The BlogWorld and New Media Expo 2009 is over, and the Skimlinks contingent is back on British soil after a mad weekend of networking and promoting our fabulous service.
Day One: Hardip, Joe and I arrived in Las Vegas on Wednesday, and we headed to the beautiful Wynn to meet up with the first-comers including the wacky @newmediajoe, @digitalandy and @gregarious and also marvel at the ridiculous animatronic karaoke frog. Ridiculous, but, of course, perfectly Vegas, as we would later find out.
We trudged back to our hotel at what would be the most resonable hour of the entire trip, and slept like a bunch of jet-lagged babies. Joe on the 4th floor, and Hardip and I on the 11th floor with our amazing view…
Day Two: We filled up on eggs and coffee before wandering over to check out our brilliantly placed booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
We created the foundations of the stand, and Hardip and I went off to pick a few extra bits and pieces for the booth. Five hours later, after a trip to the roughest part of town and a free ride from the manager of a Subway sandwich bar, we finally got back to our hotel.
After an outfit change, we made our way to Fat Tuesdays, to find Joe on his way to Bellagio’s for the TechSet party at The Bank. We took too long to take eat some horrible noodles for dinner, and caught Joe in transit again, on his way over to Caramel with @brett and the rest of the crew, where we met @benhuh and @mikeprasad who took us on a tour of the creepy talking trees and the chocolate fountain in the lobby at 3am in the morning.
Day Three: We got up on Friday with not a moment to spare before the official opening of the expo, and so, breakfast-less, we manned our booth for a full day of gabbing with the attending bloggers about the joys of affiliate marketing with Skimlinks.
The Guitar Hero proved a popular feature for the booth, with attendees battling it out through the day, and Hardip and I losing on purpose everytime we played (yeah, right). We got to see some pretty impressive skills from some people who obviously spend too much time playing pretend guitar, but we found our comfort zone cranking the bass on ‘Play That Funky Music’.
Joe did have a pretty intense session with @lewishowes and of course, there’s video evidence here.
After a wee nap back at the hotel, we traipsed down to Envy The Steakhouse for orgasmic steaks and hilarious conversation with the @marketleverage team, @rabeidoh and Rob from @bloggeries. From there, it was on to celebrity hotspot Lavo for some dancing, followed by a short limo ride to Planet Hollywood, where Hardip and I called it a night and left Joe to ‘network’ into the wee smalls.
Day Four: Another round of coffees and we were all set for our second, and final day of the expo. We had Patrick O’Keefe; Mr @ifroggy over for a few questions at our booth, as he spoke about managing online forums and his book of the same name. You can see the video of the interview here.
Highlights of the day including meeting the wandering Johnny Depp look-a-like who looked a lot a like…just from far away; the stealth impromptu interview by @jdlasica and giving away the Guitar Hero game and Nintendo Wii to @brettbum. Congratulations!
Before long it was time to head out again, this time to the Blogworld afterparty at the Hilton, which featured a fabulous pool-side BBQ, then onto the Scene-It Red Carpet party, with one last stop at Tech Karaoke, where it became clear bloggers are quite the extroverts when you give them a mic and a stage!
After an absolutely massive weekend, we left them to it, and crashed just in time to get up again for the epic trip home.
An awesome time was had by all, we met a load of great people and everybody got a kick out of all of our weird accents. Always good to have a bit of novelty factor, right?
