5 years of Internet World – Part 1 (2005-2006)

January 28, 2009 by internetworld

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This year (almost to the day) is my 5th anniversary working on Internet World.

Anniversaries are traditionally a time to reflect and reminisce so over 3 posts, I will take a brief look back at the last 5 years of Internet World with this one focusing on 2005-2006

Pre-amble…

I remember visiting Internet World when I first started working on technology events in 1999 and followed its stunning growth with envious eyes during the dot com boom. As all that VC money started to disappear there was a realisation that perhaps we were all getting a little over excited. As that VC money was largely what funded the enormous stands at Internet World, it too suffered, falling in size, attendance and exhibitor numbers each year. Here are the approximate stats:

2002: 11000 attendees 292 exhibitors
2003: 9,000 attendees 239 exhibitors
2004: 8,000 attendees 148 exhibitors

Moving from a good job to work an event like this could have been considered a bit crazy, however after a bit of research I saw that there was serious potential and this, combined with the infectious enthusiasm of Phil Nelson, Commercial Director at Penton media (the man behind all that growth during the dot com boom) was enough to persuade me to jump ship and join Penton Media in sunny Isleworth.

2005 to 2006

So what was happening in 2005?

• Tony Blair was elected for his third term and that we
• David Cameron was appointed leader of the Conservative Party
• The UK won the 2012 Olympics and then suffered, an horrific terrorist attack in London the next day
• England regained the Ashes, beating Australia in the ‘greatest test series ever’
• Pope John Paul II Died
• An earthquake in Kashmir kills more than 80,000 and leaves an estimated 4 million homeless
• About 11 million Iraqis turn out to select their first permanent Parliament since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein
• Hurricane Katrina kills more than 1,000 and leaves millions homeless.
• Liverpool come back from 3-0 down at half time to win the Champions league final on penalties
• Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith topped the box office charts
• The IAB reported UK online ad spend grew by 65% to £1.366m (with search representing 56% of it) and broadband penetration reached 70%

Having joined Internet World about 3 months out from the show, it was a case of hitting the ground running and getting through the 2005 show. We had around 5000 attendees and 100 exhibitors, but with positive feedback from both groups we knew we had managed to create a platform from which we could build for 2006.

Shortly after the event, the UK arm of Penton Media went through a management buyout forming Ithaca Media (and you get a prize if you can tell me what the name is and why it is significant).

What was happening in 2006?

• YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65bn.
• A Danish newspaper causes demonstrations and flag burning by publishing several negative cartoons depicting Muhammad.
• Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court and hanged in Baghdad.
• Italy beat France 5-3 on penalties in the World Cup final, drawing 1-1 after extra time. England were knocked out on penalties by Portugal.
• Borat found his way to movie stardom
• The IAB reported UK online ad spend grew by 42% to £2,015m and broadband penetration reached 89%

After 2005 we went through an intense process of analysis and looking at how the show could best serve the market. The main development was the increase in importance of marketing departments, rather than IT departments in the buying process, with some of the more savvy companies employing a head of online, or digital marketing manager – individuals with a foot in both IT and marketing camps.

As part of the repositioning, we entered into what would become a very important but ultimately painful co-location agreement with The International Direct Marketing fair, then the leading marketing trade show in the UK. It created an event that would look at all aspects of marketing from DM through to online. We also refocused our content and marketing campaigns to ensure that we were touching the right people with the right messages.

This included the introduction of the Internet World Keynote Theatre and worked hard to attract major publishers (MD’s from EMAP and The Times and Editor-in-chief from Conde Nast), leading pure play businesses (Brent Hoberman, CEO from Lastminute.com) and companies at the forefront of taking their traditional businesses online (Director of Boots.com and MD of Blockbuster Online). The focus was largely about how to embrace online and prepare for the impending revolution, but also touched (for the first time in the UK) on a new phenomenon called Web 2.0…

We arranged exhibitors in zones according to the type of product or service the provided (ecommerce, search, email, hosting, content management) which whilst met with some resistance by exhibitors, was a resounding success in the eyes of our attendees, making the process of attending an event of the scale of Internet World a far easier experience.

We also embarked on a new initiative to attract the top decision makers from the UK’s leading brands and companies through an enormous database building exercise and telemarketing campaign, inviting them as VIP’s to the show. This gave us a show floor teaming with big brands looking at how they can invest in online.

