This morning, I woke to a wonderful email and I thought I would share it:
Good morning Kimberly, I just wanted to send you an email to let you know how awesome you are! I have applied some of your indexing strategies to our website’s homegrown CMS and we are experiencing a significant performance increase. WOW….amazing tips delivered in an exciting way!
Thanks again,
Jim
OK, I seriously can't complain about the awesome part ;-)… but, what I think is so cool is that he sent the email. No, I don't expect everyone to send me mail after they implement a tip/trick BUT, it's really nice when I do get an email (especially like this :). There are so many ways to improve performance and some can lead to significant gains (or minimized downtime/data loss, etc.) and this is exactly why we (speakers/RDs/MVPs, etc.) do this stuff!
The long story short is that it does cost you money to go to a conference (or, at least, time to read blogs, etc.) but what we try to do at events like Connections is distill down the key points into our sessions so that you can [hopefully] apply these techniques immediately. It makes for fast-paced sessions and an information packed week but our conference just ended yesterday and I already have email from it. That's just really cool!
So, I know the economy is in a tough state and I know that quantifying the gain of a conference is hard (especially when the cost of the conference is so easy to quantify) but the end result of some of this time away might be more than worthwhile!
THANKS Jim!
kt