A Minneapolis blogger got in on the ASAE event blogging, although in a way that I bet the conference organizers didn’t anticipate:

Ooooh, my freakin’ ears. What am I talking about? The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE, I linked their site because that name just sounds too made up), that’s what. They are having a ‘little’ conference outside my apartment. By little I mean they have about four city blocks barricaded and they are all eating, drinking, and networking their heads off. Oh, one other thing. Pretend that you could marry the music of 90’s adult contemporary with smooth jazz; ahh soothing right? Well then imagine a female-male lead singing duo on crack belting out ‘today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites’ (They just did a bone-chilling rendition of Outkast’s Hey Ya). Yeah, and according to the conference itinerary I’ve got a couple more hours to go. Where’s my damn earplugs? Ugh.

That is a pretty accurate description of the party that was thrown Saturday night to open up the meeting. And that easy listening band was truly horrendous.

I came across the post by searching Technorati on Tuesday morning. My plan was to demonstrate the site during a presentation I was doing that afternoon and talk about how associations should start using it to monitor how the blogging world is covering their issues and organizations. What a perfect example! If it’s any consolation, anonymous Minneapolis law student, the attendees in the session seemed to agree that the band was pretty bad.

I also talked about what kind of PR damage that entry could have done if it had been picked up by the local media. Hell, Technorati has a CNN advisory gig so it might go national. OK, that was a pretty low risk, but it could happen. The media seem to love blog-related stories these days.

In the session, I suggested that buying the blogger in question a free dinner or giving him some noise-canceling headphones might be a nice gesture to apologize for interupting his evening and could help turn the story into a postive if it did get picked up. That would have been money well spent to avert a more negative story and at the least would be the right thing to do. Of course, that requires keeping up with what is going on in the blogging world via tools such as Technorati.

In any case, thanks for sharing your neighborhood with us and for giving me a great example for the session I spoke in.