Hello everyone from the Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile where the AMA Symposium is fully underway!  We are officially up in registrations over last year with 652 attendees. We are only up a little, but considering the fact that registrations at conferences like this one all over the country are tanking faster than the Dow (thanks to the economy)......we are thrilled!

We had a great lead off keynote session this morning in Karen Breen Vogul, President of ClearGauge, on ROI. Karen didn't hold back...she gave us a good healthy dose of marketing metrics medicine. I loved her corporate tone. She said flat out, "You are a cost center until you do your math.....your president isn't going to give you more money for marketing until you can prove to him/her how that investment is going to make your university money in the long run."

Karlyn Morissette, Web Producer at Dartmouth, had a packed house for her session on taking email to the next level. She framed her presentation with Barack Obama's email campaign and talked about why it was so effective. I'm pretty sure Karlyn's session had the highest attendance of any track session so far.

Alright, time to head back and see what's going on. There are a bunch of roundtable sessions this afternoon and those are always lively. Back atcha later......