Archive for the ‘Conference’ Category

Marketing Forum Theme Day 2: Engaging the Innovative Customer

Categories: Conference, ForresterPosted on April 25th, 2009

Forrester’s Marketing Forum in Orlando Florida, see other photos tagged FMF09

Yesterday’s theme was to take risks and engage in innovation –even in times of economic hardship. Armed and excited with examples from the speakers and panels, the conference was now focused on the ‘how to’, with a focus on engaging your customers to be involved, guide, and lead your company in tandem with your own leadership.

Forrester’s Peter Burris: Engaging the Innovative Customer
First we heard from Forrester’s Peter Burris, who focused on the theme o engaging your innovative customer, he suggested that as you take risks, let your innovative customers be your guide. The conference focus met the needs of multiple industries, and Peter gave data and insight not just how B2C can win but how B2B customers’ reliance on each other –and social tools – changes the marketing game. He referenced IBM’s Sandy Carter’s programs as best in class for bringing community into the forefront of B2B marketing including how they’ve integrated community into next week’s IMPACT event.

Peter brings forth a framework to help marketers plan for innovation: PLOT a path forward, which includes: Persona, Develop customer needs through social interactions, Location: Allow customers to create groups, and gives the example that Adobe hosts 700 user groups. Serena software embeds customers in its development & launch processes. Then Option and finally, Test.

His recommendations were very clear for engaging innovative customers:

Position marketing as a resource that B2B customers can use to drive better business outcomes.

Blend social media with traditional tactics to create new marketing forms –and new levels of productivity.

Align marketing and development to lower the risks

Ending notes: Innovative customers are ready, willing, and –thanks to social media—able to guide your efforts to manage risk.

Case Example: Microsoft’s Craig Dewar on Community
Next, we heard from Craig Dewar of Microsoft, hailing from New Zealand, he discussed how Microsoft has engaged. His first example, Craig gives the example how Microsoft launched a gaming console into a saturated market where Sony was a leader, and they launched the Xbox product. Each Xbox user can establish their own online identity and can interact with others. As each new game came out a new forum and dialog was formed. The second example is Channel 9 an online community for developers. The third example is Microsoft Dynamics Community, a CRM tool. The goals are: learning, networking, support, and feedback.

Lessons learned

Even if you build it, they may not come.

Critical Mass in a community is hard and will take longer than you think.

You won’t get community right, so be prepared to optimize.

Want to learn more? Blog Coverage from David Berkowitz
Long time friend David Berkowitz covered the many sessions, and even was adding pictures in near real time in his live blogging. Pretty dang impressive, even if I may say so myself. See all his posts that are tagged “conferences” to get more detailed coverage of the event. You can also see the hundreds of tweets tagged FMF09, and if you live blogged any of the sessions, leave a comment below.

Jeremiah’s Wrapup
I enjoyed this year’s show, it’s amazing that we had around 500 attendees registered even during a tight economy, it goes to show that now is the time for marketing to step up and innovate. I enjoyed having dinner with clients and drinking a bit too much EJ Gallow wine, heh. I was told that we had a wait list of over 30 vendors that wanted to be in the showcase, it was currently filled to capacity, so the demand for partners who wanted to help brands is clear. It was universally said that Forrester’s Shar stole the show, even with her opening musical rendition (see video from day 1, about 9 minutes in). I quick Forrester factoid, Forrester keynotes are encouraged to rehearse 20 times, many times in front of colleagues. We’ve already several more forums lined up, including the Marketing Consumer Forum in Oct in Chicago, see you there.

Here’s the archive of the live ustream of Day 2 opening keynotes.

Lastly, for attendees, you can login to the Forrester site using your password sent to your before the event to access the presentations.

Posted in Conference, Forrester | No Comments »

Marketing Forum Theme Day 1: Do Marketing Differently: Innovate During A Recession

Categories: Conference, ForresterPosted on April 24th, 2009

Forrester’s Marketing Forum in Orlando Florida

Forrester’s Christine Spivey Overby kicked off the conference, first reminiscing on how great innovation comes out of times of economic struggle. Her example, which is so suited for Forrester’s marketing conference in Orlando, is Walt Disney’s creative genius to develop an iconic entertainment franchise. She stresses that now is the time to do marketing differently by thinking differently and embracing innovation.

[Marketers should innovate now, despite the perceived risk]

Why innovate now:
VP/Principal Analyst on the Interactive Marketing team, Shar VanBoskirk spoke next. She indicates that a recent forecast shows that mobile, social, email, display, and search marketing will increase at a CGR of 17% in 2014. She gives some funny examples of some silly Twitter examples from overzealous customers. Risks: we take them because of the thrill, or the innovation.

Accessible innovation:
A marketing program development that you can pursue within your own role in order to solve problems or improve business results. It’s not limited to your CMO or your corporate strategy group. An accessible innovation should have the following traits:

Enhance: Replace incumbent channel with an unproven one.
Include: Incorporate community perspective
Empathize: Relating to your community
Iterate: Speeds developing

Shar notes that BestBuy’s remix is a great example of innovating during a recession. They’ve provided an API for third party developers – I’ve outlined the program – the most unique is GPS discovery tool and Camel. With all innovation comes risk, in Best Buy’s case the risk is letting anyone use brand assets.

7-11 Takes Risks with Simpsons tie-in
Next, we had Rita Bargerhuff, the VP of Marketing, discussing how 7-11 takes risks. She outlines there are four requirements before diving into risk: 1) is it right for your Brand 2) is it right for consumers 3) is it right for internal stakeholders and 4) Is it right for the environment.

