I will be in Miami for the FOWA conference 28/29 Feb and a party Mar 1st.

It has a great lineup of speakers and workshops, but it is going on practically the same time as SMX West

I met some of these folk at the Widget Summit in San Francisco, and I have to warn you that many of these people are not drunkards, which makes me very suspicious of them. I noticed at the Widget Summit that I was usually drinking about three beers for each one that others were having, it is an odd and surreal experience for me to be around people with clear minds.

But I am going to give the gadget crowd another chance to be drunken idiots, and since FOWA is a bigger conference, I have better odds of finding another lush, if I do not, I will hire one. I need to be around drunk people.

Oh, let’s talk about the line-up.

Kevin Rose of Digg fame will be there and so will Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch. Kevin Marks of Google and Flickr’s Cal Henderson are also gonna be there and Blaine Cook of Twitter and Emily Boyd of Remember the Milk and Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Kathy Sierra of JavaRanch and Leah Culver the founder of Pownce and the very cool Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and…

You get the picture. Buttloads of talented and interesting people.

The first day (feb 28th) is workshops and they look very very interesting, I am actually going to wake up for them

The second day is the conference and here is the schedule…

Conference Day (29th February)

Registration

1. 08:15 — 09:00

   Location / Details

2. Welcome

   From Brian Oberkirch & Tantek Çelik, the FOWA Conference Chairs

   09:00 — 09:15

   Location / Details

3. Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

   09:15 — 09:55

   Location / Details

4. Matt Mullenweg, WordPress

   The Architecture of WordPress

   09:55 — 10:35

   Location / Details

5. Sun Microsystems (Diamond Sponsor)

   Speaker TBC

   10:35 — 10:45

   Location / Details

6. AM Break

   10:45 — 11:15

   Location / Details

7. Brian Oberkirch ,Tantek Çelik & Joseph Smarr

   The Future of Social Networks

   11:15 — 11:55

   Location / Details

8. Blaine Cook, Twitter

   Building The Real-Time Web

   11:55 — 12:35

   Location / Details

9. Leah Culver, Pownce

   The Future of Web Services

   12:35 — 13:05

   Location / Details

10. Lunch

    13:05 — 14:05

    Location / Details

11. Panel Discussion, chaired by Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch, including Kevin Rose, Digg

    Launch a Web App in 40 Minutes

    14:05 — 14:45

    Location / Details

12. Microsoft (Diamond Sponsor)

    Speaker TBC

    14:45 — 14:50

    Location / Details

13. Speaker TBC

    What Makes The Next Great Startup?

    14:50 — 15:30

    Location / Details

14. Emily Boyd, Remember The Milk

    From the web, to the iPhone and beyond!

    15:30 — 16:10

    Location / Details

15. PM Break

    16:10 — 16:40

    Location / Details

16. Kevin Marks, Google

    The Future of APIs

    16:40 — 17:20

    Location / Details

17. Cal Henderson, Flickr

    The Application of New Features to an Established Application

    17:20 — 18:00

    Location / Details

18. Gary Vaynerchuk, Winelibrary.tv

    How to Grow a Community in The Future

    18:00 — 18:40

    Location / Details

19. Live filming of Winelibrary.tv

    Join Gary Vaynerchuk for a special filming of winelibrary.tv

    19:00 — 20:00

    Location / Details

20. Official Scrapblog FOWA Party

    @ Nikki Beach, South Beach, Miami

    21:00 — 01:00

    Location / Details

While learning how to make and edit Google gadgets, I have created hundreds of random gadgets. Many of these gadgets have nothing to with me, my brand, or my interests. I am simply playing and learning. I often will look for a developer’s page on any website I am on to see if anything interests me.

As a result of my “test” gadgets, I have actually created alot of traffic for people. Gadgets are being explored by more and more “recreational” developers who are just tinkering around. I was checking some numbers and I was surprised to see something.

I was creating more than a million Google gadget page views per month for one set of gadgets based on a website and product that isn’t mine.

They receive a massive amount of exposure from my efforts. Their products and links are sitting on thousands of peoples iGoogle page, simply because I was curious and wanted to figure out how to make gadgets.

It is a very good idea to have a developer page or utilize your “tools” page even if you do not have a developers program.

