I hate cliches.

I mean, really, who goes around killing birds with stones?

I can’t remember the last time I was at the library and didn’t explicitly judge a book based upon its cover.

My son spilled a glass of milk at dinner just last night – did any of us cry over it? Of course not. We’re not idiots.

You get the idea (although I did avoid Derek like the plague last week since he was convinced he had contracted it).

Anyway, back to the point of this story.

You all know the tired cliche, “Try everything once,” right? Or maybe you are more of a “Do something that scares you” kind of person. Doesn’t matter, because this is one sentiment that I want to explore a bit more today as it’s one I try to remember as I sashay through life.

OK, yes, perhaps it wasn’t the brightest idea when I decided to drink a glass of raw eggs a la Rocky Balboa when I was a teenager (didn’t get sick, felt fine).

And it’s true, perhaps little 10-year-old Derek would have been better off not telling his friends, family, and everyone in the surrounding area that he wrote a 15-page love letter to the girl/robot star of Small Wonder (today’s fun fact: she’s apparently now a nurse in Colorado. Derek asks that you let him know if she is ever a faculty member for your educational initiative).

But the point is that we were both conquering our fears and trying something new and uncomfortable (and perhaps stupid). I understand that, for many of you, when we put out the call for submissions for CMEpalooza Spring, you were scared. “No way I am going to talk in public. Uh uh, never, never, never. Besides, who cares what I have to say anyway?”

In reality, though, CMEpalooza is the perfect venue to allow you to overcome your fear of public speaking. You don’t have to picture anyone in the audience naked (let’s face it, the CME crowd ain’t exactly overflowing with Adonises and Aphrodites). You get to choose your surroundings, whether it your home, office, or favorite quiet nook in your local coffee shop. It will be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

You’ve only got a few more days to come up with a brilliant idea, recruit a colleague or two to join your presentation team, and then tell us all about what you have planned (submission deadline is this Friday)? What’s the worst that could happen? Whatever it is, it can’t be as bad as this.

So whaddya say? Let’s give it shot, OK sport? Click here for all the information you need to make your dreams come true.

As even casual fans of the CMEpalooza blog know, Derek and I are big fans of ‘80s nostalgia.

If you need someone to tell you the name of the actor who starred alongside Anthony Michael Hall in Weird Science, Derek’s your guy (it’s Ilan Mitchell Smith). If you can’t remember the name of the 49ers receiver who started that team’s ‘80s dynasty with The Catch, I can help (it was Dwight Clark). And if you keep scratching your head trying to figure out just how many licks it takes to get the center of that Tootsie Roll Pop, well, that we can’t help you with (Derek has gotten to 4, so at least he beat that wise owl).

Yet as much as we love remembering the decade of our formative childhood, what we enjoy even more is coming up with new ways to make CMEpalooza valuable to our audience and our sponsors. In response to feedback from our audience, we’ll be making a few tweaks to the way we develop and present our Spring and Fall events in 2018 – you may have seen our recent post announcing that CMEpalooza Spring is being split into 2, half-day broadcasts instead of the previous full-day marathon – that we hope will help us continue to grow.

Our growth, of course, translates into improved visibility for our sponsors. In the 4 years since CMEpalooza began, more than 50 organizations have wisely chosen to align themselves with us and support all of the top-notch education that we provide the CME community.

CMEpalooza sponsorships start at the low, low price of $600. As usual, there are a few new things we’re offering our sponsors this year (gotta love the free add-ons). You can check out everything we have thought up in our Sponsor Prospectus – and we’re open to other creative suggestions (we say that every year, but you can still be the first ever to take us up on it).

We make the sponsorship process as easy as possible. You send us an email saying, “CMEpalooza is the best thing since New Coke. Of course we want to be a sponsor,” we collect some basic information from you, and PRESTO! up you go on the CMEpalooza Sponsor page. You get in on all of our promotions and special events, and as much exposure as we can possibly offer.