Rita eloquently gave a case study of how they aligned the 7-11 brand with the popular Simpsons movie, which while was risky as the show paints “Kwik-e-mart” in a culturally sensitive parody, see a public flickr set. Taking the risk required intensive stakeholder buy-in, which resulted in movie tie-ins, movie product tie-in (squishee), and even creating a Kwik-e-mart store. Did it pay off? Yes, there were lines wrapped around the store to get into the store.

Her closing remarks? “Success leads to success You’ll attract new business partners” well spoken.

This was cross posted on the Forrester Interactive Marketing Blog, Zach Hofer-Shall gave a quick read over this post before I posted, thanks.

Above: Here’s a ustream recording of the opening keynote.

Posted in Conference, Forrester | 3 Comments »

Forrester Panel: The Future of Media with Coke, MTV, and Canoe Ventures

Categories: Conference, Forrester, Media 2.0Posted on April 23rd, 2009

Left: The Future of Media Panel rounds off Day 1 at Forrester’s Marketing Conference.

I’m sitting in the front row here in Orlando at Forrester’s Marketing Conference. We’re talking about the “M”M world, no not the Mouse but Media. This closing panel is discussing the Future of Media. Moderator is colleague David Card, Annis Lyles, VP Media of Coca Cola, Greg Clayman, EVP of MTV, and David Verklin CEO of Canoe Ventures. David’s not taking any prisoners and is intending to make this a pretty tough panel, rightfully so, media is undergoing some serious changes.

David starts out showing that newspapers is struggling, from NYT, Rocky Mountain, and SFgate. First let’s start with the client side. Coke recalls the day when there were only three major media networks –now there are many. She focuses her strategy on consumers, and first starts with her kids. David, from Canoe has a focus on TV, and says “TV is getting back in the game”. How? to bring interactivity to the TV. He’s extremely optimistic saying that “TV is a platform”, and says he’s going to launch a new product in three weeks. I’m a bit hesitant to his optimism, but hey, I’m open to a briefing.

Annis from Coke brings us back to reality, but suggesting we should first collect information from our consumers. David suggests that we can use data to only show TV ads about dog supplies to dog owners. The panel debated over how to get this data, from a variety of sources, such as panels, existing data sources. I certainly hope they read my upcoming report on the Future of the Social Web, some of the answers are in there. David suggests that “the Internet has really raised our game”, and nods to how the benefits of search, and it’s ability to measure. Yet, he suggests that the accuracy and relevancy of internet ads are very low.

Moderator David Card fires a blow to the panel and says “What happens when consumers skip through advertisements on TV” The panels spins, rebalanced and comes back. David says that we’ve had ad skipping technology for years, called the “clicker”, nice counter. I didn’t hear any epiphanies out of the panel, not sure if they have a strong idea of the future of media, but hey, this is a very difficult topic.

A question from audience: “Why is new interactive ads on TV relevant? It’s still push, interruptive advertising” David suggests that interactive TV will provide new engagements for segments. Cooking shows are entertainment, and chefs are taking notes, instead, they’ll need new experiences to get recipes.

The final question from the audience? When does TV and Internet combine. Coke says “all media will merge” and says “it’s now”. Good answer. David from Canoe says 2011, “in next five years content will come across 3 screens” nice bold statement. Greg suggests 3-5 years.

David Berkowitz, who I’ve known for years, a top marketing blogger and practitioner is live blogging, see what he wrote. David always has to outdo me and has not 1, but 4 pictures.

I’m updating this post live

Posted in Conference, Forrester, Media 2.0 | 7 Comments »

Video: How To Use Twitter and Connect in the Comments

Categories: Conference, MicroMedia, VideoPosted on April 15th, 2009

I’m getting more and more client calls asking about Twitter, although I tend to think most of my readers are the super social elite folks you’d find in Friendfeed. Yet, in reality, many agencies, brands, and executives are just hearing about this microblogging services from the recent media buzz.

The above video, created by Lee and Sachi LeFever (I hung out with them in SXSW) of CommonCraft is available here on YouTube, or you can use their license and use for internal education. If you’re seeking to find some of my Forrester colleagues, Alexis Karlin in our web marketing team has an ongoing roster of Forrester employees who happen to be on Twitter.

If you happen to be a client, Zach Hofer-Shall and me wrote this report on how to use Twitter based on the Groundswell objectives, or you can catch me at these Twitter conferences: the 140 Twitter conference in Mountain View on May 26-27th, or at Twtrcon in SF on May 31st. Yes, I find it curious we have Twitter conferences, but people said the same thing about blogging conferences in 2006.

If you’re new to Twitter, first read my Twitter FAQ. Then if you want to connect with other folks that are readers of the Web Strategy blog, leave a comment below, then others will follow you in my community, and we can all connect. I’ve noticed that new users have no idea what to do (empty bar syndrome) when they’re not connected with others, I hope this spurs things along for new members.

Update: Oh yeah, this is interesting, I helped Tony get on the Tyra Banks TV Show.

Posted in Conference, MicroMedia, Video | 62 Comments »

Panel: Search Engine Optimization for New Media

Categories: Conference, Search Strategy, Social MediaPosted on November 8th, 2008

I’m sitting here at the Thin Air Summit in Denver, anyone who is here on a Saturday is very serious about social media –I guess I fit the bill. I don’t know that much about SEO when it comes to social media, so I’m going to blog some of the key findings.

Moderator: Micah Baldwin
Panelists: Brett Borders, Elizabeth Yarnell, John Fischer

Elizabeth a book author had a desire to promote her book Glorious One-Pot Meals –without using a traditional publisher. Her advice? The goal is to be found, rather than focus on traditional marketing which is ‘target markets’.

