• Danielle said basically a bunch of medical terms that were over most marketers (at least this one’s head).
• Dr. Pradeep showed a really cool video which woke up the crowd.

On a whole, I wasn’t impressed at all with this session. The panel was too scripted and didn’t provide a lot of value.

I really like Jason’s point about planning. His point on “planning” is that its guessing. Strategic planning should be strategic guessing, financial planning should be financial guessing, etc.

Jason also wasn’t fond of the word “entrepreneur” and startups. He thinks that term scares more people away from business than encourage it. For startups, the principles of business doesn’t always work. You need money to be successful!

Having a good point of view is extremely important for a company. Each company should stand for something and have a voice. This helps keep decisions simple.

One point that really drove home was to have a core competency for your business. A good example was the hot dog stand. People aren’t going to come to your stand, they are going to come to your hot dogs!

I also like how Jason talked about selling your by-products. Growing up and working at my Uncle’s meat packing plant, they sold every part of the animal. Every part! For the interactive world, by products could be knowledge (key learnings) or technology frameworks.

I didn’t like what Jason said about new customers vrs old customers. His point was that customers can out grow you, and instead of adding new features, it is easier to let them go. His analogy was that there will always be more freshman than seniors in college. The golden rule in business is that its more profitable to keep existing old customers than soliciting new.

Although I haven’t read the book yet, I am going to the store here at SXSW to pick it up for the flight home. Jason ended with a great quote about apologies. He said that when you spill coffee on someone, you are sincerely sorry. You don’t say “I apologize for any inconvenience that this caused you”! The key to a great company is believing in your apologies.

I got a laugh today when I checked out my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn shows a “who viewed you also viewed” section. I can see how they would check out several other Ad 2 members who have had a similar career path. These included San Diego iPhone development company Treeline Interactive.

Barack Obama though? Are we underestimating ourself or is LinkedIn’s algorithm a little out of wack?

Justice was my first friend when I interned with the Indians back in 2002. He has provided guidance throughout my whole career. Its fun to work together now in the online world. Check out his stuff at Czar Justice.

Andrea started with a general introduction to search engine optimization. I was scared that this event was going to turn into a Search Engine 101 session! The event description made it sound like this was a more advanced session. Generally, for a good seo presentation, you have to be aware of your audience before hand. It is very hard, if not impossible, to speak effectively to beginner and advanced seo practictioners at the same time.

She did know her stuff and progressed up the SEO hierarchy. She pointed out Google Caffeine and changes that you should look for. I would love to see her in an advanced SEO session.

Darren Rush spoke about Cloud Powered WordPress at WordCamp La. Darren is a serial entrepreneur who is currently working on Koders.com, breitbart.com and biggovernment.com. His talk was geared towards wordpress performance, search and user experience.

Darren really emphasized the importance of cloud servers to help improve your site’s performance. Cloud servers allows you to utilize multiple (thousands) of servers to handle spikes of your traffic. You pay only for bandwidth, not the hardware. Rackspace just launched cloud serving in late 2008 and Amazon is one of the largest. I like to use MediaTemple, based in Los Angeles for my cloud hosting.

Darren also spoke about the importance of search. It is a critical part of your site’s uer experience. Search often gets pushed to the side because it is isn’t visually appealing. There are some good search plugins: sphinx, lijit and solr are some of them.

Solr hasn’t been adopted by the wordpress community yet. It was initially built for cnet, netflix, digg, aol and some other huge sites. The reason why it doesn’t work well with WordPress is that it’s based on java. PowCloud, a cloud hosting company does offer Solr with their hosting packages.

A good search function should have:

• Ajax – autocomplete
• Did you mean auto completing
• Suffix checking

If your site gets a ton of comments, then you may want to look into a cloud comment vendor. Automattic purchased intense debate, and disqus and echo are also in the space. Most of these tools are free right now.

Beau Lebens presented the meet the WordPress family at the WordCampLa Seminar. He is a lead developer at Automattic and has been there for over 4 years. This seminar took place at the beautiful Loyola Marymount university in Los Angeles.

The WordPress family consists of five projects:

• WordPress
• WordPress MU
• bbPress
• BuddyPress
• backPress

I’ve spoken before about my love for WordPress, I’m just going to speak about the other 4 WordPress projects.

WordPress MU

WordPress MU isn’t WordPress! It uses more server resources (memory, processing power) and it’s more complicated to run. The site admin is also responsible for updating plugins. Blog admins can’t install their own themes or plugins.

WordPress MU is going to merge with WordPress during version 3.0. If all goes well, you can set a configuration options and you can load directly all of the multi-user functionality. You can simply decide if you want to run MU or WordPress. Most companies just need to run the WordPress.

Example sites that run WordPress MU are wordpress.com. There are a thousand servers that run WordPress.com. They have a Hybrid system that allows it to work smoothly across all servers. WordPress MU has a ton of tables in the database. If you are looking to downgrade WordPress MU to regular Wordpress, good luck. We briefly attemped this for the Ad 2 site and quickly changed our minds.

bbPress

bbPress is a totally separate platform from WordPress; however it does share user tables (profiles, options). bbPress also shares login cookies. It is a very lightweight forum. I’m using it on the SDGCSA.com site, but it hasn’t been used very much. You can’t use a normal theme for bbPress, but it’s very easy to use the CSS from your normal theme. You really just have to stylize the header, background and footer.

bbPress runs the WordPress.org forums. I use this forum on a daily basis, and it’s as clean as it gets.

Buddy Press

BuddyPress started out as a project that started out as a social network called “chic speak”. It is a social network in a box. It’s WordPress MU + set of plugins + bbPress. Beau said that BuddyPress is a “make your own Facebook and bring your own terms of service”.

BuddyPress has a real clean interface and lets you set up a lot of the same functionalities as WordPress. Automattic uses BuddyPress as their intranet. Buddypress will be powering the new profiles on WordPress.org

backPress

The only project that I haven’t heard of before is backPress BackPress is Automattic’s latest project. backPress shares code library between WordPress and bbPress. It provides common web app functionality. This is more of the coding library, so it won’t appeal to the masses. It handles more of the scripting, handling and advanced functionality. The cool thing is that you can take WordPress code and then use it on your own project that is external to WordPress.

This project sounds awesome! There is a ton of great code in WordPress and BackPress lets you use it. Kudos to Automattic for creating this project.

The fun thing about this type of site, is there are many passionate baseball fans (like yours truly.)  Do you ever read the comments on sports sites?  I actively read Cleveland.com and follow Paul Hoynes, Bud Shaw, Terry Pluto and friends.  I know Hoynes from my travels with the Indians. The comments left are almost better than the articles themselves.

I would continue to blog on HermsDigital for various topics, including Motorola walkie talkies, the San Diego Golf scene, Ad 2 San Diego, the Professional Baseball Video Coordinators and more.

This blog is a lot of fun and I’ll keep pumping out the content. More online marketing topics will be found on my BigTuna Interactive blog as I won’t be writing any more of them for HermsDigital. In the near future, I plan on giving this site it’s 4th redesign and pimping out the layout even more.

Bottom of the SERP for my name

I’m a huge fan of this Google program as it gives you greater control of your search results page.