Element Fusion is happy to be a part of the 4th annual Innotech eMarketing Summit, coming up on November 4th, 2009 here in Oklahoma City. One of the sessions will be presented by our very own Andrea Decker. Andrea will moderate a panel discussion entitled "Lessons Learned from Internet Marketing Experts," featuring insights from Mike Koehler, Tiffany Monhollon and Chris Wilson.

The Summit includes a line up of other great sessions as well, including a Featured Luncheon presentation by Christi Day, Southwest Airlines Spokesperson and Emerging Media Specialist. She'll be speaking about how Southwest has used social media channels to continually evolve its communication and customer connection strategy. Plus, there are several other sessions from great speakers on topics such as "Top 10 Extreme Social Media Promotion Hacks," "Five Essential Tools for Improving and Measuring New Media Marketing Results," and more.

Several of our team members will be at the Summit all day and we are really looking forward to it. If you'd like to join us there, we can offer you a special discount price. Use promo code FUSION9 and you'll get a special price of $59 per person for the full day summit, which includes your lunch. Get full details about the event and register online on the Innotech eMarketing Summit website.

Hope to see you there!

We'll be taking LightCMS on the road in October this year to Adobe MAX in Los Angeles, the powerhouse conference for designers, developers, business strategists and the like. This will be our first year at MAX and we look forward to engaging with the community there.

If you'll be at MAX this year, we hope you'll stop by our booth and say hello. We will, of course, have our legendary "Web Designers are Sexy" t-shirts to give away to those creating a free LightCMS account.

Hope to see you there.

We're all back from Austin now and busily trying to catch up on everything from the last week. Our participation in the SXSW Interactive tradeshow was an outstanding experience. We are very pleased to have met so many new people and to have the opportunity to show LightCMS to them. Thanks to the hundreds of you who came by our booth and took the time to check out LightCMS.

We also enjoyed spending time with some of our existing LightCMS customers who were in the area. What fun to finally put some faces with the names we know so well.

We received a lot of very positive feedback and we also got a lot of great ideas for ways to continue enhancing the product. One thing is for sure — the best days for LightCMS are still ahead. We see a very bright future for this product and our other products and, as always, we are committed to their continued development and support.

If you have any questions or suggestions for us, please just let us know. You can drop them on our LightCMS user forum or email them to support@publishpath.com.

I've pasted in some pictures from SXSW below for all to enjoy.

Here's a look at the booth before things opened, with our lovely "Web designers are sexy" shirt displayed out front.

Here's a look at the booth in full swing. Ashley's demoing in the "sit down" station, Amine is on the iMac, and I'm just talking my head off about a brochure. Andrea was there too, but she's taking the picture. The crazy (and wonderful) thing is it was busy like this almost all the time.

This doesn't really have anything to do with us, but Google's booth was next door and you can see here all of the crates involved in tearing down their setup when the show was over. You can see that Ashley is nearly drowning in crates. Scary.

Well, we made it to SXSW Interactive and we're set up and ready to go. The trade show opens at noon Saturday and runs through Monday night. If you're in the area, we hope you'll come out and visit the LightCMS booth.

Just for fun, I've attached a picture of our booth as it looked after setup. Enjoy.

As an exhibitor at the SXSW Interactive trade show, we have a few complimentary trade show tickets available to give away. These are one-day passes to the trade show only. If you already have a full SXSW registration, you won't need one of these since you can already access the trade show.

But, if you don't have a registration and would like to spend a day or part of the day at the interactive trade show in Austin on March 14th, 15th or 16th, send me an email with your name, company name, and mailing address to tim@elementfusion.com to request a one-day trade show pass. It'll be first come, first served until they are gone. Please only request one if you plan to use it.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you at SXSW.

Element Fusion is a bronze sponsor of the OpenBeta un-conference, coming up on March 12th in Oklahoma City. Several of our team will be there and we'd love to see you there. As an attendee, you'll even have the chance to win some fantastic limited-edition EF t-shirts.

We were a part of last year's inaugural event and it was a lot of fun. OpenBeta provides a lot of great information and networking and fits it neatly into a single evening. For us, that evening happens to be the night before we leave for SXSW, so we will be in serious conferencing (or un-conferencing) mode.

If you're in the Oklahoma City area, check out OpenBeta. You need to register, but registration is free. Plus, there's even still time to propose your own demo or lightning talk. See you there.

I'm back in the office today after spending most of the week in Phoenix at the Church Solutions Conference. It was a great experience all around. Turnout at the conference was lower than the previous year (so I'm told) but we still acquired a good number of leads and talked to a lot of people about websites. I found most everyone I talked with, whether churches or businesses, to be very interested in website issues, especially anything that can make their work on the web easier and more effective. That's great, since that is what we specialize in here at Element Fusion.

It was also good to spend time with our friends at Church Community Builder. At this particular conference, we actually shared booth space with CCB (you can see a pic of our space below), and it was also good to spend time with Steve and Jamie from CCB, sharing ideas and discussing what's happening in the church technology world. Thanks to them for the great conversations.

Thanks also to everyone who took the time to visit with me at the conference. It was great to meet so many people from so many different places. We look forward to working with you in the future.

Finally, I want to thank President Obama for making a stop in Phoenix while I was there. I didn't see him or anything related to him as I was buried in a trade show at the time, but the cab driver who took me to the airport Thursday did show me the spot where they parked Air Force One on Wednesday. It really was amazingly close to the road and he assures me it was a really impressive sight.

Our next travel stop will be SXSW in Austin March 14-16. That one will be all about LightCMS. Hope to see you there.

Our space at the Church Solutions Conference, shared with Church Community Builder. Please note: the girl in the picture is actually an image on CCB's backdrop, and not a legless giant.

On Monday, I'll be heading to Phoenix, Arizona for the Church Solutions Conference. I'll be exhibiting SkyCMS, our website system for churches, at the trade show there. If you're at the conference, please stop by and say hello. We'll be at booth #114 alongside our friends from Church Community Builder.

In addition, Steve Caton from Church Community Builder and myself will be presenting a seminar entitled "Building Community — Turning Your Crowd into a Tribe." Steve will be covering some great information about building community in the church and I'll be adding my thoughts on how websites, blogs, podcasts, Facebook and Twitter can be a part of your church's strategy for community. I'm really looking forward to this workshop and I'm hoping that soon after it's over, I can publish some of the content we cover here on the blog. So, stay tuned for that.

I'll be publishing some updates and hopefully some pics from the conference next week here on the blog and on twitter (@efstatus). Of course, the rest of the Element Fusion team will still be here in OKC, hard at work on all of the exciting updates on the way. In fact, we even have a small upgrade planned for next week. Watch for details.

As we've mentioned a couple times already, Element Fusion is planning some appearances at upcoming conferences this year. In preparation for those events, we've started putting together some trade show materials to take with us to the exhibit halls.

Today, we received our new retractable banner stands. There are four of them, but we likely won't ever use all four at the same time. Rather, they are designed to function interchangeably with each other. There's one for the Element Fusion brand, two for the LightCMS brand, and one for our SkyCMS brand.

When they're not being used at trade shows, they also make nice decorative pieces around the office. I've included some photos below so you can see where they are currently displayed.

In case you are interested, the printing and production on these was done by PostUpStand.com. I found this group to be extremely helpful in their over-the-phone pre-sales work and extremely fast in their turnaround time (48 hours plus shipping time). Plus, their pricing is really fantastic and the quality of the products we received has met our expectations, at least so far.

The two LightCMS banners are currently hanging out in the developer room.

The Element Fusion and SkyCMS banners have found a nice home in the conference room.