Think beyond keywords and be actionable
Bad: “Elizabeth Yarnell, Author” instead use the title bar to put in keywords about your product, you’ll have better search results.
Better: “Learn to cook fast meals with Elizabeth Yarnell”, notice the call to action.

Existing social media sites score high
She suggests that social media sites (like flickr, myspace, blogger) already get lots of traffic, and page rank, and will increase your SEO ranking.

Social Media is about the abundance theory
It’s about giving away what you know and to share with others, in return they will come back to you.

Learn the keyword search tools on the internet, such as keyword tracker, google tracker, word tracker. Many are free, some are expensive.

Brett Borders provide some highlights of what SEOs are doing within social media, he doesn’t advocate these tactics.

Create video to dominate universal search results
Since Google launched ‘universal search’ (showing images, video, beyond just text) these are opportunities to score well on your search results. Create content in multiple mediums that all support your marketing effort. A snapshot of the video will show up on the universal search results.

Free Google Adwords
How to do free google adwords? Have you blog post create similar content pointing to the video, then submit to digg. It can ’sometimes’ provide Google ads. (I really don’t get this)

Ego Searches influence your SERP –but not everyone else’s
If you do lots of ego searches for your own domains, Brett suggests that personalized search will actually cause your results to show higher –but that’s just what you see, not everyone else. You can go to your web history tools and have your history cleared which will prevent this from happening.

Persona Blogging (flogging)
Create a branded human character, as a facade, and ‘uplift’ the community, then link to your site every 25 times. There are agencies that are doing this. The risks? like the Edelman fiasco can get the ill will of your community and can result in brand backlash. These tactics will be found out in a few years.

Make Friends –make links
Create profiles in social networks such as tribe, then make a lot of friends which will send traffic back to your profile –which links to your website.

Follow folks on Twitter
A discussion talking about an automated way to gain followers on twitter, despite the limit of 2000, you can remove them then add more. These get more followers then you can spam them with tweets.

Link Tuning –and tone down adsl
Suggests that webmasters tune their page so not important pages have a ‘no-follow’ so Google doesn’t index it. Also he suggests that new blogs not be adsense heavy so it doesn’t look so commercial.

John Fischer runs a sticker company called Sticker Giants
Suggests that search engines don’t want marketers to focus on SEO, they just want you to do naturally link building.

Focus on business goals –not your personal name
After reviewing one of the attendee’s website suggested that her website content/titles focus on her business goals, not her given name. People will search on her business, not her name

Show off your media
On your blog, make it obvious and promote your social media content: youtube, flickr, ustream, seesmic, perhaps use a friendfeed widget, so readers know who you are.

Strategy perspective from moderator Micah Baldwin

Understand the difference between long and short term SEO strategies
There’s a long term and short term strategy. While there’s a lot of things you can do in the short term to generate traffic, it can result in you getting banned in the long term. The short term low value may build up long term value.

Be pervasive with a sticky post
Suggests creating a ’sticky post’ that stays at the top of a blog and lists all the important information regardless of what you’ve posted recently. I think a header or footer could also help accomplish this

Summary
From the crowd, isn’t it better to be passionate about a topic and work on long term relevance? This way Google won’t discount your efforts in the long term.

The end suggestions were to be passionate about whatever you’re doing, it will help you to be relevant in the long term.

Me? I don’t do any specific SEO tactics in order to get search relevance, I just focus on writing content that people will link to, tweet it, and the rest happens by itself. I encourage you to avoid the short term tactics and focus on building the long term relationships –go for the long haul.

Oxygen is provided at the Thin Air Summit in Denver

Posted in Conference, Search Strategy, Social Media | 18 Comments »

Thinking Bigger: Web 2.0 Summit Gives a Purpose

Categories: ConferencePosted on November 8th, 2008

For the first time in a while yesterday, I felt back at home.

Although I’ve been traveling all about speaking to different companies and business conferences, it’s been some time since I’ve gone to conferences in my core passion area of social media and web 2.0. Although I was only able to attend the third of three days, Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit really gave a good show in the most literal meaning. The 3k ticket price brought forth amazing speakers from Mark Zuckerberg, Arianna Huffington, Jerry Yang, Lance Armstrong, Issac Mao, Marc Benioff, Kevin Rose, and an inspirational keynote by Al Gore.

Unlike previous Web 2.0 events the theme was very clear to me, these social tools are now impacting so much more than the tech blogger circle jerk that we all tire of. With our future President launching a blog on Wednesday, Lance Armstrong discussing politics, ego and the web, and Al Gore on stage discussing how energy and global crises can help be solved from collaborative means.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been at a tech conference where we didn’t fondle the hammer and actually focused on building the house. Actually choosing an objective to apply these tools to much bigger problems: cancer, health, politics, global warming, energy crises, and connecting the world.

In an earlier panel we saw the bumping of elbows between Google, Microsoft, MySpace and Facebook each pitting themselves against each other in this cage match panel, yet it was more inspiring to hear in Al Gore’s closing keynote, he talked about having a purpose to using these tools to impact something far bigger than ever before.

See the many other public pictures tagged #web2summit coming in.

Posted in Conference | 13 Comments »

Giveaway: Tickets to the Internet Strategy Forum Summit

Categories: ConferencePosted on June 26th, 2008

I’m rewarding two readers with a complimentary VIP pass to the Internet Strategy Forum Summit conference on July 17th at the Governor Hotel in downtown Portland.

If you’re passionate about making your corporate website the best it can be, and want to connect with others who are leading the charge at their companies, then you’ve already marked a place on your Calendar for the Internet Strategy Forum Summit in July 17th in Portland.

