Of course our ever-vigilant leaders would never leave us unsupervised without a very good reason – two very good reasons, actually.  Brand Labs’ president, Kevin Harman, is exhibiting with Volusion at Shop.org’s annual summit in Boston.  We’re sharing booth #1113 in the exhibit hall and Kevin is always eager to network after the show, so you should hit him up.  He’s like a business-card-hurling free drink machine.

At the other end of our great nation, you’ll find Dane Downer (Brand Labs’ VP) at the very exclusive Google Analytic Partner Summit.   You know why you never heard of it?  Because you totally weren’t invited.  It’s an invitation-only affair for Google Analytics Partners.  It’s our understanding that all attendees will actually be able to get their pictures taken sitting on the Google Bunny’s lap!  We’re very, very jealous.

Scheduled to appear at the three day conference are speakers from Facebook, Apogee, Audette Media and SEOmoz  (and many more!)  They’ll be discussing the latest SEO techniques and tools, learning about SEOmoz’s latest, secret offering(s) and networking under the famous gray, drippy skies of the American Northwest.

If you’re in Seattle and you’d like to meet up with Dane, just shoot him an email at dane.downer@brandlabs.us.  He’ll be the guy in the flannel shirt, hanging outside the coffee shop and listening to Pearl Jam.

… if one unified theory can be called a flood.

Pretty much everyone speculated that the “awesome” announcement would have to do with video chatting.

They were right.

(from left) Ryan Forrest, Katelyn Stanis, Sal Agrusa, Kevin Harman and Dane Downer at IRCE 2011

Fresh off of our inaugural appearance as exhibitors at the Internet Retail Conference & Exhibition, our traveling sales staff has returned with stories and images from the trip.

Here we see our intrepid team gathered in front of our fancy new display which was recently voted the Greenest Trade Show Display in History.  But the show wasn’t just about standing around and looking awesome.  We also got to hang out with our Volusion friends, meet up with several of our customers, hear Doug Mack and Ariana Huffington speak and introduce ourselves to hundreds and hundreds of IRCE attendees.

The team supposedly got a lot of business done, but if we were to judge solely by the pictures they came back with, it would be easy to assume that the primary reason for the trip was beachgoing and barhopping.  We’ll be going over their expense reports with a fine tooth comb, but in the meantime, why not check out the photo gallery after the jump…

San Diego - "Like Los Angeles, Only a Little More South"

We're on a boat!

Ryan with Brad Cox from Brand Labs' client, HotTubThings.com. Brad is taller in person than he is on the interwebs.

The IRCE block party hosted by Newgistics, Knotice and Verisign. We can't tell for sure but that looks like Morris Day and the Time on stage.

Kevin, Andy from EcoMowers.com and Katelyn are clearly working their asses off.

The crew celebrates their triumphant IRCE appearance by breaking in to a restaurant and cooking their own food.

The Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition is the premiere event for the eCommerce industry and we’re pleased to be taking our rightful place as part of the big show.  A portion of our team of experts will set up camp in the exhibit hall (booth 936) for the duration of the show.  We’ll be answering questions about eCommerce, Volusion, AutoResponderMax and anything else you’ve got.  We’ll also be giving away two year-long AutoResponderMax subscriptions and an iPad (in cooperation with our friends at Volusion).

Pictured here is our mobile team of experts.  From the top left (clockwise), Dane Downer, Kevin Harman, Ryan Forrest, Katelyn Stanis and Sal Agrusa.  Look for their happy, smiling faces in front of the greenest damn display in the whole exhibit hall.

You can sync Mashable Follow with your existing social media accounts, like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google Buzz, Digg, and LinkedIn. You can follow other Mashable Follow users to see what they’re doing and reading. You can follow specific topics, designed to deliver you a personalized news feed that subsists solely on topics that you find interesting.

It also allows other users to follow you to see what you’ve shared, see what you’re following, and help spread the social media goodness. You can share each article that you see, allowing you to broadcast it across your linked social media accounts.

Mashable Follow acts as an aggregate for sharing to your social media accounts, allowing you to find and follow news articles tailored to your interests, and then you can share interesting articles (from Mashable) across multiple sources with one click.

