Day 1 of the NewComm Forum: all this, before lunch!
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Dave Weinberger’s opening keynote was great. It was a great way to kick off the conference – full of energy, humor and good ideas. Dave did a good job of setting the tone for the conference, and his passion for the subject matter at the forum was encouraging.
Aside from the touchy-feely “we’re changing the world” talk, a couple of things Dave said really resonated. He said that marketers often believe they have markets for which they create messages, when in reality, the opposite is true: Messages create markets.
Don’t get hung up on the strict this-then-that of this seemingly sequential statement. The true point here is that “markets” don’t exist; they’re a construction of a business or communication plan. Maybe you don’t buy that, but it’s an interesting thought. To me, it means that marketers and communicators need to think about the messages – the meaning, the sincerity, the desired response – before they think too hard about anything else.
John Bell from Ogilvy gave a good presentation on creating a complete social media strategy. First of all, it’s nice to see a big dog from a big company who speaks English (as opposed to speaking Bullshit or Over-everyone’s-head-ese). Second, it was indeed insightful to hear John talk about a complete social media strategy, rather than, as he called it, a GMOT strategy: Get Me One of Those…blogs, podcasts, (or god forbid) viral videos.
John was talking about some very recognizable blogs and other Web properties, and he mentioned TechCrunch and its mighty leader, Michael Harrington. Yes, Harrington (for the unaware, it’s actually Arrington). This stands out in my mind, but it certainly didn’t “ruin it” for me. John’s presentation kept my attention and taught me a few things. Still, is this an honest mistake, a sign of an unlearned intern toiling away on PowerPoint slides, or an indication of not being as in-touch as believed? The world, as the Tootsie Pop company will tell you, may never know.
Jim Nail from Cymfony (just acquired by TNS Media) gave a great presentation on making a case for social media strategy. The best part was the piles of stats and factoids strewn about his talk.
Jim said 69 percent of consumers are “interested in” products to help them avoid ads. First question: How will these people initially find out about this magical product? Word of mouth? Sure, but how about the people who spread the word? Where’d they hear about it? As informal as it might be, there’s got to be advertising or marketing somewhere, doesn’t there? Bottom line: It’s not all bad.
Perhaps a more interesting thought about “ad hatred” is this: Consumers will do anything to avoid traditional ads (TV commercials, for example). Why is it that this leads advertisers to infiltrate (ruin, even?) “regular” programming with product placement and other “new” ad tricks rather than just making better ads? Isn’t this like taking the path of most resistance? I’ve certainly seen many TV commercials that don’t make me think about throwing my shoe at the TV. Why do they think to go the other way first?
More from Jim Nail:
Blogs with “high or very high authority” (according to Technorati – a good but not flawless measure) outnumber by a damn long way any other single media.
— “authoritative blogs”: 30,488
– radio stations: 13,000
– TV stations: 9,000
– magazines: 17,000 (by what measure, I wonder? I’d expect a bit more)
BoingBoing has more inbound links (plus one, now!) than NPR or BusinessWeek.
Jim says if 20 percent of blog comments about a company are positive, that’s “pretty good.” That seems a low standard, but it’s an interesting benchmark.
One point of disagreement: Jim talked about “blog victims” like Kryptonite and three other examples I can’t remember. But one common trait ran among these supposed “victims”: They weren’t victims. They all deserved it. “Victim” implies some sort of innocence, that they were being picked on and beat up on by the blogosphere without warrant. In the Kryptonite example, for one, people really could pick those bike locks with a Bic pen. Don’t they deserve to be outed? Doesn’t the public deserve to know that? How does that make them a victim?
Like I said, this all happened before lunch! More to come later. This is a great conference. Lots of fun and lots to write about. (Plus, I won $100 playing Spanish 21.)
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Thanks for the comments. I could have sworn that I fixed that dang Arrington/Harrington slide. As David Weinberger said in the keynote, we tend to work faster nowadays (yes, he was referring to crafting blog posts, but I seem to have applied the same casualness to my PowerPoint text.) and make, hopefully forgiveable mistakes. Suffice it to say, we know Michael’s work very well.
It was a great session, John. As I said, it was certainly refreshing to attend a session from “one of the big dogs” in the business that was actually delivered in English. Surprisingly rare.
Just consider this blog post the world’s most elaborate typo correction. It happens to the best of us. I misspelled a client’s first name in a news release a while back. Eats at me almost daily - that’s far worse than this PowerPoint “oops.”