AMA International Leadership Summit

• Advertising, Branding, Events, Internet Marketing, Televison, media
• 2 Comments
• April 23rd

AMA International Leadership Summit is this Weekend

This weekend, many of the Columbus AMA officers will be attending the AMA International Leadership Summit in Chicago, Illinois. The Summit, which is totally paid for by the chapter if you are an officer, will be held at the Westin O’Hare. AMA International expects 75 chapters across North America to be represented and 300 marketing professionals to attend. Check back here over the weekend to see their thoughts.

The following was submitted by Jason Rubinstein.

 Day 1
Morning:
The first session Nick Iannitto and I attended was the Good to Great seminar for chapter presidents and president-elects. A lot of the things discussed were straight out of the book itself. However, there was some very helpful dialogue. One person suggested starting a Job Transition SIG, which completely makes sense to me in this economy. Another good takeaway was that our board needs to acknowledge the things that we are not good at and stop doing them. My table was also asked to come up with three things that we’d like to see International do to help us. We realized that lots of questions could arise from all of them. They were as follows:

1. Establishing a volunteer track to obtain and promote volunteers.
2. Building a national network of sponsors, which would give lots of local exposure to large businesses.
3. Helping local chapters set up and maintain marketing awards and possibly having the Marketer of the Year of each chapter move on to a national competition.

Nick and I sat next to the president of the Boston Chapter. He has some amazing ideas on how to improve and track the goings on within the chapter and the board. Nick intends on picking his brain for ideas, and I would like to sit down with him, as well.

Lunch:
I sat next to a couple young ladies from the Akron/Canton Chapter, which I didn’t even know existed until today. Apparently, there’s a Dayton Chapter, too. They said that they would like to see more interaction between all the Ohio Chapters.  It was great that we got recognized for Excellence in Leadership this year.  Hopefully, we can build on it and take home the Chapter of the Year Award next year.

Random Thought:
I like this year’s Leadership Summit theme: “Let’s Get Cooking.” However, I think a lot of the speakers have become a bit too obsessed with sneaking in cooking references while they are speaking. It’s humorous the first time, but it’s starting to get old. The food itself here is amazing.

Evening:
Jessica Hamlin made a good observation that the summit has a good balance of new members and seasoned AMA veterans. She also felt that it was extremely well-organized.

The keynote speaker for the evening was Michael Smith, the Senior VP of Marketing for the Food Network. His speech started off with some very good quotes about business and life in general. He then discussed how the Food Network has evolved over the past ten years from catering to gourmet chefs to average people who want to learn how to cook during the day and be entertained in the evening. He also showed a bunch of video clips about what the network is doing and where it is headed. I asked him how DVR has affected the network. He said that people generally don’t DVR the day shows, but they do record the evening ones. He also said that commercials have evolved so that logos are shown longer, so people can see them while they are fast-fowarding. Jamie Falcon wanted to meet him because she is interested in working for Disney, so we waited in line at the end of dinner to talk with him about it. We would definitely like to get him to come speak for one of our luncheons next year. When we left, we received a free copy of the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives book.

Day 2
Random Thought:
Apparently, a bunch of Twitterers are trying to meet up at a secret location in Chicago this evening. They’re using the hash tag #chiama. I don’t know if I’ll willing to get myself lost in Chicago on a Saturday with barely any energy left. It doesn’t help that I don’t have an iPhone or one that is Twitter-compatible. I’ll see how I feel.

Morning:
Went to three 30-minute roundtables: Communications, Budgeting, and Board Management. All three were very helpful. I liked the idea about putting volunteering opportunities on the website. I plan to speak with Nancy Bohman about it. The Boston Chapter President showed us some great charts and graphs on their revenues and event attendance. This is something we absolutely need to start doing. Several people said their chapters have Past Presidents Councils, which help with obtaining contacts and mentoring current volunteers and board members.

After the roundtables, I went to a open forum for all the President-Elects of the chapters in the top three tiers in terms of membership.  We talked about topics ranging from goal-setting to recruiting to determining what each board member wants to get out of being on the board.  A lot of people said that it was important to make sure that members were getting benefits beyond reduced event costs, such as members-only events.

Afternoon
The President-Elect forum continued in the afternoon. Jessica Hamlin came to the session with me this time. She said it was much more useful than the one she had attended in the morning. Someone decided that it would be a good idea to set off the hotel fire alarm as the forum was finishing up. So we all had to leave the building for about 15 minutes.

Evening
Nick took all of us out to Giordano’s for deep dish Chicagp pizza. We tweaked the chapter’s mission and vision. We also talked about where we want to take the chapter in the next year. Afterwards, Jessica, Paul, Jamie, and I decided to go to the Tweetup with some of the people from the Chicago chapter. We went to a wine bar near Wrigleyville, and I came up with the term “twhining.” Several people from a few of the Texas chapters also met up with us. It was a good time overall, but I was exhausted by the time we got home.

Day 3
Only two morning sessions before the Leadership Summit officially ended.  The first was a discussion about leadership.  I never knew that, according to International Headquarters, AMA volunteers did not have to be members, though some chapters make membership a requirement for volunteering.  The second was a panel about social media, on which Nick was asked to sit with two other chapter officers.  All three had good advice, though Nick was the most amusing speaker.  The best advice for chapters delving into this realm for the first time is as follows:

1. Do not be afraid to play around with it.
2. Do not try to do too much.
3. Do not use social media only for solicitation; try to share some good educational advice with your followers.