So what were the highlights of mesh ’11? Without going into too much detail, here’s a personal list:

1. The venue – the Allstream Centre – was a major move for mesh because it’s much bigger than MaRS, which hosted the first five mesh events. Like any new home, there were a few kinks but, for the most part, it worked really well. It was great to have more meeting rooms and more space to mingle and eat.

2. The sponsors village – However you want to cut it, sponsors need to be part of the mix for a good conference. They provide the support needed to put on a good show. At the same time, sponsors want to be more than just a logo on the Web site and swag. At mesh, the village was part of the landscape so that they had great exposure that seemed natural and non-obtrusive.

3. The keynotes, particularly Gabe Zichermann’s talk with Stuart MacDonald about gameification. There are speakers who have a gift for entertaining, educating and engaging, and Gabe is a perfect example of someone who delivers all three. It was a keynote that delivered endless pearls of wisdom, and I found myself scribbling lots of notes.

A great example was Gabe’s contention that Web sites need to be simple rather than offer a lot of options, which is something that I constantly advocate when doing Web site projects for clients. Gabe also talked about the importance of rewarding users when they do what they you want. This can even message message such as “You’re amazing” after they register.

4. The porn panel – With a great lineup of speakers that included Pink Visual CEO Alison Vivas, who runs an adult entertainment company, it epitomized a mesh panel at its best. The panelists were engaged with each other, they had different perspectives to offer, they were entertaining and educational, and the audience was into it. Here’s the Huffington Post Canada story on the panel.

5. The bean bag chairs from FatBoy, which were a hit of the conference. Imagine walking into a large conference ballroom to discover there are 20 different coloured bean bag chairs to sit in. Now, a few people may have gone too far when they decided to take a nap but they were one of the small touches that made mesh really work. (Note: The photo above is the mesh gang post-mesh.)

6. The influencer panel with David Armano and Valeria Maltoni – With so much interest in the role of influencers within social media, the room was packed. As some of the leading thinkers about digital marketing, Armano and Maltoni were well-armed to provide perspective. If I had to moderate the panel over again, I would have pressed them into talking more about the tools – PeerIndex, Klout, mPact, etc. – because everyone gets that influence is an important thing but a lot of people are struggling with how to identify and successfully engage with influencers.

7. The TVO panel with host Steve Paikin, Micah Sifry, Jesse Brown, the NDP’s Charlie Angus and Tony Clement, the new Treasury Minister. It was a wonderful panel, highlighted by Angus proclaiming Twitter had little value – something that didn’t go over while in a room in which Twitter has enthusiastic support, including Clement.

There are lots of other highlights but these are some that jumped out. I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about the other important part of mesh – the people who attended and spoke, and their enthusiasm to network, exchange ideas and engage. It’s something that makes mesh different and wonderful.

Now, it’s on to Calgary for meshwest, and pretty soon, we’ll be getting the programming machine going for meshmarketing in November…and then it’ll be time for mesh ’12 in May 2012!

Links: It was great to see so much coverage of mesh. One of the blog posts that caught my attention was Louise Armstrong’s post on conference etiquette, which captures the essence of mesh. As well, Micah Sifry (aka TechPresident) did a wonderful post about Canada’s Internet landscape.

More: Here are the “official” mesh photos.

Unfortunately, attracting the attention of bloggers and media is a major challenge. It is particularly surprising for blogs given there are no real estate limits. For large blogs, volume is the name of the editorial game so you would think it would be an easier process. As someone with nearly 15 years as a newspaper reporter, you figure I might have an edge but it doesn’t seem to be the case. Like everyone else, my efforts are hit and miss, mostly miss.

So how do you capture the attention of bloggers and the media? Here are some tips:

1. Craft a good story rather than pitching what your company does. Bloggers and reporters tell stories so make their lives easier by giving them one on a silver platter. Make sure the story has a twist or hook that makes it different. It could be you have created something innovative, unorthodox or unique. Whatever your edge, play it up. A good example is Guardly, an iPhone app that launched yesterday that lets you notify friends and family when you have a personal emergency. Guardly is not your run of the mill startup but it’s one that resonates with many people, which is probably why it attracted some nice coverage in TechCrunch.