If you want some hard numbers on our events, you check out the CMEpalooza “By the Numbers” page within this prospectus. We crunch data throughout the year and have pulled out some of the most impressive numbers here, but we can give you whatever else you may need. Just ask.

Still not sure? Maybe a few testimonials will convince you. Such as these, for instance, courtesy of the Way Back Machine:

• (Speaking really fast) “CMEpalooza is doing it again. Yes that’s right, doing it again with the lowest sponsorship prices under the sun. We’ve got bronze sponsorships, silver sponsorships, and, whoa, whoa, whoa, even 2 gold sponsorships ripe for the pickings. But don’t take your time and dawdle because the lines are already forming at our doors right now. I’m Crazy Derek, and if you don’t sign up for a CMEpalooza sponsorship tooo-day, you must be INSANE…”
• (Speaking really slowly, perhaps from a porch swing) “Hello. There are many ways to calculate the value of a CMEpalooza sponsorship. Mabel from Decatur, Georgia says that she has decorated the walls of her kitchen with the hundreds of ways she has thought up. We’d suggest just one – driving attention and traffic to the great work your company does. We hope you take this suggestion to heart… and thank you for your support.”
• (With a banging drum in the background) “For years, you’ve heard other CME-focused meetings claim that spending money on an exhibit booth or exclusive sponsorship at their event is the best investment any company involved in our industry can make, so you may have assumed that their sponsorship has more value than a sponsorship of CMEpalooza. Fact is, CMEpalooza wasn’t even included in their analysis. And we won’t be included next year either. Why? Because they know they can’t match our reach, our value, and our wit. CMEpalooza… it keeps growing and growing and growing…”

Maybe you have another question or concern we haven’t thought of. Just email us (that’s thecmeguy@gmail.com for Derek and scott@medcasewriter.com for me) – we promise we’ll respond to you quickly, like within 10 minutes or so (note from Derek: I’m gonna be 100% honest with you…if you email me, I probably won’t respond within 10 minutes. As hard as this may be to believe, I do have other things that I do during the day besides sit around waiting for CMEpalooza email. Quite a few things, actually. I do promise to respond to you as soon as I can, though.)

Derek and I will both be down in Orlando at the ACEHP meeting later this month, too, in case you want to chat, even if it has nothing to do with CMEpalooza sponsorship. For instance, you can ask Derek about the time he asked Tina Yothers to marry him. Or the time he plastered a Tiffany poster to his bedroom door. Or the time he begged his parents for weeks to let him take breakdancing lessons. Or something else just as embarrassing – be creative!

We’ll leave the light on for you.

A few weeks ago, Derek posted a short poll based upon a conversation our team had during its Winter Retreat in Aruba. The poll essentially involved one key question – “Should we split CMEpalooza in half?” Essentially, do we mess with our usual formula of a full-day event to better serve our audience?

Knowing how much people generally like change (sarcastic rolling of the eyes), I predicted that “Keep CMEpalooza the way it is” would be a runaway winner.

Boy was I wrong. Overwhelmingly (like, 90%+ overwhelmingly), our audience expressed a preference for 2 half-day Paloozas. Some people even suggested separating half-day broadcasts a week or a month apart. One person even asked us to have a single, 1-hour broadcast each month. Logistically, those kinds of extreme ideas would have been too taxing for our crew to pull off, but nonetheless, we are prepared to listen to our audience and make adjustments.

And so, for the first time since the inaugural CMEpalooza in the spring of 2015, we’ll be offering a CMEpalooza as a two-day event this spring. It will be on Wednesday, April 25 and Thursday, April 26. We’re still working out some of the details (do we do the same times each day or do we make some modifications so that we may better fit everyone’s schedule?), but once we get everything hammered down, we’ll let you know. If it goes well this spring, we’ll consider keeping the format for the fall and beyond.

In the meantime, be prepared to hear about a lot of the other new features we’ll be adding to CMEpalooza this year  in the coming weeks. The blog will be pretty active for a little while as we start rolling out some of our new stuff. It’s all good, I promise.

Oh, and Happy New Year.