Echo Conference

In case you missed it, or in case you need to see it again, here’s Johnny & Chachi’s 90s medley from Echo 2009:

Echo attendee surveys are coming in and one of the things that people really seemed to enjoy was the Q&A we did with each of our keynotes after their talks. To facilitate our Q&As we asked for audience questions via Twitter and then we sorted through them and displayed them on the auditorium screens. Thankfully, our friends at ParaTweet have a great product that’s really easy to use for this sort of thing.

Just as it did at the Catalyst events of the past year, ParaTweet took audience participation and interactivity to the next level at Echo. When I moderated the church panel at Echo, I remember feeling so relieved to see excellent questions pouring in via Twitter and displayed via ParaTweet. Frankly, I relied pretty heavily on ParaTweet because our audience’s questions were much better than mine. Plus, the ParaTweet moderation and filtering features ensured that no obscene Twitter spam ended up on our screens. That would’ve been embarrassing. (If anything obscene was going to end up on our screens, we wanted it to be intentional and to be our idea. Kidding.)

If you’ve got a live event coming up and you’re looking to facilitate some interaction via Twitter, check out ParaTweet.

This entry was originally posted on the COLLIDE blog. 

One of the people who played an integral role in Echo was our Master of Ceremonies and keynote speaker Mark Steele.

As you may know, Mark is the President and Executive Creative of Steelehouse Productions where he creates art for business and ministry through the mediums of film, stage and animation. But there’s so much more to Mark:

• He co-hosts the wildly entertaining and consistently informative Steelehouse Podcast with Jeff Huston. You should take a listen.
• He lends his creative talents to Veggie Tales.
• He has written three hilarious and insightful books about life and faith: Flashbang, Half-Life / Die Already, and Christianish.
• His performance in the Igniter video “Boys and Grills” cracks me up every time.

If you get a chance, check out all of Mark’s fine work and support his creative genius.

Wow … what an event! Honestly, we’re still recovering and playing catch up after last week’s conference. If you were at Echo, or if you followed along on our live page or on Twitter, we’d like to say thank you. Echo exists to serve creative church leaders such as yourselves, so we can’t thank you enough for your support.

In addition, I’d like to thank Phil Vischer, Phil Cooke, Mark Steele (also our congenial emcee), and Ben Arment for being phenomenal keynote speakers. The members of our panel—Scott Hodge, Cynthia Ware, Carlos Whittaker, Bobby Gruenewald, and Conway Edwards—were wonderful, too. Each our breakout speakers did a great job, so check out the entire list here. And I can’t forget our great sponsors, each of whom provides a valuable resource or service to the church.

Thanks to Brad and Adam from ChurchMediaDesign.tv for coordinating our live stream and doing some great interviews during Echo. Also, thanks to the team from ParaTweet for enabling us to integrate keynote speaker Q&A’s via Twitter. Last but not least, the entire team at Watermark Community Church went above and beyond the call of duty—they were the best hosts a conference could ask for.

In the coming weeks, I hope to do more detailed blog posts about some of the amazing people that helped make Echo happen. We’ll also post pictures and videos from this year’s event soon, so keep an eye out for those.

Thanks again for making Echo 2009 something special.