2. Give someone a “scoop”. Having a story that no one else does has always been a prize within the news game. Today, the rules are still the same. The downside of exclusives is the risk of alienating every other blogger or newspaper but if it means getting coverage in GigaOm or TechCrunch, for example, it can be worth the gamble.

3. Demonstrate success. Bloggers and the media really like two things: success and failure. Too many startups try to capture coverage when they haven’t done much of anything other than create a new service product. Unless you have something really special, this isn’t newsworthy. If, on the other hand, you attract thousands of customers or users, that is far more interesting because you have done something many companies fail to achieve.

A good example is WineAlign, which I did some work for two years ago. At the time, WineAlign founder Bryan McCaw was convinced he had created an innovative new service that would let people make smarter buying decisions at liquor stores in Ontario. But when he pitched the story, the response was deafening silence. Fast-forward two years and 15,000 registered users later, WineAlign just got great coverage in the Toronto Star.

4. If you’ve been successful in the past, make this part of the marketing efforts. It’s a spin-off of point #3. If an entrepreneur has been successful in the past, there may be interest in their latest efforts.

5. Have high-profile investors or advisors. Again, you’re looking to capture someone’s attention at a time when thousands of other companies are trying to do the same thing. Having recognizable investors or advisors can raise a company above the crowd. Look at the attention lavished on anything that Marc Andreessen invests in. This includes RockMelt, the browser that captured the spotlight only to quickly disappear.

6. Recognition at conferences and shows. Whether it’s Demo, 500 Startups Demo Day, TechCrunch 50 or another event, winning best of show can attract the spotlight and separate your company from the crowd. Look at what Mint.com or Yammer were able to do after winning the top prize at TechCrunch 50.

7. Relationships.Building relationships with bloggers or reporters can give you a better chance of getting your story covered. Bloggers and reporters people, they’re not writing machines. Like everyone else, they do things for friends, people who have done them favours, helped them out, or people they like.

Relationships are the biggest reason you should consider hiring a PR agency because a PR person’s most valuable asset is their Rolodex. A good PR person is building relationships every day, something that they can leverage when it comes to pitching a story.

First reaction is not why AOL decided to buy Huffington Post but why Arianna Huffington sold to AOL. Of course, there are 315 million reasons to justify the deal but why throw in the towel to AOL when you’ve got the world in the palm of your hand as the world’s largest and most influential online publisher?

It’s not like Huffington needs the money personally or whether the Huffington Post is lacking growth capital. At the apex of her career, Huffington made a strange decision by taking the money and running. Maybe her investors made her do it given the size of the AOL offer, which is five times the HP’s sales. After six years at the helm, maybe Huffington wants to focus on giving speeches and writing books rather than running a fast-growing online publishing company.

Whatever the reason, AOL is placing a huge bet not only the Huffington Post but the value of content to create a lucrative digital platform. For those of you with a sense of history, AOL pulled the same trick a decade ago with a marriage to Time-Warner in the name of digital convergence – and we all know how well that turned out.

With Huffington Post and TechCrunch now in the fold, AOL has swooped up two of the highest profile digital publishers and, along with it, two of the more interesting entrepreneurs (Huffington and TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington) along with it.

All I can say is “interesting”.

The problem is there are dozens, if not hundreds, of new start-ups looking to capture the spotlight each and every day. Even if you have created a better mousetrap, it doesn’t guarantee coverage. It can be a frustrating because there are start-ups with amazing technology and innovative services that fail to get even a sniff of attention.

The problem is there is too much digital noise and competition, which makes rising above the crowd challenging.

The start-ups that do get coverage in the New York Times and blogs such as TechCrunch are anomalies. For whatever reason, they have the right story at the right time, and it has little to do with the quality of their technology, service or the excellent pitches crafted by PR agencies.

So how does a start-up attract media and blogger coverage? The answer is simple: be successful.

It’s not enough to have an innovative product or service; what really matters is if you can attract enough users or customers to validate that what you are doing is interesting or, at least, newsworthy.