Finally, it has badges! Of course it does, who doesn’t have badges nowadays? So far I’ve only gotten a few, mostly for completing my profile, following 15 topics, and that sort of thing, but it looks like if I get more followers, and do more things, I’ll get more badges, and why would I not want to collect badges? There is no reason, that’s why. I have six, and they’re mostly modeled after Internet Memes (which we’re obviously into). For example, the badge for finishing your profile is the Dramatic Chipmunk. Also, I’ve never gotten an “early adopter” badge for anything, so I’m disgustingly pleased with myself.

Overall, it seems like a great news and social sharing tool, and it will be interesting to see where it goes when it gets past the beta test. To get on the invite list for Mashable Follow (it has Ashton Kutcher!), you can find that here.

… okay.  So “featured” may be inaccurate (intentionally misleading, even) but it is undeniable that both Brand Labs and Kevin Harman did appear in TechCrunch’s video coverage of SXSW.  At about 18:56, you’ll get to meet our new bestest Volusion buddy, Olga Kazakova, standing directly in front of our big ol’ Brand Labs banner.

Of course, we clearly took second billing to the free slap bracelets, but let’s be honest: slap bracelets are pretty frigging sweet.  (They’re jewelry with a playfully violent delivery system.  That’s kinda awesome.)

Anyhoo, as the TechCrunch crew wraps things up with Olga and moves along, sharp-eyed viewers will spot our jovial president, Kevin Harman, in the background – gleefully thinking about eCommerce as he (somewhat expectedly) returns his gaze to his iPhone.

Kevin’s back now, seemingly unfazed by his microscopic brush with Internet fame, but to us, he’ll always be right up there with Chocolate Rain Guy and That Grape-Stomping Newslady Who Fell Really Hard on Her Face.

From what we’ve heard so far, he’s representin’ well for eCommerce and for the D.  Any minute now, the show will be breaking up for the day and Kevin will be doing what he does best: inserting business-related talk into social situations.  So if you like your SEO talk served up with an ice-cold Corona (no lime) then you should head over to booth 913 and look for this happy, smiling face.

(Interesting side note: Kevin actually never stops sharing his encyclopedic eCommerce knowledge, so if you just stand near him for 5 – 7 minutes, it’s pretty likely that your SEO will go up simply by osmosis.)

The other player in the current drama is Anonymous – a loosely-affiliated group of hacker activists known for their G8 protests and a string of Denial of Service attacks on those who they feel are perpetrating wrongs on the world as a whole.

Now that we’re up to speed on the players, here’s the current story (in a nutshell): a couple of days ago, WBC representatives started to make a lot of noise about a supposed “threat” leveled against them by Anonymous.  For their part, representatives of Anonymous denied that any recognized member of their group had claimed responsibility for the “threat” and that they had better things to do than go to war with obvious publicity whores.

Read the latest developments after the jump…

Today in the midst an online talkshow featuring a spokeswoman for Westboro Baptist Church battling with a representative of Anonymous, despite their earlier proclamation that they wanted nothing to do with these frothing zealots, Anonymous launched an attack on many sites owned by the church.  Visitors to the sites were met with this message from Anonymous.  The representative of the WBC seemed absolutely delighted by the news while the Anonymous rep. almost seemed as though he felt dirty stooping to her level.  See video of the event here.

Now, regardless of your feelings about either of these organizations, there’s a significant takeaway to be had here.  In the video, the Anonymous representative claimed that their site had received a 2,100% increase in traffic as a result of the purportedly manufactured battle and that the resulting ad revenue generated by the site had increased by 3,500%.  Of course Wesboro Baptist Church also received more traffic… right up until Anonymous effectively shut them down entirely.  (As of this writing, all of the Westboro Baptist Church sites that we tried to reach were simply gone.)

These numbers tell us two truly important things about marketing in the current Internet environment.  First, online buzz is like lightning in a jar – tricky to capture, but massively powerful (and likely to disappear as fast as it arrived).  Second, whether you’re marketing a message, a philosophy or a product, one must never fail to exploit every single avenue of revenue generation.  Here we have two ideologically-opposed organizations benefiting from a heated public discussion and a prank-level crime.  They aren’t benefiting directly by having tied their revenue stream to an unpredictable event.  They are benefiting because they each have an established network of online marketing channels.  They are benefiting because when the rain came, they already had their barrels out, ready to catch the downpour.  That’s a worthy lesson for anyone who hopes one day to drive significant traffic to their site.  Like Anonymous (who surely have some boy scouts in their ranks), you should be prepared.

(via SC Magazine)