Speakers include

• Geoffrey Ramsey, Co-founder & CEO, eMarketer
• Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research (I can’t wait to meet her someday!)
• Chris Shimojima, VP, Global Digital Commerce, Nike
• David Placier, VP, Consumer Insights, Disney Online
• Nancy Bhagat, VP of Sales and Marketing Group, Intel
• Daniel Stickel, new CEO, WebTrends (formerly with Google)
• Shane O’Neill, Chief Technology Officer, Fandango
• Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM, author (highest-rated speaker at 2007 Summit)

I attended last year, and was impressed to see all the corporate web leaders (web strategists) attending. Steve Gehlen for the Internet Strategy Forum, who founded ISF, has done a great service to our industry, in fact, he and I worked together to form the Silicon Valley chapter a few years ago.

We both realize that many of the readers of this Web Strategy Blog would love to attend the ISF conference, so we’re giving away two free tickets.

Last time, I gave away tickets for Graphing Social Patterns (John Bell, a winner rated it 4/5 stars) by running a contest, it worked pretty well, and I’d like to do this again./ The winners will be announced in new blog post and this post will be updated (so bookmark it).

I will be selected two winners who answer the following question:

1) Question: What is the future of Corporate Websites in 5 years?
I’ll be looking for out-of-the-box thinking, plausibility, and ability to logically connect the dots why and how your 5 year prediction will happen.

2) Write it clearly and succinctly, points assigned for brevity.
Effective strategists are excellent communicators.

3) What percentage will you attend the conference?
I want to give these tickets to someone who’ll really use it, I encourage you to answer this even if you don’t plan to attend, have fun with it!

Thanks for reading, I’m grateful to get enough traction now to reward readers with conference tickets, books, and the ability to network. Have fun with this, and strut your stuff strategists!

Update June 28: I’d like to thank Christopher Smith and Kristie Conner for their excellent responses (scroll down) to their vision of the future of the corporate website. While everyone provided excellent answers, I enjoyed hearing the focus on people from Chris (sites become social) and Kristie’s notion on ‘fluity’ of the future of the corporate website –it’ll spread both off domain and aggregate social content. Thanks all for playing.

Posted in Conference | 17 Comments »

Carmen, John, and Ajay on the future of White Label Social Networks

Categories: ConferencePosted on May 29th, 2008

In my previous post, I asked a question for the chance to win one of two tickets to the Graphing Social Conference in Virginia. I was getting so many responses (over 20 in 12 hours) that I had to put a cap on the contest. I carefully read each of the comments, and have found three comments that I find insightful, back up their assertion with reasoning, or are just plain interesting. Please congratulate these winners!

Also, for reasons out of my control, I won’t be attending GSP this time, hope you live blog it.

Question: Where you think the future of White Label Social networks is headed over the next 5 years, and why you back up that prediction?

Two top answers (Winners)

Carmen Delessio writes:
The value of a white label social network is tied to the intended audience. A network for a closed affinity group will have more value than social networking features on a generic local business web site or large corporate site.

A closed affinity can be the alumni of a college, fraternity, or corporation. It can be based on a shared experience or common interest. Managing the verification of the group info is a component of closed social networks. I really am an alumnus of Manhattanville College. Verifying that is a component of participating in their alumni network.

White Label social networks can stand alone for these affinity groups *and* coexist and thrive within larger social sites like Facebook. People can belong to more than one club.

In 5 years, there will be consolidation in this area. The remaining players will provide deep services to closed affinity groups and simple services to very small groups. Large corporations will be more interactive and engaged with customers through these tools, but it will be seen as a normal extension of their web sites and not a standalone community. Facebook and future large social sites will provide ties to these networks - small and large.
Corporations that blur the line between products and affinity will be succcessful with social networks.

Jeremiah: Carmen gets it, it’s not about “or” it’s about “and”. There’s plenty of room for white label vendors in the world of Facebook and MySpace. I enjoy her future perspective in making corporate websites relevant again. Good stuff, enjoy the conference!

John Bell writes:
For public social networks, the “white-label” space is due for shakeout and consolidation. All you had to do was browse the “vendor” floor at Community 2.0 a few weeks back and see the clustering of 5-6 different platforms with overlapping feature sets and minor tweaks on un-tried busiess models (charge by the user, charge by implementation, charge by time).

They cannot all succeed. Hopefully the market will favor those with real distinctions and with the best technology. I am pretty technologically savvy but still don’t feel prepared to judge Mzinga next to Jive next to…..

The most immediate an tangible use of white labels is in a space where the label doesn’t really matter: employee intra/extranets. The social network-based model where the staff member is the dominant knowledge “unit” is the natural course of all extranets. Many companies have been spending quite a bit to create their internal social net for knwoledge management, access and communication. The wide range of choices from teh current slew of socnets will drive down the costs of implementation dramatically.

The interesting innovation to come is when employee social networks bridge the divide between walled-garden access and content to the public face of employees. I want to share one thing internally - client materials and insight - and something else externally - though leadership and co-creation. Will there come a time when my staff “profile” at Ogilvy becomes portable to me next job?
Anyhow, I’m just sayin’…..

Jeremiah: John often leaves broad thinking comments on my blog, as he should as he’s one of the senior leaders at Ogivy interactive, so I’d expect no less. I agree with John, we’ll see a shake out in this space in the next few years, especially after traditional IT companies, ERP, CMS companies realize it may be better to buy than build their own. Thanks John, hope you live blog the show.

Honorable Mention
Ajay Mungara writes:
I think the whole concept of social networking is getting morphed into all websites. I see an explosion of corporate and consumer websites touting the social networking bandwagon. Just because a website has the so called social networking capabilities (blogs, wiki, podcast, twitter streams, facebook apps, etc.) does not make it a social networking site. Tools & services are only the means, but not the end. Today most of the tools / services are centered around providing social networking capabilities to your websites, but five years from now the best services will be the ones that can actually harness the power of “social intelligence” for practical business/consumer uses.