Only then will your story start to resonate with reporters and bloggers. It really boils down to what reporters and bloggers like: success or failure. If you’re wildly successful, that’s interesting. If you explode and make millions of dollars in venture capital disappear, that’s interesting. If you’re a start-up with an innovative service but few users, that’s not interesting or newsworthy.

Does this mean start-ups with few users give up on trying to get media and blogger coverage? Probably not. What it does suggest, however, is having realistic expectations about how much attention you will attract when there are few people using your product or service.

Rather than being disappointed when the world doesn’t beat a path to your door, a better approach is focusing on improving your product or service, and growing the business. Don’t worry about attracting attention from reporters or bloggers. If you’re business becomes a success, you can hit them again with a much more interesting story.

Bottom line: If you’re a start-up with no or few customers or users, getting media or blog coverage is a major challenge. It doesn’t mean what you’re doing isn’t interesting; it just means that it’s not newsworthy until more people endorse that what you’re doing is worthy writing about.

So why is it that some PR firms still have no clue how to approach bloggers? I have noticed a strange inability to recognize that bloggers have particular interests, different approaches and particular styles – just like traditional media.

Here’s a classic example of how not to approach a blogger – an e-mail I received from someone who works for a large PR firm.

Hi there –

Thank you.

First mistake: A lack of personalization. How difficult could it be to write “Hi, Mark”.

Second mistake: I don’t write about laptops so sending me a press release about a new one suggests you haven’t done your homework.

Third mistake: Even if I did write about laptops, what’s the angle other than this particular model is new? Why would I be interested in learning more?

As they say in baseball, three strikes and you’re out.

What puzzles me is many PR firms have “rap sheets” about reporters – their likes, dislikes, when they like to be contacted, how they like to be contacted, etc. Why wouldn’t they do the same for bloggers? Are bloggers still not seen as equivalent to reporters so not worthy of the same love and attention?

Let’s be clear, there are many PR firms that are excellent at bloggers relations. But when you have a major PR firm sending press releases to bloggers that are unpersonalized press release, there’s something not quite right.

The reality is as traditional newsrooms shrink, there will be fewer reports. As a result, bloggers will become more important. Now is the time to start implementing best practices for blogger relations as opposed to dropping the proverbial ball.

Fabrice Taylor had an interesting column in yesterday’s Globe & Mail that talked about his own decision to cut the chord, as well as the fact the number of U.S. cable and satellite subscribers dropped by 216,000 in the second-quarter, the first time it had ever declined.

In the scheme of things 216,000 is a drop in the bucket compared with the 10s of millions of subscribers still coughing up a growing amount of dollars each and every month. But it does signal that consumers now have an option to get their video fix – be it movies, documentaries or television shows. With higher-speed networks and a growing number of devices to watch video, the Web is becoming a more viable and attractive platform.

This is a movement that will likely gain more traction as services such as Hulu, NetFlix and iTunes make it even easier to access online video anywhere, any time on any device, including smartphones.

The big obstacle facing cord-cutting is live sports – something that is available on pay-per-view but not readily available through an online service. If the professional sports leagues come around to offering games on a pay-as-you-go basis, it could dramatically jump-start the cord-cutting trend.

Last weekend, for example, I watched an NFL football game via online service. It wasn’t a legitimate service but, nevertheless, hinted at what was possible. If I could purchase the game of the week (e.g. New England vs. the New York Jets) for let’s say $4.99 from NFL.com, that would completely change how I would consume television.

That said, I do not expect the professional sports leagues in North America to change how they do business in the near future. The television deals from ESPN, NBC, Fox and CBS are too lucrative to consideration alternatives. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.

So while professional sports may not be part of the cord-cutting movement, everything else is on the table. As more services become available and more people get their heads around the fact they really don’t need to have cable or satellite service, cord-cutting could go from a murmur to a rumble in no time at all.

Have you cut the cord? If so, how do you consume your video these days, and what services do you use?

You may try to do multiple things at the same time but it is difficult, if not impossible, to focus on the task at hand if there several tasks battling for attention.

