danliveshere.com

I landed in Miami after an extensive trip (12+ hours) and the weather is awesome. I’m here for the 2008 NBA Marketing Meetings. All the team gather with the league to share best practices about marketing basketball. I went last year to New Orleans and it was pretty cool…

This year, we started with a formal meeting where all the teams representatives hung in their own little groups and talked amongst themselves. It was cool cause in our little huddle was Greg. As in Greg Oden. He came down to be on a panel with some of the all time greats (Dr. J, Bill Walton) more on that to come. Also in the crowd was Amhad Rashad (go DUCKS).

I was introduced to Bill Walton. He’s just as tall in person as you expect, and is extremely cool. Seriously, he looked me in the face and said, what you guys have in Portland is great. We had something special in 1977 and what is going on now is amazing.

The Trail Blazers group gathered into cabs and headed to South Beach where we had an AMAZING dinner at WISH. Todd Oldham did the design… cool, you know it. Then headed to Mangos. Crazy good looking Puertoricans were dancing on the the bar. It was a good time by our group, some hung longer than others, but all in all, it was a good night for the first night of the meetings.

You might be asking yourself,  what the hell goes on there? Well, we’ll do a lot of different seminars in our own respective field. I will be going to Database Marketing, Marketing, Ticket Sales and Retention. Ther are community outreach, player development, public relations and other seminars that go on. I think these meetings hold a lot of water when it comes to brainstorming and furthering ideas for the teams and the league.

One topic will be one that is close to home, social networks. We don’t have the solution for social networking, but no one does. That is the beauty. Do we have the best website out there. No. But no one does. Seriously. Everyone should improve their sites and their interaction… and that is why we are here to discuss and refine. In addition to talking through what these sites can be, we are relaunching our social network, to strive for more. To strive for better. Fans deserve it. Our team deserves it. The internet deserves it. That sounds boisterous, or extremist, but you need to push to do better. Seriously.

I will try to twitter during the meetings… and maybe blog. I know, they’ve been rare. But I will make an effort.

Oh yeah, my little boy (Jack) is getting all growns up. Check out “Jack Lives Here”. He’s started to pull himself up. Crap, that means he’s about to walk.