Recollections from Marketing & Online Communities 2008

Last night wrapped up a very productive one day conference from the good folks at Forum One, Marketing & Online Communities 2008. Marc from Microsoft did a nice job capturing some notes in blog form, and Chris Wolz from Forum One tweeted just about all the key points made, in realtime (see Chris’ and all other tweets with the #moc2008 hastag here).

First off, congrats to Jim, Chris, Bill, and team for a nice event. I’ve been to two prior events, a roundtable in Redmond this year and a one-day unconference in San Francisco a couple years back. All of them brought together an interesting mix of consultants, agency types, and corporate practitioners and were well worth the time and expense to attend.

Several great blog ideas were sparked from the sessions and hallways conversations, which I hope to post in the next few days (likely including some kind of recap over on BlogJunction as well).

My big takeaways, in short form and no particular order:

• Twitter as a customer support tool - several people mentioned this as a great way for businesses of all sizes to monitor instant customer feedback and address support issues. Really ideas that have been pioneered by Comcast, Dell, and others, but at WebJunction we had some success with this (combined with Friendfeed monitoring and commenting) after our recent re-launch. Might be worth a blog post recap of what we learned from that experience.
• When figuring out which bloggers to engage, recognize that as blogging has evolved and some bloggers find success with ad-driven revenue models the kind of engagement they expect and warrant may evolve as well. They may not be the “classic” blogger driven by passion and community, but rather more similar to traditional media driven by traffic, exclusives, and deadlines. So 1) be aware of what drives the bloggers you are reaching out to, and 2) make sure you look beyond the high traffic, high profile blogs to find the perhaps less known but hyper passionate group that may really drive the story around your brand.
• From the above, are some blogs better called “movement” or “cause” blogs? Still motivated by passion AND seeing ad revenue success - some political and health blogs definitely fall into this group.
• 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.
• Carley Roney from The Knot spoke on a panel, and I flashed back to my wedding planning days and reminded myself how freaking brilliant the idea of The Know is. She stated that reach 80% of their target demo of women 18-34. EIGHTY PERCENT. Wow.
• “Vulnerability leads to connection” - from Heather Gold’s opening panel. Powerful insight when you think about it. Overall I thought her session was unique, more of a free flow conversation that clearly reflected her personality than a presentation session. However it did make it hard to pick out the logical flow of it (assuming there was intended to be one :)).
• AMEX is doing some pretty cool things around social media right now, or at least is talking about them more effectively than other folks.
• Agencies of all stripes are making slightly different but ultimately similar plays for the social media services space - I saw this back at MSFT when I got pitched for social media monitoring and engagement services by marketing, advertising, and PR agencies. Brad McCormick from Porter Novelli did a nice presentation on PR’s role in this field, which really reminded me of this convergence. I see a dogfight coming on.
• Indieclick is doing some very cool “integrations” of brands into established music and related communities they represent. Heather Lutrell gave some excellent examples of brand engagement of a depth I hadn’t really seen previously, and I had a chance to pick her brain at lunch as well.

There’s more - it was a full day! Like I said, I hope to explore a few more of these takeaways in later blog posts, so if you happen to read this, stay tuned.