Nevertheless, there’s a widely-accepted belief that talking on the phone, writing an e-mail, and checking your Twitter status at the same time is an efficient way to operate.

Frankly, we’re kidding ourselves. It may be physically possible to multi-task but it’s totally inefficient to be bouncing around from task to task like a Mexican jumping bean, rather than focusing on one thing at a time, before moving on to the next task. (aka single-tasking).

Focus is a subject I have battled to embrace over the past couple of years as the demands of handling multiple consulting clients makes it more important to manage my time and focus my efforts. In our multi-tasking world, it takes tremendous discipline to bear down on what needs to be done when there are a variety of tempting distractions.

Among my peers, it seemed like I was the only one struggling to figure out if there was a different way to operate – a way that let us focus in a multi-tasking world.

It is encouraging to see other people start to address what I see as the “Focus Crisis”.

In a blog post recently, Jason Falls asked “What would happened if you took a break from social media? Falls, a social media consultant, addressed the issue of being engaged professionally and personally when social media can be seductive mistress demanding your attention 24/7.

Mark MacLeod (aka StartupCFO) had a post about turning off his wireless device so he could focus on talking to new companies about a possible investment, or watching his son swim. Again, we’re talking about someone struggling to focus. To an effort to get back on the right track, MacLeod made this commitment:

“So, I am vowing now to my family, my partners and the entrepreneurs we meet that I will be present. Work will continue to come in probably faster and faster as our portfolio grows over time. So, I will need to be very good at carving out blocks for work and blocks for meetings. And at home, I will need to create distinct times for work vs. continually floating in and out of work and family stuff.”

Finally, the New York Times has a front-page story today about the struggles teachers are having getting students to focus. In class, students are sending dozens of text messages using wireless devices rather than focusing on the teacher.

Maybe I’m taking 1 + 1 + 1 to equal four but what we’re increasingly having is a failure to focus on anything. We’re multi-tasking, distracted and inefficient. Our personal lives are less rich and engaged because we need to check our wireless devices for e-mail or update our Twitter status. Our professional lives are becoming less productive even at a time when it’s more important to focus because many companies continue to operate lean and mean.

As the ability to focus becomes more difficult, we’re losing something along the way. In our personal lives, it’s respect and true engagement – something that can not be achieved when a conversation with someone could be abandoned at any time to take a phone call. In our professional lives, we’re less efficient, which means more stress because the work isn’t getting done. As a result, work is spilling into our personal lives so we can catch up.

Not a lot of people may be talking about it but we’re in the midst of a focus crisis. And it’s not going to any easier as more devices, technologies and online services battle for attention. But if we don’t get a handle on being focused soon, we’re in trouble.

That said, I still have cable television because it’s really the only way to watch live sports. If there was a service that let you buy live sports on a pay-as-you-go basis, I probably wouldn’t need cable service.

For all the talk about TV’s new future and the rise of services such as Hulu and Apple TV, the world is still dominated by cable and satellite service providers. As much as people talk about being able to just buy the shows they want by downloading them or streaming them off the Web, there doesn’t appear to be a stampede of consumers yet.

But there are indications that the marketplace is changing. A recent survey Webbush Securities analyst James Dix discovered 7% of 2,500 respondents had stopped using basic cable and 12% had cut their premium or satellite services.

“There is evidence of cord cutting,” Dix told the New York Post

Perhaps the biggest hurdle facing the growth of the pay-as-you-go TV market is live sports. While there is some pay-per-view and sports packages, sports remains the reason why many people still have cable or satellite service. As much as television shows have migrated to the New TV, sports is still pretty much rooted in the Old TV.

It may have to do with the fact the networks are willing to pay billions of dollars in broadcasting rights, or maybe it simply has to do with a new model not being ready for prime time yet. For example, a Hulu for live sports in which you could watch any professionals game for $2.99 or $4.99/shot could be very interesting.

My take is we’re just moving into the New TV era. Hulu is an indication of what may be over the horizon, although it is a hybrid given it’s controlled by traditional broadcasters. Apple TV could be interesting but it’s strong ties to iTunes will be a strength and a weakness, while Google TV is still finding its feet.

