Dallas Digital Summit 2014

I had a great time presenting my talk on ROI for Digital Marketing at the Dallas Digital Summit this past week! To commemorate, I thought I’d provide a quick report for the Strongpages blog to document our trip.

Report from DDS 2014Dallas Digital Summit

Adrienne and I drove up to Dallas early on Tuesday and caught the entire afternoon of sessions.  I enjoyed an excellent presentation on video from Jeff Perkins, another good one on disruption from Will Clevenger, an interesting one on mobile from Michael Griffith, and a not-so good one on SEO content from a party that will remain nameless.  All in all it was a full and very informative afternoon. We enjoyed the post-conference dinner and happy hour, but we were beat when it wrapped up, so we headed back to our rooms for the night.

On Wednesday, I was feeling good and well prepared for my upcoming talk. After some morning sessions, I particularly enjoyed the combined lunch Keynote Presentation from Matt Wallaert, a Behavioral Scientist at Microsoft, who talked about all the different things competing for your attention online (and in your day-to-day life), although it was a bit sprawling in terms of subject matter.  In any case, I would be speaking a bit after 2pm, so after lunch I headed over to catch the sessions prior to my own.

My lead-in speaker was Matt Byrd, an email marketing expert and a very funny and engaging speaker.  He set the bar pretty high with a lot of good jokes in his presentation. Good job Matt! Then it was time for me to go.

My Own Presentation

Now first of all, there was something that made this conference very special and personal for me, and helped make me feel particularly at ease at the conference.  If you’ll check out the image above you may notice my initials, “ds” (i.e., “Danny Strack”) used somewhat prominently on and around the stage.  In fact, as I gave my talk on this very stage, at that podium, I was basically standing directly over a two-foot neon sign of my initials.

Anyways, there were probably 150-200 people in the audience, and it went well.

I gave a presentation entitled “Fun with ROI – 2015 Digital Marketing Budget Analysis Made Simple”, in which I talked about dividing spend into three groups: “Core Spend”, “Experimental Spend”, and “Branded Spend”.  I also presented my “SP-8000 ROI-CALC” ROI Calculator, which I built from an old electronic Gin Rummy game:

ROI Calculator image for Blog

 

It’s pretty useful. If only it was real. Contact me if you’d like a pdf copy of my full presentation, or if you just want to talk about ROI.

A Note on Gauging Success in Public Speaking

As a frequent public speaker, I’ve learned to gauge my performance by three main audience-related factors:

  • Attention – Do people in the audience seem engaged? Are they looking at me or their phones? Are they smiling (or hopefully laughing) at my jokes.
  • Attendance – Does anyone leave? If new people arrive, do they stay?
  • Engagement Afterwards – Once I’m done talking, are there people that want to chat and follow up, and perhaps exchange business cards?

By all three of these factors, I felt good about the way my talk went.  I didn’t get as many laughs as I might have liked, but definitely big smiles all around, no one left, the people who arrived late stayed, and if anything, I was overwhelmed by the positive response at the end of my talk. That was the only point where I felt ill-prepared, because there were too many people who wanted to talk! I do hope that I was able to pay enough attention to each of them.

Conclusion

In any case, the day closed out with a few more sessions and an excellent final keynote from the Wizard of Moz, which was informative and engaging as always.

All in all, I met a lot of great people and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing some of them again at future conferences!