On March 2nd, 2011, marketing superstar and best-selling author Seth Godin honored his Orange County fans with a return visit to a Linked OC event and the venue this time was brand new and beautiful Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall; inspiring to see what landmarks Swedish immigrants can leave behind! It was also gratifying to see that many of my students were able to make it for this terrific event. A special thanks to the host of the evening, Bryan Elliott, who made this happen and for recognizing our Chapman University volunteers from the stage. Many thanks also to the many students of mine who volunteered at the event! Finally, thanks to Seth Godin for an excellent talk on his latest book, “Poke the Box” and for encouraging us all to take more initiatives! For some more of my pictures from the event, please click here and for many professional pictures from the event, please check out Pixel That Photography!

David O. Sacks, Founder/CEO at Yammer, Inc., and at Geni, Inc. and former COO of PayPal, generously shared insights on technology startups and social media marketing in the MBA class of Marketing Professor Niklas Myhr at Chapman University. Best IT startups have a viral component to them like all three he has been involved with. Buying eyeballs with ads quickly gets very expensive. Beware feature creep, launch once you have a “minimum viable product” and get the snowball rolling!

The setting was beautiful at the St Regis Hotel & Spa in Dana Point and the big crowd including my students had high expectations. Bryan Elliott impressed by keeping his introduction entertaining and crisp before Shelene Bryan did a great job in further warming up the audience with an inspiring story about her Skip1.org, check that out! It was good seeing her again after her very successful appearance at the Innovation & Humanity Summit at Chapman University last month. She brought her husband Brice along this time and they seemed to be a really fun couple to hang out with. When Seth came in and got started, you would have been able to hear a pin drop in the audience, as we were all captivated both by the message and by the delivery which was simply world-class and hopefully, I picked up a clue here and there in terms of presentation technique. I posted some pics from the event on Flickr at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/niklasmyhr/