Jeremiah: Thanks Ajay, who’s busy over at Intel in the trenches dealing with these very issues. We agree, the tools aren’t as important as the actual relationship changes companies will have with their customers.

Thanks to everyone who participated it was hard to narrow down to these choices. Speaking of games, I was part of Jive’s Jeapardy game, where I scored last place, a mere $200 Jive bucks and Bill Johnston won the game! Jive is a client of Forrester btw.

Update: Sam from Small World Labs (white label social network) says that many of the commenters were negative on white label, and he sees a different future.

Posted in Conference | 7 Comments »

Focused on Social Networks? Attend Graphing Social Patterns

Categories: Conference, Social Networking, White Label Social NetworkPosted on May 27th, 2008

My main focus as an analyst is on online communities and social networks, if you’ve the same focus, I highly recommend you attend the Graphing Social Patterns conference, started by Dave McClure. The conferences runs deep into the developer discussions, as well as is blossoming with more and more business and marketing discussions. View my blog posts from previous events, including an interview with Dave.

This upcoming east coast version will have at least a few discussions focused on white label social networks, in fact, I’ve been asked to moderate the panel. I’m really looking forward to this focus on these important vendors, as there hasn’t been any conferences that have done a sole focus on the discussion of corporate communities in the context of these tools.

The upcoming GSP East (The West Coast conference was in San Diego a few weeks back) will be held in June 9-11, 2008 in the Washington, DC area, readers of this blog can register with a discount (Save 15% Use Code: gspe08fo). As a partner, attendees will receive a copy of one of my latest reports on “Online Community Best Practices” so please watch for that

I’m giving away 2 free tickets (valued at $1195, each)

Update: 12 hours later While I encourage additional comments, I”ll be selecting the winners from the first 24 comments. I simply don’t have enough bandwidth to compare and contrast all the great answers. The winners will be contacted and announced on this post.

O’Reilly has offered readers of this blog two tickets, during this week, going to select from the comments, simply answer the following question:

Where you think the future of White Label Social networks is headed over the next 5 years, and why you back up that prediction?

If you’re planning to leave a comment, but know you can’t attend the conference, please indicate so, so someone else who is interested in attending will benefit, thanks.

Posted in Conference, Social Networking, White Label Social Network | 29 Comments »

Upcoming Conferences to Attend: Where will you be?

Categories: ConferencePosted on April 28th, 2008

There are two conferences that I recommend you attend if you read my blog, the topics and presentations are closely aligned to what I’m interested in, and I know both of the organizers –they give good conferences with high value.

The first one is the Internet Strategy Forum Summit, July 17-18 in Portland, managed by my friend Steve Gehlen. He’s even offered a discount for readers of my blog (many web decision makers). Enter in WEBSTRAT as the discount code to get 10% off. I won’t be able to attend this year (I did last year) but Charlene Li will be one of the presenters. enjoy!

Graphing Social Patterns by Dave McClure, is a successful conference on the topic of Social Networks. I was a moderator at the last one in San Diego, and the upcoming one in Washington DC on June 9-11th will be a hit. I’m still trying to work out my schedule so I can attend.

But those are just two of my recommended conferences to attend (Web 2.0 expo, any Forrester Conferences, and SXSW are compulsory, of course) and if you’re in the bay area, there’s plenty of reocurring meetups (see large list).

Update: I attended last year’s community unconference (you control the agenda), and will do so again this year, It’s run by Bill Johnston, who I’ve interviewed for my research report on Online Communities, this is a great event I forgot to mention.

What upcoming conferences would you suggest?

Posted in Conference | 31 Comments »

Listening to the Audience (Twitter) at Web 2.0 Expo: The Balance of Value vs Entertainment

Categories: ConferencePosted on April 24th, 2008

I had near polar experiences on my two panels yesterday, the first one I moderated called Community Building: Good, Bad, and Ugly, and the second as a panelist: Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia.

A “Boring” panel that shifted to audience questions
Now the first panel had very enterprise technology companies present: Jive Software (Dawn Foster), Intel (Bob Duffy), PC/Mac World (Kellie Parker) and Forrester. We were very pragmatic, informational, and provide best practices information. While the majority of people enjoyed the discussion, I noticed an increase of Fortune 5000 attendees who are craving ‘how to’ information, some found the panel “dry” or “boring”. I tend to agree, the content we provided had lots of nuggets if insight, practical examples.

I was watching twitter in real-time to gauge the audience reaction (a best practice I prescribe in how to moderate a panel) and saw two tweets, in particular this one:

“I agree with @nickionita…community building panel is a snooze”

Like any speaker, when you start to see audience feedback like this your heart flutters and your mind jumps forward to images of SXSW. Quick! what do you do?

I think of the audience members as customers (they’ve paid with time and money) so I acknowledged them in twitter, and let everyone know we would quickly shift to questions, so the audience could drive the agenda. We received over a dozen questions, and I hope the audience was satisfied, lots of good hard questions from many folks on the ground that are trying to solve these problems: getting management to agree, measuring roi, dealing with detractors, etc.

After which, I think we won him over:

“Questions made the panel: Love hearing viewpoints from people with boots on the ground”

Thank you Chrisainsworth and Nickionita for giving me the feedback. The summary of the whole session can be found from this love blog from Lasandra. Update: another summary from Manage to Change. A review came in, 3/5 stars.

