The early bird discount for registration at FM’s Conversational Marketing Summit ends Weds, so if any of you are thinking about joining us in San Francisco this September, now is the time to register.

Please do RSVP soon, because our capacity at the Golden Gate Club is limited. We’ll have to cut off registration for both the public and VIPs once we hit capacity, and that’s at about 300 or so. We’re already at nearly 200. And man, if you care about the future of marketing, check out who’s joining this conversation (note that Google’s new VP of Marketing, David Lawee, is going to be there):

# Jay Adelson; CEO, Digg.com

# Heather Armstrong; Founder, Dooce

# Jon Armstrong; Founder, Dooce

# Paul Beck; Senior Partner, Ogilvy

# Barak Berkowitz; CEO, Six Apart

# Matt Cohler; VP Strategy, Facebook

# Laura Desmond; CEO, Starcom MediaVest Group/The Americas

# Scott Donaton; Publisher, AdAge

# Sarah Fay; President, Isobar US

# Shawn Gold; SVP Marketing & Content, MySpace.com

# David Grubb; Worldwide Media Director; Microsoft

# Curt Hecht; EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group

# Carla Hendra; Co-CEO, Ogilvy North America

# Casey Jones; VP Marketing, Dell

# Patrick Keane; EVP, CMO, CBS Interactive

# David Lawee; VP Marketing, Google

# Ross Levinsohn; Former President, Fox Interactive Media

# Daina Middleton; Dir, Global Interactive Marketing , Imaging and Printing Group, HP

# Jon Miller; Former Chairman & CEO, AOL Inc

# Kent Nichols; Writer, Performer, Beatbox Giant Productions

# Greg Ott; VP, Global Marketing, Ask.com

# Randall Rothenberg; President & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau

# Suzie Reider; Head of Advertising Sales, Youtube

# Douglas Sarine; Writer, Performer, Beatbox Giant Productions

# Tina Sharkey; Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter, LLC

# Suhaila Suhimi-Waldner; East Coast Director, Digital, OMD

# Rishad Tobaccowala; CEO, Denuo

# Johnny Vulkan; Founder, Anomaly

# Jeff Weiner; EVP, Network Division, Yahoo!

More will be announced soon, so sign up now!

It was a big day Sunday for FM authors in The New York Times. In three separate articles, Pages 2 and 3 of the Sunday Business section featured a dressed up Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose of Diggnation with their signature beers and laptops along with quotes from GigaOm’s Om Malik, and four giant screenshots from Instructables and a quote from CEO Eric Wilhelm.
And, credit where credit’s due: Two mentions in the same articles for our friends at Valleywag.

Today our partner Digg and our new partner Microsoft announced a deal to work together on advertising across Digg’s burgeoning site. At FM, we’re proud of our partners, and particularly proud when we’ve helped prove their businesses’ value. It’s no secret that Digg is the kind of property – like Facebook – that was bound to get the attention of the Big Guys as they continue to play an ever more fascinating game of Internet chess. That’s why I’m even more pleased that FM is continuing to work with Digg and with Microsoft to further Digg’s goals. Read more about the deal from Kevin Rose. And if you have any questions about the deal, please let me know.

We’re thrilled to welcome Teresa Nielsen Hayden to FM’s Author Services team. Teresa has been an editor of one sort or another for more than 25 years. She has worked in reference publishing, comic books, magazines, and especially the science fiction and fantasy book industry. She was managing editor and subsequently a consulting editor for Tor Books, the largest science fiction publisher in the English-speaking world. Authors she has worked with include James White, Steven Brust, Jane Lindskold, Harry Turtledove, and Robert Charles Wilson. And she’s a book author herself. Since 2001, Teresa and her husband Patrick Nielsen Hayden have been writing and moderating the weblog Making Light, which has a reputation for unusually crowded, vigorous, and yet civil comment threads. We’re looking forward to putting Teresa’s unique talents to work for all FM authors.

Earlier this week, several FM sites rolled out their first “voice posts,” a new series of editorial segments served up as audio files on blog sites. HP is the sponsor of the series, meaning their logo appears under the audio file with copy that says “voice post technology sponsored by HP iPaq 510.” HP also bought banner ads on the sites. Beyond that, though, HP has no relationship to or influence over the content of the voice posts — a brilliant stroke on their part. Why? Two reasons.
First, by giving blog authors a new, easy-to-use platform to talk to their readers (listeners?) about topics of their own choosing, HP stands a much better chance of creating a “voice post habit” among top independent bloggers. Mark Frauenfelder, for example, one of Boing Boing’s editors, reads an excerpt from his book, “The World’s Worst.” According to Amazon, the paperback edition is 176 pages long. If Mark gets good feedback from Boing Boing readers, he’s got a lot more book to read — in his own voice! — for voice-posting on the site. Not that HP’s logo will necessarily accompany hundreds of future voice posts on Boing Boing (their current sponsorship runs for 2 months); but presumably the HP and the iPaq brands benefit if more bloggers and more online media consumers get comfortable with voice-to-text and text-to-voice activities.
Second, not every visitor to these sites will understand what’s meant by “voice post technology sponsored by HP iPaq 510.” So David Ponce at OhGizmo used a voice post to explain to his audience exactly what HP paid for (ads on his site and the HP logo under voice posts), and what they didn’t (his editorial content). Transparency and full disclosure, never bad things, are enormously important practices for independent publishers (who tend to face greater, or at least more vocal, scrutiny than traditional publishers, see this or this) and for publishers exploring marketing that goes beyond standard ad banners. And while HP didn’t pay OhGizmo to write or “voice” a disclosure, they benefited from it: It’s impossible for an author to disclose a sponsorship relationship without naming the involved sponsor. In OhGizmo’s case, David mentions HP or iPaq five times in the voice post and another five times in the accompanying text post, both under the headline “Voice Posts On OhGizmo: An Explanation, A Disclaimer And An Example.”
Nice going, HP.
(Disclosure: FM represents OhGizmo and Boing Boing and takes a commission on advertising that runs on those sites, and I work for FM.)

This week Bernie planned a fantastic 2 day sales summit/training seminar for all 20 people in FM’s sales org. While they had dinner and drinks after the first night, things got silly on night two…
Here’s a shot of John Shankman blowing out a sparkler on his un-birthday cake/ice-cream. Notice the woman at the table in the back giving our rowdy group a look of disapproval.

Here are Chas and Jared crooning away at some afterhours Karaoke…

A good time was had by all…

Marcia Simmons joins FM as an Author Services Account Manager. She has a diverse background in media. Before joining FM, she was managing editor for the North Bay Business Journal, a New York Times Co. publication. She has also been a freelance journalist, public relations consultant and broadcaster. Marcia blogs at Smart Kitty. Her role here at FM is to work with the Author Services team, and the rest of the company, to take care of our authors. Marcia will institute and follow a plan to make regular contact with FM authors, checking in with them on how we are proceeding, together, toward meeting their goals.

Welcome aboard, Marcia!