Internet World

So, after all the build-up, the Future of Social Media finally took place yesterday (does this mean it’s STILL the Future of Social Media?!) with an extremely healthy crowd of over 250 delegates in attendance. And what treats they had in store, as the international speaker line-up outlined their visions of what great social media marketing looks like, and also gave us some peeks into the near (and longer term) future.

Highlights? Well, it was all beef and no filler, so this is what we were treated to, all ably presented and chaired by Internet World Event Director James Drake-Brockman:

Ian Pearson, Futurologist, Futurizon
Funny and a little bit scary, blending utopian and dystopian visions of what the web of the future may look like. A thought-provoking opening to the more concrete learnings to come…

Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence – a published author of Personality Not Included and one of the top 50 marketing blogs worldwide. He was a thoroughly engaging speaker, who highlighted some of the ways that marketing, sales and customer service come together in emerging social spaces to make your brand stickier and more “authentic”. For me, the key quote went something like this: “there is no such thing as bad marketing, just irrelevant marketing.” I also enjoyed his analogy of ‘old’ marketing being like spoon-feeding a baby: some of it goes in, some of it doesn’t, it’s a bit of a battle and is often a pretty messy experience.

Will McInnes, MD of Nixon McInnes, was next – another well-polished and entertaining presenter who showcased some of the ways that quite traditional and conservative organizations (like the Ministry of Defence) have been able to exploit the opportunities that social media offer to reach the people they might otherwise struggle to reach.

Martin Verdon-Roe, Head of Sales, TripAdvisor: Our first speaker from the end-user/brand side, talking about the (highly successful) efforts to extend TripAdvisor beyond reviews and rankings to add depth to the brand, across their websites and through various widgets on 3rd party social platforms like Facebook.

Kevin Eyres, Managing Director, LinkedIn Europe: Well, Kevin certainly did not disappoint, following his bravura performance in the Internet World keynote earlier this year. We’re big LinkedIn fans (join our Future of Social media group) and Kevin was able to address a key concern about niche social networks – should you build one yourself or piggy-back off of a platform like LinkedIn, XING or Viadeo?

Jia Shen, Founder, RockYou – a really interesting chap, Jia Shen – king of the world of widgets. Some of the ROI figures he was able to point to from widget marketing were eye-watering – and with increasing focus on measurability and accountability, RockYou could well be a company you’ll be hearing a LOT more about in the near future…

Jane Copeland, Search Marketing, SEOmoz – Jane, a Kiwi based in the US, helped us understand how to optimize your social media activities for search. A self-acknowledged geek, Jane is certainly passionate about search, and added very valuable viewpoints on understanding how SEO is key to maximizing the returns on social media efforts

Ville Osterlund, MD, InterQuest had the unenviable task of taking the last sesison before lunch and kept the audience interested with an amusing and insightful look at how social media can be used as a market research tool.

Cesar Mascaraque, MD Europe, Ask.com: wow, lots going on in this one – picking up from the earlier presentation by Jane, but approaching from the point of view of a search engine. Big priority for Ask is getting social networks to open up to crawlers, but privacy concerns will of course rear their heads!

Chris Davies, Digital Marketing, British Airways – lots of interest here, picking up somewhat from earlier points that Will McInnes had made about persuading the MoD to let young RAF Regiment recruits share their experience of basic training on YouTube. How DID he manage to persuade senior management to work with Pam Ann on viral marketing?!. For me this was one of those rare presentations where you have an acomplished individual, at the cutting edge of his profession recounting details of his journey implimenting 3 social media projects. he even went as far as highlighting some fo the key obstacles (Senior level buy in/ brand teams/lawyers) with tips on how to get around them. I will keep an eye on Metrotwin with great interest…

Andy Hobsbaum, European Chairman, Agency.com – we all loved this one. A regular keynote at Internet World, he gave a really coherent, fascinating view on the future of brands, and indeed, the future of marketers and agencies. Will we need agencies in the future if marketing moves more and more towards social media and User Generated Content? Well, maybe agencies won’t be making as much stuff (video, brand imagery etc) – but marketers of the future will still need the spark of inspiration that agency partners can help provide – so ideas factories of the future.

Panel session – Andy, Rohit, Jia and Simon Frank of KickApps sat on the panel, James Drake-Brockman moderated, and the audience released an accumulation of questions that had likely been building all day. And then it was down to the bar for a couple of beers for a lucky few – next year, we want cocktails!

And to prove that we DO eat our own dog food, we had a healthy crowd of social media junkies in place all day who output a phenomenal volume of tweets, blog postings, Flickrs and Friendfeeds – including a few people who weren’t even there blogging about us! Good to see people are that interested…

Also a first for us is that we found out the wireless internet had gone down via twitter!!!

More specific postings on a lot of the above to follow shortly…

Endaf Kerfoot
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