For couch potatoes, it could be an interesting landscape with far more choices.

For more, check out David Pogue’s recent column in the New York Times.

Many of the start-ups that approach me are looking for help with messaging to better articulate who they are and why potential customers would be interested in their products or services. It may seem like a straightforward proposition but, in reality, being able to clearly tell the world why they should care is a major challenge.

The biggest issue is a growing number of consumers are time-strapped and, at the same time, multi-tasking. And their attention spans are, at best, minimal. It means that if a company fails to capture their attention right away, you can kiss that potential customer goodbye. It’s not that your product or service isn’t interesting or worth a look; it’s more that we live in a world of instant-gratification and give it to me now.

This means that messaging quickly needs to resonate, captivate and engage. The mission statement, value proposition and feature benefits need to be crystal clear and basically grab people by their collars. There’s no time to be cute, subtle or a tease. Your messaging must make people immediately say “Yes, I get it.” It can’t make consumers do any work to figure things out because it will only encourage them to quickly move on.

The question is: if messaging is so important, why do so many companies struggle with it?

The answers are various and far from simple. In some cases, bad messaging has a lot to do with the skill-sets of people developing a product or service. They’re really good at building things but not good at telling other people what these things do and their benefits. It’s not a bad thing but the reality some people don’t have good marketing and communication skills, particularly when they have to do it in such a short period of time.

Another pitfall for many companies is they’re so close to the action, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get a fresh perspective on what they do and why anyone would care. When you spend so much time focused on a particular product or service, it’s hard not to get locked in about what it does. This is where a third-party perspective can be invaluable to shed new light or ideas that may be entirely different than what a company has been thinking.

A big part of this problem is companies are focused on talking about what their products or service do, the features and the benefits. Instead, they should be focused on how their products or services meet the needs of existing and potential customers. There may be a subtle difference in these two approaches but they can make make or break a company.

The first approach is “me, me, me”, while the second approach is “you, you, you”. Look at how many companies talk about how “We make this product…” or “Our technology is best of class…”, rather than “You can use our products to be more efficient” or “You need to be reduce costs…..”.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for companies is acknowledging they need help to improve or change their messaging. It can be difficult to admit that what they’ve been telling the world may be working or, for that matter, an accurate depiction of who they are and what they do.

Any company willing to take the next step by seeking outside help needs to be flexible and open to change. They need to embrace the possibility that their messaging may be completely overhauled or taken in a different direction. It’s the only way that messaging can improve or evolve, which, at the end of the day, can make a big difference.

Despite the renewed belief that content and connectivity are a magical pairing, my take is it’s much ado about nothing all over again. At the end of the day, the pipes are much more valuable than content. Why? It’s simple: There are only a limited number of pipes but lots of content. This may live in a 500-channel universe but there’s limited way to access all of this content.

If consumers want content, they need a way to get it, and they are willing to pay higher prices for better, faster, more convenient connections. Look at how broadband prices continue to be increased with nary a whimper from consumers, who are loathe to pay anything for online services, even those they find valuable and useful.

No one talks about it much but he/she who controls the pipes, wins. It’s as simple as that.

There’s at least one person who seems to share my thesis: Rogers Communications CEO Nadir Mohammed, who provided this juicy quote to the Globe & Mail:

“We think there’s a lot of glory in dumb pipes,” he says. This is shortly before he also says, “There’s no such thing as dumb pipes.”

This quote come from the leader of a company which owns large broadband and wireless businesses, as well as radio stations and TV stations, magazines, Web sites and a baseball team.

The sudden need by pipe owners such as Bell Canada and Shaw to own content sounds like the same arguments pipe owners were making a decade ago, and we all know how well that turned out. The difference between then and now is there’s so much more content being created, which has made content is more of a commodity.

Meanwhile, the number of pipes has stayed relatively the same. Sure, there are a few more wireless carriers but it’s not like billions of dollars being poured into building new broadband networks being created. As long as pipes are in short supply, they will remain an extremely valuable asset – much more valuable than content.