Let’s look at Sphinn and their “tools” page which I think is a very useful and informative page (my compliments Danny), and I will suggest a very simple but very important minor tweak to it.

Tool pages are essentially for your users, but they are also your gateway to developers.

The tweak I would suggest is to have clear contact info targeted towards developers. I don’t want to send an email or fill out a form without knowing it will be responded to. If there was a simple phrase like…

“Have a idea or questions about creating tools for our web site? Please contact (name of the technical person here) we would love to hear what you have to say”

Developers would be much more inclined to contact you with their myriad of ideas if they knew there was an actual person who will respond to them.

Or if you have a general contact form with a drop down menu of choices add a “web development” option so that such queries will actually get to the person who takes care of the technical details of your website and so that developers, recreational or not, will feel warm and fuzzy and feel confident that their email will get responded to.

Developers are very very important. They are the new “links”. If you have talented people in your user base, you want to make them feel welcome and know that their efforts are appreciated.

Sphinn has a great set of tools. Not because they made them, but because their users did.

Danny Sullivan provides an excellent example of how to both spread the news of tools to his users and reward the people who made them.

Even if no one has made tools for you or your brand, you know what? You can still have a similar page. If you blog, you are likely using plug-ins. Consider having a page listing your plugins or themes, thus thanking the developers and providing valuable info to your users. It could just be a “resource page” like the way Sebastian does it.

If you do have developers, have them put out a page about what they are doing, and the things they are testing out, for example, Kayak.com has a wonderful developers page, even though they do not have an actual open developers program.

It is dawn in the age of gadget distributed content, and developers are golden.

Are you developer friendly?

Think about the tiny tweaks you can make to your website that would be attractive to developers and implement them.

Santa Barbara’s Greg Nichols reported in the local weekly Independent a very interesting article about Harley-Davidson and UCSB.

The ultra cool American motorcycle company is dipping its toes into… viral marketing?

Here is what they did. They actually sponsored a class on viral marketing on a real campus. They granted ten film and media students 1200 dollars to create a video to market Harleys to a new generation and to women. This was a wonderful idea.

“eyebrows rose a few months ago when the Film and Media Studies Department at UCSB announced an upcoming class sponsored by Harley-Davidson, a name synonymous with outlaw ideals. Now in its eighth week, the class — a workshop aimed at understanding and developing viral advertising — seems to have made a fruitful collaboration of the odd coupling, and has served as a valuable lesson to students about the inevitable intersection of creativity and commercialism.” more from the article

The results were interesting but as a thought experiment, could have gotten much sweeter were such an effort spearheaded not only by the obviously professional marketing effort it had, but also a link building guru whose entire life is being savvy at the art of viral.

I think this effort would have benefited from the students hanging out with Webuildpages, SEOmoz, Stuntdl, RangeOnline or Clientside to name a few. Even the top online marketing specialists in the field can benefit from link building gurus, using targeted viral efforts. Typical marketing budgets can be rewarded with an enormous ROI if they simply seek out the people who know this stuff best.

We delight in this shit. Really. Give me 50,000 of your budget and some college students…Yum.

The fact that Harley Davidson is sponsoring this class is brilliant. Those in the know realize how much these techniques are on the minds of the handful of people who can provide the real value of unique viral strategy. The fact that they are translating this into groups of students on real campuses is sweet.

This has been on my mind alot. The importance of such campaigns is very clear in the new Google universal world. My compliments to Harley for doing an impressive campaign (they started on this last fall). It was a job well done.

If you are a company (even if you are a online marketing company) with what you think is a great idea, then make the 10000 (or so) spend it costs for someone to take a targeted look at it. Your idea is very likely a great one. Todays market requires more than a great idea, it needs creative and directed implementation.

That being said, why am I reading about Harleys marketing effort in a free city weekly paper? Why am I hearing about Harleys viral efforts offline? Note for fairness: I am not their target audience, so not a judgment, but an observation. In fact the weekly paper I read it in serves the community of a student population (UCSB) so I may very well be reacting to a community effort, in which case… here is your link for the coolest motorcycle ever. See they got links out of it. Thats how it works.

check out the videos

Nice job.