Powering Up for Trade Shows

SPEAKER_1 (0:06)

This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall (0:15)

Good morning, welcome to Marketing Over Coffee, I'm John Wall.

Christopher Penn (0:17)

I'm Christopher Penn.

John Wall (0:19)

And it all felt like a rock here. I had a friend about five days ago, ask when the peak foliage would be here. And I said, well, probably two weeks, that's about, when it comes in.

And suddenly two days later, it was 40 degrees, all the trees turned. And two days after that, we had 30 mile an hour winds and half the trees have gotten strips. So I don't know what's out. It's always a challenge to get that stuff straight. But the short version is, yeah, this is the time to get to New England. If you like apples and cider donuts and all that kind of stuff, come check it all out. And of course, Chris is celebrating by going to Columbus, Ohio.

Christopher Penn (0:55)

Cleveland.

John Wall (0:56)

Cleveland. I always screw that up. Now Cleveland, they have the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That's for Maicon's event coming up next week for anybody that's going. Anything besides, you're doing your sessions and everything. Anything else you've got looking forward to on that?

Christopher Penn (1:09)

Oh, tons of stuff. Just hanging out with folks. I'm trying to get some stuff built in advance so that I can chat with folks who are in the know about various systems and say like, hey, here's the thing I'm working on.

What do you think? Am I going up the right tree? One of the big ones is Google released a paper in mid-September.

They released a production notice saying, from early this year, we've got this paper out about a new way of AI search working. I'm going to try and grab some time with Will Reynolds from Sierra Interactive and we're going to nerd out over, can I implement this thing successfully to replicate Google system? Because they've told that in the very, very technical academic paper, they give away all of the materials used to make it. So I'm going to say, let's see if we can build this for ourselves. But yeah, looking forward to that. Katie's got her Claude for business workshop. We're going to be recording at least one episode of In-Ear Insights from the show floor from their podcast booth. I've got my Maicon build session where we're going to try and teach people AI analytics in 45 minutes, which is going to be interesting. So it is a fully packed agenda.

John Wall (2:21)

That's very cool. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff going on. We'll have links to that as that goes. This was a great opportunity because we haven't talked about events in so long. Of course, the normal pitch that I always run is that you're screwed because it's too late. You normally want to work a month in advance setting up these meetings like you've got. If somebody is trying to get time with Christopher Penn next week, they have no shot at you. You are already locked in for the next two weeks.

If you have that going, don't make that mistake. A month out, start scheduling and getting stuff going. Then I had totally stolen your spreadsheet. Back in the days where you would do posts on LinkedIn or Twitter and you had to have a bunch of hashtags and links ready to go. Having a spreadsheet pre-built with all the tags and everybody's at and all that stuff. You can just sit there and rattle them out. You can do five or 10 in five minutes without even trying to get stuff going.

What have you got in your bag of tools now as you're rolling, as far as things to help you post and keep track of everything that goes on the show?

Christopher Penn (3:21)

Also, it's very interesting. The app for this conference is a web app.

It's not a separate iOS or Android app, which is very smart because that means an AI agent can open up a browser and access it, and so use the app on my behalf. I've been building this thing. I've got this Hermes agent, which is an open-source product that's installed on a little crappy old Beelink computer from Amazon. I bought a couple years ago for like 200 bucks, back when computers were affordable.

It's running Linux. It's connected to my MacBook. My MacBook is running the Quinn 3.6 model, which is a very good energy intensive model, as energy test as a MacBook can get. But it's a very smart agent model. Hermes and my MacBook essentially are collaborating back and forth on... I've got a whole setup where there's some skills like the LL on Wiki skill, and I've got to tie to my Discord account. So on Discord, I have a channel on my own server called Hermes. I have a bot in there. I've named it Skynet.