LinkShare Symposium NYC 2009 Preview

I am heading across the Hudson River for the LinkShare Symposium tomorrow and just wanted to share some highlights (to me, at least).

The networking starts this evening with an open dinner in The Living Room at the Standard Hotel, which is the official hotel of the LinkShare Symposium. Come and join myself and a bunch of other folks for affiliate marketing shop talk and dinner.

And then there is a pre-party organized by Paresh Vadavia of Ice.com form 8:00pm – 11:00pm at Brass Monkey NYC. RSVP for this Paresh CONNECT event on Facebook.

The next day starts at 8:00am at Chelsea Piers with registration and continental breakfast (see the full agenda).

Be sure to check out your copy of issue 6 of FeedFront magazine when you pick up your registration materials.

The speaker I’m most anxious to see is keynote Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide” and Editor of Wired. He’s going to be talking about neurological and social psychology studies that explain how people make decisions and how to use those insights to become better online marketers – I love that stuff.

The Golden Link Awards are taking place during the luncheon, and this is always a fun event.

The host of the Golden Link Awards will be Joan Rivers, and Affiliate Summit is up as a finalist for the Most Vocal Advocate award. We’ve got formidable competition in Scott Jangro and the PMA.

I’d imagine multiple people will Tweet the award winners as it goes along, so be sure to track #sympo on Twitter. A good tool for this is twazzup – check out the page for the LinkShare Symposium.

Later in the afternoon, there is the DealMaker Tradeshow. This is always a highlight for me, and I’ve got a target list of merchants to chat up.

Stay tuned for my photo coverage of the event at http://www.flickr.com/photos/affiliate/.