I went to Startup Riot in Atlanta this week and one of the more interesting startups was a company called ShoutNow — a rapid voice messaging company. The idea is that you record a short message using your own phone, then ShoutNow broadcasts that message simultaneously to a list of numbes you enter into their website.

The uses they suggest are more personal — coach notifying the youth soccer team that practice is canceled, pastor notifying the congregation in emergencies, etc. But a really good use of this technology for entrepreneurs is creating a voice reminder for registered attendees for your event.

You can’t be too proactive in making sure people remember to attend an event for which they’ve registered, and most people won’t mind a short voice message if it’s something they really don’t want to miss. Email is good, but it’s not reliable for time-sensitive events.

You could also use this as a follow-up reminder after the event to encourage people to get in touch if they have questions. You don’t want to bug people, but I can see a number of ways this could be used effectively to reach people who can’t reliably be reached online.

When you spend as much time studying internet marketing as I do you start to get really burned out on the hype and BS. It’s refreshing to hear real people talk about actual businesses and how they’re using legitimate marketing techniques to grow them.

All the speakers were good, but two stood out:

• Andrew Lock has one of the most popular marketing vid-casts on iTunes — ahead of Harvard Business IdeaCast and BusinessWeek Market Report. Andrew has a TV production background, and it shows. But he does his vid-cast as a one-man show every week. It’s entertaining, informative, and a worthwhile way to spend 10 minutes a week.
• Bob Bly is a long-time copy writer. He’s the author of more than 70 books, all for traditional publishers, and has written copy for numerous Fortune 500 corporations. 18 months ago Bob had no internet marketing whatsoever. None. Zip. Then he got hooked up with Fred and, using Fred’s techniques, Bob is on track to earn more than $200k from his internet efforts this year. Not bad at all.

And that’s the kind of thing we heard all weekend long. Not stuff about making millions in minutes, but about how to build systems – both product and marketing – that can grow a business over time.

The other presenters were Dave Hamilton, Glenn Livingston, and (of course) Fred. Dave offers a variety of technical support services, like setting up shopping carts and configuring web sites, for new internet entrepreneurs. Glenn is a master at market research and segmentation.

All the presenters were very big on ethical behavior. The audience was interesting, too. A pilot for JetBlue airlines, two ladies who are long-time professional freelance writers, a traditional marketing consultant from DC, and a variety of entrepreneurs. It was a good group.

I had very low expectations, as I have never attended an internet marketing seminar before. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the level of professionalism present in both the presenters and the audience. I’ll be writing more about the three big lessons for traditional business owners in my next post.