Crowd Sourcing the Agenda to the Audience –Using Twitter
Now, the next panel (Greg Narain, Brian Solis, Stowe Boyd) wasn’t traditional by any sense, it was an experiment, where we crowd-sourced the agenda to the audience –they used Twitter. Greg Narain setup an application where members from the audience could message (@micromedia2) and their tweets (comments, questions, requests, answers, and sometimes jokes made at Scoble’s expense) were seen live on the screen. The focus was less on the panelists and the things we were to say, and more on the discussion between hundreds of people in the room –all from computers and mobile devices.

While certainly very, very entertaining, and very very interesting, the panel offered little insight or value. My colleague Josh Bernoff even tweeted that while it was entertaining, he was waiting for that breakthrough insight. Josh is a uber-analyst, and probably would have benefited from my first panel more than the second, although he enjoyed himself.

I asked for raise of hands at the end of the session, two thought it was ‘ok’, two thought it was a ‘bad’ session, and the majority, over 90% thought it was a good session. The people rule. Later, I talked to the gentleman who thought the session was negative, and his reason was because he was left out, and didn’t know how to get twitter started. I spent a few minutes with him, giving him the basic, and told him how to start an account at twitter, how to tweet, and how to add followers.

The session was far more ‘remarkable’ than the first (we can tell as people actually took the time to blog about it…yes that old thing) and you can read about Examples of how to use Twitter for Business Purposes. Micromedia and Microblogging session capture, and our new friend Shanti from Sun who didn’t get twittering before the panel, decided to give it a try (please welcome her if you’re on twitter). Update: Jacob highlights how the conversation in Twitter went downhill –as it spread around the globe.

So what does this all mean?
I need to improve my panel skills, make sure we’re entertain while providing value, and also know when letting the crowd control too much results in little value. While agenda setters and panelists certainly lead the presentation, for this audience of tech-minded folks, learning how to listen in real-time, make course corrections, and listen to the audience is key for today’s modern conference.

The audience is now more of participants, literally up on stage –well at least at my panels.

Update: I had my third and final panel (moderator) at Web 2.0 Expo today on Facebook Best Practices (plus I was an advisor to the event), and received the following tweet that made my day:

“Olsen should be monitoring Twitter like Owyang was for his sessions!“

Posted in Conference | 33 Comments »

Forrester’s Marketing Conference Day 2: Understanding Your Customers Through Engagement

Categories: Conference, ForresterPosted on April 10th, 2008

Designing For Engagement, Kerry Bodine, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Sitting in the front row from Forrester’s Marketing Forum 2008, the theme for today’s event with over 800 attendees being Marketing’s New Imperative For Success: Engagement

Voices from the Audience:

UK’s Hayden, who was our virtual guest who’s question was asked and answered in the Ustream Channel enjoys participating.
David Berkowitz watches the chat room from NYC
Adam Cohen reveals that The Future Will Be Televised…With Social Media
David Deal comments on George Colony’s keynote in Your employee, your blogger

Live Streaming the Morning Keynotes:
Harley Manning (Setting the Stage) and Kerry Bodine (Engagement), 52 Minutes

MicroBlogging: Twitter
Members are using their laptops and mobile devices to interact with each other using Twitter, a form of Microblogging. Some of them are tagging their posts (called "tweets") with the event tag, you can view them all here.

Select Tweets include:

MichelleBB : Working to get all FedEx Kinkos up to standards of brand. They welcome that feedback. Only way they’ll get better.
MichelleBB : Ouch! Kerry just called out Harley’s fanny pack
melmcbride
: Kerry Bodine’s talk about emotional connection is
amazing. I want to blog it once the vid is available as an embed
Rumford : @worleygirl you give away the appetizers and sometimes the dinner. people love the knowledge sharing and become loyal
nickhuhn : forrester CEO George Colony re: his blogging: i can’t believe MSFT isn’t behind typepad or wordpress as bad as they are

Pictures:
Below are select images, but to see all public photos peruse this flickr tag ForrMarketing08,also see Jeremy Pepper’s set, and Forrester Research’s set. Select photos, including those from Jeremy Pepper:

Cross posted on the Forrester Marketing blog

Posted in Conference, Forrester | 5 Comments »

Where to get the Live Updates from the Forrester Marketing Conference

Categories: Conference, Forrester, Web MarketingPosted on April 7th, 2008

Forrester has asked me to be on point for the social media efforts during tomorrow’s Marketing conference in L.A. (over 800 senior marketers are attending) we’re still in the evaluation process for hiring the community manager, so I’m just filling in.

So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be blogging at the Marketing Blog, and will be using the Forrester Twitter account.

Quite a few bloggers are attending, such as Jeremy Pepper, Rodney Rumford, Jennifer Jones (podcaster), and others. On the Forrester Marketing blog, I’ll link to all those that are doing live blogging of the sessions.

If I can get my gear to work correctly, Ill be live streaming the keynotes, I’ll announce it from the Forrester Twitter account.

Here’s the last event I went to, Day 1, and Day 2.

Posted in Conference, Forrester, Web Marketing | 3 Comments »

SXSW Backchannel is on Twitter

Categories: Conference, MicroMediaPosted on March 10th, 2008

I’m not going to be blogging the next few days while I’m here at SXSW, in fact, most have noticed that I’m not carrying my usual battle gear of digital camera, video camera, laptop, wireless gear. Instead, I’m just using a mobile device and will be tweeting most of the time.

I’ll point to anything that I think is interesting from Twitter, so you can follow me there, I mainly use it as a ‘link stream’ (I point to what I think is interesting) and secondly as a communication tool.

Not sure what Twitter is? It’s a social network that becomes a chat room, so you’ll need to find other folks to connect with. Use the “@” symbol to reply to someone. For example “@jowyang good morning” (minus the quotes) and I’ll see that in my reply feed.

