This is a post about Pubcon but not from a session standpoint. I know there are plenty of those out there already. In fact here are a few of the session recaps and slides that some of you might enjoy.
This post is specifically about some of the nightly events we attended. All of these events were so much fun we wanted to put together a thank you post and recap how much fun we had.
In case you don’t know about us (McKremie) we are a small firm out of Orange County, California. We have three and a half employees. OK, we don’t really have a half employee but rather three full-time employees and one part-time 20-30 hour a week employee. Two of us went to Pubcon, myself (Anna) and Stuart McHenry the head of our company. Although this was my first Pubcon Stuart has attended numerous Pubcon’s going back to 2005.
Our first night in town we went to the Raven Tools Poker Tournament. Arienne Holland of Raven did a great job organizing and hosting this event which was held at the Wynn Resort. Each participant received a keepsake card protector that had Raven’s logo. Did I mention that it cost the player nothing? Yep, Raven is that cool plus they gave out over $2,000 in cash prizes.
I didn’t play myself as I don’t feel that comfortable at the game, so I mingled and talked to non-players and people that got knocked out. Stuart, on the other hand, loves poker and even though he didn’t make it that far (better luck next year) he said he really enjoyed himself. He also lost a side bet to Ben Cook which cost him a Jackson.
Stuart explained “We were very fortunate to have some really nice people at our table. Two of them seemed to really know what they were doing. Patrick Keeble the CEO of Raven Tools and Brent Csutoras of Kairay Media had obviously played more than their share of poker. Both looked like they could be on ESPN WSOP TV Shows.”
He was sandwiched between Mike Ramsey from Nifty Marketing and Rich Farr a conversion rate expert from Click Advisors. On the other side of Rich was his partner Theresa Baiocco who seemed to get a lot of Stuart’s chips.
Pictures During Raven Event:
Mike Ramsey, Stuart McHenry & Anna Mackey (me)
Arienne Holland
Brent Csutoras
Patrick Keeble
Instead of hanging out at the Wynn bar all night we decided to go see Mike King (Director of Inbound Marketing for iAcquire) perform at the Beauty Bar in downtown Las Vegas. We have read a few tweets from Mike on how he was a rapper and we were excited to see how good he really was.
More on MC Mike in a bit. First, the Beauty Bar is an interesting place, which is geared towards a younger grunge crowd and awesome prices on beer, if you like beer. We paid a $5 cover (yep, cheapo for Vegas) but the beer crowd got unlimited $0.05 beers for the first hour. Definitely, a very relaxed place to listen to live music and get your drank on.
OK, so Mr iPullRank should probably change his name to iFlowMaster or something like that. He was good. The best SEO rapper we’ve ever seen. In all seriousness, he was really good and not just for an SEO but even as far as rappers go. The highlight of the night was when Mike did this magic trick rapping thing. I know sounds strange typing this but follow along and you’ll get the picture. He covered the top half of this head which included his eyes with a shirt. Then he asked audience members to bring up objects for him to rap about. What blew my mind was not only did he guess every object correct but he put it in a rhyme. The crowd went crazy and was totally into this and Stuart and I had a great time watching.
Beauty Bar Pictures:
Mike King & Anna Mackey
Mike King
Mike King Blindfolded
Alan Bleiweiss puts on this awesome dinner event during Pubcon called Epic Dinner. The dinner is free! All you have to do is get on the list via Twitter before it fills up. Alan seeks sponsors for the dinner which in return cover the costs for everyone else. We were proud to be one of the many sponsors that helped make the event possible. A special shout out to Carlos Fernandes of ISOOSI for being the Platinum Sponsor.
Epic Dinner was held at Pampas Brazilian Grille located in the Miracle Mile Shops adjacent to the Planet Hollywood Resort. If you have never been to a Brazilian style grill before you are in for a treat. If you love meat you would be in heaven. Meat, meat and more meat show up magically to the table every few minutes. Bacon wrapped filet mignon, sausage, trip-tip, grilled chicken, ham, pork, and more beef than I can remember. Not to worry there were plenty of non-meat choices for the rest of us.
The best part of the meal was meeting new people. Epic Dinner is 150 online marketers all at one dinner. Our table alone had some super interesting people. I met Trish Carey who does social media marketing for a university in the Portland area and Jim Robinson who is the SEO Director for Nasdaq. We also sat and chatted with Bruce Greer a web marketer from Nova Scotia and Steven Ferrino a developer turned SEO who also happen to help sponsor Epic Dinner. There were so many people we wanted to see and meet but with 150 people at one dinner, it was a little crazy.
There is so much to learn during a conference but the most valuable things are the connections you take away. It was so wonderful connecting with people from all over the world that share in our common interest of online marketing. I’m excited and cannot wait for my next Pubcon.
Pictures of Epic Dinner:
Alan Bleiweiss
Me, great picture Michael!
Jim Robinson
Bruce Greer
A special thanks goes to Michael Dorausch (Chiropractor, SEO) who took most of these great pictures during the Raven Event and Epic Dinner.
Michael Dorausch
