The Marketing & Online Communities conference was held last Wednesday at the Tribeca Grand in New York. We had a fantastic lineup of folks representing top agencies, brand marketers and online communities. A few of the organizations that were in attendance:
Fleishman-Hillard, Digitas, Swirl, The Knot, Google, Business Week, BlogHer, iVillage, Trip Adivsor, and American Express.
The venue was fantastic. We were in the Grand Screening room at the Tribeca Grand for most of the day, which is a very posh 100+ person theater. The room was small enough to be comfortable and intimate, and supported the in-depth conversations among participants that strive for at our conferences.
Some of the key takeaways:
The Power of Conversation
Heather Gold kicked off the conference with her session “Designing for Conversation”. Heather started the session by holding an informal conversation with a few folks in the front of the room, and scaling the dialog to the whole room in the course of the next 50 minutes. Her intention was to show that conversation leads to connection. Marc Sirkin thoughts about Heather’s session:
Heather Gold was terrific (a bit like Sarah Silverman if you ask me). She’s funny as hell and led a kickoff discussion. “Presentation as conversation” is what I wrote down.
During that same session, this quote popped for me as well: “Vulnerability leads to connection.” How true! My experiences managing online communities prove this over and over again. I can be scary to allow yourself to be vulnerable in an online community, but it goes a long way to proving that you are an actual human being.
Definition of Community
The term “community” was obviously mentioned throughout the day, but depending on the speaker’s context “community” was used to describe mass social media, private feedback panels, a customer base, and social site used to support a campaign (I’m sure there were other mentions as well). In his blog recap of the conference, Kevin Briody asks if we should get more sophisticated about community nomenclature
Should there be a more concrete distinction between “real†communities – long lasting with invested hosts and participants – vs “branded communities†– short term, advertising driven and product- or brand-centric communities? Also, what is the minimum amount of time that a “branded community†should exist for? CPG’s can run campaigns as short as 6 weeks, but the consensus seemed that 6 months was a standard minimum to push for.
Evolution of the Agency
Another thread that ran throughout the day was that agencies are feeling the push to develop their social media and community-building chops. Brad McCormick of Porter-Novelli went so far as to say that boundaries between advertising, PR and marketing are softening, and that there is an invetable convergence towards “digital”. Bryan Person of Liveworld conducted several interviews for the conference, including the one with Brad McCormick below:
Additional Sources:
Mirc Sirkin’s – Microsoft
http://www.mindnumbingthoughts.com/2008/11/marketing-and-communities-conference.html
Bryan Person – LiveWorld
http://socialvoice.liveworld.com/blog/Bryan-Persons-Blog/2000001553
Kevin Briody – Webjunction / OCLC
http://kevinbriody.net/2008/11/06/recollections-from-marketing-online-communities-2008/
Twitter stream from the event:
http://twemes.com/moc2008
We are pulling together the speaker’s presentations, and we captured additional notes and video from the conference, which we are currently processing. Stay tuned for more great content!
There is some last minute awesomeness coming together for next week’s Marketing & Online Communities conference that I wanted to pass along.