Many business folks have a hard time understanding the value of twitter, (they don’t get it) but I talked to a reporter from NYT, and the Guardian, and they use it to find breaking news and stories.

In this case, what’s important is to focus on the content, not the toolset.

Yesterday, I was on the panel about mobile blogging, and in the spirit of it, we split up into different groups and roamed the hall using utterz, twitter, on board cameras. Here’s my interview with Jemima Kiss of the Guardian (her profile). You’ll have to understand the irony of this, I’m using my cell phone to interview a journalist on how she uses social media.

Posted in Conference, MicroMedia | 4 Comments »

SXSW 2008

Categories: Conference, EventsPosted on March 9th, 2008

I’m headed to SXSW Interactive Festival in a few hours, I’ve a red eye from Silicon Valley that’s going to give me time to sort through a few hundred emails, write a few blog posts, and pen the strawman for my upcoming report on OpenSocial: Challenges and Opportunities.

SXSW is a festival, not a conference. Its about parties, networking, conference then bbq, pretty much in that order (at least to me), what’s amazing is that most of the bay area tech scene picks up and transplants in artsy city of Austin, except for Dave Winer who said to me in twitter that it’s mostly for young folks (Ill be sure to find some “old” people and congratulate them for breaking the mold)

Check out my posts from last years events, (the awards, how twitter exploded on the scene day 2 and 3 coverage). If you’re headed to SXSW, I look forward to meeting you at the many parties, events, and at the conference itself, so please come up and say hi, I really love meeting folks. I’ll be at the following events:

Sunday: Panel: Scoop the Story on Your Blog We’re going to do something unique, that involves mobile and not just in the session room we’re intended to be, so please join this very interactive session.

Dinner at the famous Salt Lick outdoor BBQ restaurant with many bloggers.

Monday: Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing, the killer panel will include: Chris Heuer Partner, The Conversation Group, Tara Hunt Co-Founder, Citizen Agency, Deborah Schultz Founder/Chief Catalyst, deborahschultz.com, David Parmet Owner, Marketing Begins At Home, Hugh MacLeod Grand Pooh-Bah, gapingvoid.com

Monday Night Party: An Evening of Conversation Starters at Icon Cactus sponsored by Federated Media and Dell , along with Bulldog Solutions, The Conversation Group, and Social Media Club Austin

I’ll also be tweeting where I’m heading in real time, I hope to see you on twitter, my screen name is jowyang. (Ill add you back)

Or you too can choose from the dozens and dozens of panels (and this is just the interactive sessions, not even the film or music ones)

I’m purposly trying to avoid any set meetings (except for the ones listed above) but if you do want to meetup, let me know of which events you plan to attend in the comments, and Ill try to make it.

Posted in Conference, Events | 5 Comments »

Widget Strategies Panel

Categories: Conference, Widget StrategyPosted on March 4th, 2008

The four panelists did a great job yesterday handling my barrage of questions in the Widget Strategies and Social Platforms session, Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies. I asked each of them to suggest an image or icon that best represents their company (an idea to make the panel more memorable from Pam) and they each suggested the following:

Clearspring was like a cable, as they were a connector

Newsgator was like a kitchen where you come and create

Widgetbox was like a DIY Pottery store where you come in and make your own product

Gigya was like a like a spine, as they were the backbone or infrastructure

While there are many challenges to widgets (and every industry) the panelists did a great job refuting them, demonstrating their expertise in the area, and suggesting how to work around any bumps that we may see. If you want to refute the challenges, I certainly encourage you to leave comments on that post or leave a link demonstrating how you can overcome those. It’s all part of a healthy dialog.

The challenge questions? on the difficulties of measurement, lack of brand control, the hurdles of distribution, and how to monetize the space. I also asked them to share how they help clients develop strategies, and to provide clarity around the most common misconceptions. Each of them shined in their own right.

To hear what the rest of the panel said, Alex Nesbit did a great job live blogging the session. Beth Kanter (who did a great job presenting with passion yesterday) shares her notes from the session. And Peter Kaminski, CTO of SocialText writes on his wiki the high level notes. It makes sense if everyone updated the wiki, rather than having several blog posts it could centralize and make the effort more collaborative and efficient.

Posted in Conference, Widget Strategy | 8 Comments »

Notes from Sean O’Driscoll’s Webinar on Social Media and Communities hosted by SAP Salon

Categories: Community Manager, Community Marketing, Conference, Social MediaPosted on February 26th, 2008

(Above Graphic: Sean’s suggests that word of mouth will travel through networks at different speeds, and with different accuracy depending on the network. He lists many attributes that will impact the speed of sharing)

Sean O’Driscoll, who did a fantastic job, who has extensive experience managing the Microsoft MVP program has struck out on his own and has launched his own consulting shop Community Group Therapy.

SAP Salon: Social Media and Online Communities

Key highlights:

To be an effective community professional, you need to walk the talk and use the tools

Google is not a search engine, it’s a reputation tracker

Sean scored high on search engine results for Microsoft Support after a bad story was on Digg.com

Admits there are many buzzwords, yet many forget to look at the bigger picture

Rather than focusing on the Techcrunch/Scoble “Shiny Diamond” to develop a social media strategy

The 5 P’s of Social Media: People, Places, Process, Platform, Patterns

Process is potentially the most important P –but often overlooked

There are more smarter people about your product outside of your company

It’s good and horrible news that it’s easy to publish. Many fractures due to lack of strategy.

Google is the enemy of brand loyalty, if I can find the answer to a question not on your corporate property

Most advocates and influencers are not
helping to help a brand, they are helping other users.

