After reading through my notes from Scott Stratten’s keynote presentation at Blissdom, I realized why I couldn’t stop overusing the word “awesome” for a few days. I blame Scott. Or, as most people know him, @unmarketing.

No matter what you call him, he got me thinking about The Awesome, and I haven’t stopped since.

I’ll tell you more about what this means to me (and my blog) next week, but for now, I wanted to share the best tidbits of Scott’s highly entertaining, beautifully organized and thoroughly engaging presentation.

The man literally spoke in tweets, pausing and winking after each one, but he didn’t need to. His stories and illustrations – not to mention his eye-catching graphics on the big screen and his quirky Canadian accent – were enough to draw us in and keep us enthralled (for lack of a less dramatic yet still accurate word) for the good part of an hour. Throughout his presentation, the audience literally gasped, moaned, laughed and squealed. This was, in addition to the most practical teaching I heard at Blissdom, the best presentation I’ve seen in a very long time.

Now, for the things I took away from Scott’s keynote:

1. You’re not “only” anything. You’re not “just” something. (e.g. Not JUST a mommy blogger.)
2. To have good customer service, you only have to be average because everyone else sucks.
3. Marketing isn’t hard. Social media isn’t hard. Just care. Care about people.
4. People don’t spread MEH. People don’t spread okay. People spread AWESOME.
5. Why we spread information hasn’t changed. How we spread it has.
6. Only blog when you have something awesome to say!
7. It is not my job to tell my audience how to consume my product. I just want them to consume it. (This came from someone he knows on Twitter, but I didn’t catch who said it originally.)
8. Create the awesome, THEN add the SEO stuff.
9. Social media doesn’t make anything better. It just amplifies.
10. I’d like to go back to when it (communication) was called TALKING.

Bonus takeaways:

• Make your site mobile-enabled.
• Only 1-3% blog readers ever comment.
• 75% of @unmarketing’s tweets are replies.

Okay, I know I’ve raved here, so you’re probably wondering if anyone could be as good as all that. But you know me. Have you ever heard me RAVE about a speaker? Having taught one full semester of speech at a university, I am extremely picky when it comes to evaluating speakers. (Just ask my students. The ones that hated me so much and so loudly that I quit teaching. AHEM. That would be what we call a story for another time!)

In addition to that piece of baggage, I mean background, there’s also the fact that I’ve seen “famous” social media “gurus” speak before. And they just annoyed me. Scott did not annoy me. (And again. You know me – and how easily I’m annoyed!)

Finally, much as I loved Blissdom and all the fun hanging-out-with-friends time I had, I didn’t feel that the conference’s value was in the sessions. That bummed me out, because I’m a big nerd who likes to learn. But this presentation? It was chock full of practical tips and down-to-earth advice. In short, I loved it.

And now, just to prove that little line about being a nerd, I must ask you: Does anyone else think of the book, How to Eat Fried Worms, when they hear the phrase “chock full”?

Image by GoodNCrazy. This post will be linked to [next week’s] Top Ten Tuesday at Oh Amanda, What I Learned This Week at From Inmates to Playdates and Works for Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family.