I’m the #1 PM Blogger!
19. Nov, 2009 
22 Comments
The Association of International Product Marketing and Management (AIPMM) held their educational conference this week and hosted a “Battle of the Product Management Bloggers” contest which I was happy to be asked to take part in. At short notice my travel plans changed and when I let them know I couldn’t make it, they invited me to do my presentation remotely over Skype.
Trying to be entertaining without being able to see or hear the audience is goofy! People walking past my office would have seen me flapping my arms “presenting” at my computer and likely thought I’d done one too many revisions on that Powerpoint deck and finally lost my marbles.
The competitors were clearly better than me so I decided to use my product marketing skills to come up with a winning strategy that did not depend on having a superior product. My strategy can be summed up as follows:
- Deliver silly presentation.
- Ask people to vote for me.
Surprisingly, that worked.
So I’m the #1 PM blogger! The power! The glory! The prizes! I won a bunch of cool stuff including a “top of Alltop” from Guy Kawasaki, an interview with The Brand Show, an interview with Wayne Hurlburt on Blog Talk Radio, a copy of the Product Management Office Professional from the 280 group, a copy of Morae from TechSmith, a lifetime membership with the AIPMM and some cool swag from MarketeersClub, Overtone, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting.
The last prize was a catered holiday dinner for 8 people from the Fairmont San Jose! Woo Hoo! I’ve got big plans for that one, which I will blog about soon…..
Ethan Henry from On Product Management was the runner up, followed by Tom Grant of The Heretech, and Ivan Chalif of The Productologist and Ivan Lybbert of My Product Management Opinion. Rounding out the field were: Brian Lawley of Product Management 2.0, Michael Ray Hopkin from Lead on Purpose, Alison Charter-Smith of The Innovation Jam, Marsha Shenk of Thriving Enterprise, Gavin Johnston of The Brand Show, and all the way from Australia – Janey Wong of Brainmates. Rich Mironov of Product Bytes was our charming moderator. If you don’t read these blogs already you should. There is also a Twitter group to follow the whole crew on Twitter at http://twitter.com/aipmm/battle-of-the-bloggers
A big thank-you to folks that voted, in particular the awesome Julie Fogg who literally chased people down and made them vote for me, as well as the members of the Castiles networking group who have endured my surprisingly frequent (uh, ok, surprising to me) requests for their support.
Just for fun, here’s the deck I used. Yep, I actually won with this thing.
#prodmgmt
Sometimes you just have to ask for what you want.
Congratulations, well deserved.
Jason
Thanks Jason
April
Congrats April … well deserved.
Thanks Peter – and I’m really enjoying your blog!
April
I wish everyone could have seen your presentation April. Even over Skype, it was perfectly executed! More importantly, very deserved.
It was too bad you weren’t there. I “modified” pictures of the other contestants (including yours). I guess I’ll just have to hang on to those and use them for leverage out at the perfect moment!
Again, congrats!
Wow, thanks! It was too bad I didn’t get to see everyone. I was actually disconnected after Ethan’s preso. And I want to see those pics!!
April
Congratulations… Wish we could hear your skype presentation…
Thanks Christine – Trust me, the face to face version of me is way less goofy
April
You won because you understood the audience’s pain and described the solution in words they could relate to!
LOL! Thanks! Honestly I think I won because I asked people to vote. I’m in marketing – I never forget the call to action….
April
Congratulations April. Well done.
Congratulations! I appreciate your insights and loved your presentation. Best wishes from a Cranky Marketer (not really, but…).