Check out Shamus McGillicuddy’s post on the event for a first person account of the tourney.

Larry Howard of Infonetics Research took home top honors and bragging rights for 2008. Will he be able to defend his title in 2009? You’ll have to join us next year to find out.

More pics from the event are on the voce nation photostream.

Just two quick plugs for Josh Hallett and Mike Manuel this week…

Josh has a contributed story appearing in the May issue of PRSA’s PR Tactics, which was published online earlier this week. It’s about how practitioners can use social media to enhance and extend their media relations efforts. He also offers some tips on the importance of blogger relations (an excerpt from the article):

“Using blogs to reach traditional media sounds like the meeting of matter with anti-matter. Some say that blogs are the antithesis of media. Recent studies indicate that ever more journalists are looking to blogs for story leads and quotes, among other things. Combine this with the number of journalists who now count a blog as a publishing medium and the line between blogs and journalism is blurring more than ever.”

And Mike was up at the NewComm Forum this week, co-presenting a case study on corporate blogging with the good folks from PlayStation (an excerpt from his blog post).

“The case study chat with the new media team behind Sony PlayStation’s blog went well yesterday afternoon at the NewComm Forum, we actually covered a lot of ground - everything from content development and technical design to community management tactics and measurement. By the end of our session, the PlayStation guys had shared 15 “lessons learned” over the last year.”

Great stuff….

We’re living large at the Affinia hotel in Manhattan, talking about social media and making real-life friends (not just the virtual ones). We’re representing Voce at this week’s BlogHer Business Conference, and it’s been a great week so far. Here’s a quick recap:

Festivities started at a launch party for the New York City Moms Blog on Wednesday night. Graco and client Yahoo! sponsored the launch party; check out the Flickr stream. I’m a contributing writer for the Silicon Valley Moms Blog, and was excited to meet some of my fellow writers on the “other” coast.

One highlight of the evening was a special guest appearance by the producers from the Today show! Yes, Today is working on a “mommy blogger” segment to air later this month, and three of my fellow bloggers were interviewed. Very cool!

BlogHer Business started the next day (yesterday, actually), with some great speakers (including Method, HP and Graco) and included several interesting topics (SEO, podcasting, community-building, etc.). One thing is for certain: there are a lot of women blogging, and lots of companies marketing to them. More to come as the conference continues…

This past weekend I attended (and spoke) at SoCon 08 in Atlanta. On my personal blog I also posted this photo and note….we’re all equals. I led a mid-day recap session and showed this photo as well. The picture shows how the day started.

That’s what makes events like SoCon08 refreshing. The modified un-conference format gets a diverse group of people in a room. It’s not all PR/marketing, or business/VC…it’s everybody. The thing that unites the audience is the interest in the topic(s) and some geography.

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The past two days I’ve been attending/blogging the Strategy & Innovation Forum, a conference focussed on e-commerce which is hosted by Shop.org. When you get 500+ e-commerce folks in one room, the basic question, “How Does it Sell Stuff?” (props to Scott’s blog).

The photo above is from Andy Nulman’s session on mobile marketing. His message was direct and to the point, just like the message above.

Retailers are notoriously slow to adapt (sound familiar). One speaker joked that retailers always say, “We want to innovate…so, who else is doing this?”

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Does social media tend to drive people towards more isolation from the real world or the opposite? I was asked this question recently in an interview. What do you think?

I answered that it can do both, depending on the nature of the individual, i.e. if you’re already a bit of a loner then online communication can help drive your further away from society. However, I think from my experience that interactions online also help foster new real-world relationships and communications. A great example of this is conferences and events.

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Voce has been selected by AlwaysOn as the official press organizer for the upcoming OnMedia event, scheduled to occur on January 28-30, 2008 in New York City. Please visit the conference website for more info on this year’s event. We’ll be updating this blog with select pieces of conference coverage, live from the event. Much more to come, stay tuned!