“Pay it forward” a good model and metaphor how a community works

Participation:

Impacts to busienss: Customer Service and Support, Sales and Marketing, Innovation and Product Development

You can’t own the message and the audience is going to change it on their own

Word of Mouth has been a key driver why people buy what they buy, now with access to information through social tools greatly impacts this

Engagement is about brand inclusion, making sure people have their voiced involved

We’ve all seen ugly babies but never had one. We’ve strong attraction to our own products. Uses a MS open source as a case study

Beta is not early enough to get your community involved

If you want raving fans, get affinity, talks about Harley Davidson

Influencer Framework in Web 1.0: Envision and develop, test and release, and sell and support

Suggests that social aspect of employees were only in sell and support aspect, not other areas

Sean had an executive champion, Steve Ballmer

Social graph: as a business strategy we should think about it as

For some reason, webex auto-showed webcams (powerbook users?) which was a potential major hazard for those who did not know they were being streamed at their desk. This needs to be fixed, could be a major embarrassment for folks.

Also the chat room in the webex client was very active, I saw Kevin Marks, Marita, Pistachio and others chiming away. The organizer said this chat room was the one of the most active they’ve ever seen. Twitter was a big recruiter.

There are several graphics that I could not effectively blog to text, I’ll link to the slides if they are published.

When I live blog webinars or conferences (even doing screen grabs), not only does it help everyone else, but it helps me to get smarter. Writing really helps to cement knowledge to actionable work.

Thanks Sean and thanks SAP for hosting this!

Tagged SAP Salon

Posted in Community Manager, Community Marketing, Conference, Social Media | 12 Comments »

Where to find me in March

Categories: Conference, EventsPosted on February 23rd, 2008

Seems like everything is picking up, there are more conferences, workshops, and webinars appearing at –the space is booming. Everyone has questions about social networks, and there’s a lot of interest around widgets and the promise of OpenSocial.

Here’s where you can find me in the month of March

Online Community Keynote, The Knight Journalism School | UC Berkeley, March 27, 2008 Last time I visited the journalism school, we had a great roundtable, looking to expand on this

Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives | Mountain View, March 25th To date, I’m really proud to be invited, I’m the only male speaker at this point.

SNAP Summit | San Francisco, March 25th If you’re in the social networking space, you should be here.

Webinar with Awareness Networks (client) on Online Community Best Pracftices| 11:00 AM US/Eastern, March 13th (update the details are here)

SXSW | Austin, March 7-11th I’m really looking forward to this event, lots of parties. Dell and the Conversation Group are hosting a lounge on Monday night, and I’m looking forward to seeing my Singapore friends

Supernova 2008| San Francisco, March 6 Kevin Warbach just asked me to moderate a panel on opensocial, interop, and I’ll post more details when I get them.

Graphing Social Patterns by O’Reilly | San Diego, March 3-4 That’s just next week, I can’t wait to get some San Diego sun!

I’ll be at various other local events, stay tuned.

I considered creating a public calendar, like Scoble does, but I decided to just centralize on this blog for now. I also keep a tally of all my future and past speaking gigs on my profile page.

If you’re going to be at any of these events, leave a comment below, and let the community know of any get together, blogger dinners, or if you just want to meet. Looking forward to meeting you!

Posted in Conference, Events | 4 Comments »

A Night a VLAB: The Social Networking Widget Money Tree –a Green Sapling with Fruit to Bear

Categories: Conference, Social NetworkingPosted on February 20th, 2008

(Me, giving opening remarks, pic from Julio of Oracle)

The VLAB event last night was a success. What’s VLAB? A non-profit group that sponsors ongoing panels and talks around the subject of business and technology at Stanford and co-sponsored with MIT. I met many of the volunteers and organizers, a good group of folks. Thanks for joining the Shaking the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks hosted by VLAB.

I kicked off the event as the moderator last night, I gave a very short ‘industry level’ discussion about the social networking space and lead with these high level slides. It was followed by a presentation from RockYou, an applications developer network, then Social Media, a “meta” network for developers, then the panel which included, Sourabh Niyogi, Co-Founder & Vice President of Engineering, SocialMedia, Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate, OpenSocial, Jia Shen, Co-Founder & CTO, RockYou, Steve Cohen, Head of Platform, Bebo, and Ken Gullicksen, Managing Partner, Morgenthaler Ventures.

The topic of the evening? Finding monetization in the next phase of widgets being spread on multiple social networks. We were “shaking the money tree” the tree being the social networking space. At the end of the evening, I came to the conclusion the money tree is small, a sapling really, yet on this tree we’re seeing small buds of potential growth. In most cases, the successful applications are self-expression or entertainment, and we’re just starting to see some applications around utility spring forth.

One rule, the money in the social networking space can’t be from acquisitions, it needed to be long term revenues generated from creating value. The event was sold out, (over 350 registered) and folks came out despite the rainstorm and the heavy traffic from the Bill Gates speech next door. The event was video taped, so I’ll point to it once it’s live, hang tight.

In the meantime read what Kevin Marks from Google wrote, he observed that the key take away was to be Organic, not Viral. Shannon expands upon the conversation, and even discusses some of his upcoming projects. Ken Kaplan shares his notes.

For a detailed blow by blow on the event, Lawrence went out of his way (bus trip and all) to attend the event, read his detailed notes. Foldier blogged their thoughts about the event, and think their product will align nicely.

Despite this industry being young and green, spring is right around the corner, expect growth, innovation, and some real business utility to come out of this blossoming tree –we all hope to soon taste some fruit.

(Tagged vlabfeb08. If you blog about the event, leave a comment and I’ll include your link)