The result was significant. The 2006 show had 160 exhibitors and 8580 attendees (an unprecedented 55% increase). it also resulted in an extraordinary onsite rebooking of 106% - meaning we started our campaign for 2007 with a larger show than we had for 2006. A testament to the quality and quantity of the 2006 attendees. What faced us now was a rare opportunity to establish Internet World as the leading event for the market…

Next post I’ll look at 2007 – 2008, which will include running battles in Earls Court 2 (well almost) and 2 changes of venue…

James Drake-Brockman
Visit Internet World

Posted in Internet World exhibitors, Internet World visitors, News, Online marketing, Speakers, Sponsors, events | Leave a Comment »

What is the Point of Social Media?

January 23, 2009 by internetworld

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We are really excited here by the new Internet World website, featuring significant social networking capabilities that we didn’t have before.

We are also feverishly expanding our activities on LinkedIn and other networks, and edging into Twitter, and, as you are currently reading, ramping up our blogging efforts.

The question that was bluntly put yesterday by a colleague was – “What’s the point of all social media? It requires so much effort.” (well, not quite so blunt, but close enough!)

What she was getting across was – “How do we measure the impact of our social media efforts, and are there any effective metrics for measuring return on social media investments?”

Which, ultimately, is the $64,000 question – or, rather, far more than that. One of the key attractions of social media marketing is the fact that brands and marketers can sidestep massive upfront media buying costs. LinkedIn groups, to take but one example, are free to set up. Blogging is free. Facebook is free for building a group. Twitter is free.

The problem, as many of you out there will have figured out, is that although direct costs are low(er), it’s the resource issues that rear their ugly heads. So, just as marketers are turning to social media as traditional media budgets are shrinking, they will also find that they are hampered in social media by cutbacks in headcount in the marketing department. And social media marketing is simply something that can NOT be outsourced to a third party – and feel free to correct me if you disagree, but the key quality to all your social media efforts should be a genuine voice.

Social media marketing is NOT the marketing you used to do, just propagated via social media. There is a paradigm shift taking place, as we discovered at the first Future of Social Media conference, whereby consumers, customers, brand advocates – call them what you will – are demanding a genuine voice in social media. They will not tolerate push marketing coming at them on Facebook, but they will respond more warmly to content and promotions that cleverly capture their needs and desires at a certain moment in time. The key is to build trust – and would you risk outsourcing something so mission-critical to a third party that doesn’t live and breathe your brand and product?

I, for one, would not.

I will leave you with a discussion point – and the best answer will receive an awesome internet radio – what are the best examples of genuine, measurable, concrete ROI from social media marketing investments?

Get your thinking caps on – if you have a story to share, get in touch and you could be writing the next blog posting or find your article in the next Buzz newsletter…

While we’ve got you thinking about your social media strategy, why not join the discussion on our Future of Social Media group on LinkedIn

Endaf Kerfoot
Visit Internet World

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Posted in Blogging, Online marketing, The Future of Social Media, Web 2.0 Experience, social media | Leave a Comment »

Turning downturns into upturns

December 12, 2008 by internetworld

I read with interest some research that was brought to my attention recently, a McGraw-Hill study of over 600 businesses looking specifically at previous economic downturns.

The tradition when facing tough economic times is to cut marketing and advertising budgets. At first glance this seems sensible: keep costs down so profit is as high as possible. The report, however, suggests that this may be a false economy and those companies who follow this tradition are likely to end up, in the mid to long term, as losers not winners.

Does that sound like crazy talk to anyone else? Well as evidence, here are the stats:

Those companies who maintained or increased ad spend between 1981 and 1982 averaged higher sales growth during the recession AND for the following 3 years.

By 1985 these same companies had sales 256% bigger than those companies who had cut back.

In 2001, companies who marketed aggressively increased their market share by 2 ½ times the average for all businesses during the period following the downturn.

Conversely, the Strategic Planning Institute published research looking at the effect of advertising during economic expansion. Although 80% of businesses increased their ad spend there was no marked improvement in market share. Why is this…?

Because everyone else is doing it.

As we have commented before, downturns, whilst a scary prospect for many, in fact offer enormous opportunities for smart and bold businesses.

Assuming your message is tailored and you are providing people with something they actually need rather than just want, companies can make huge gains in market share during these times. Especially since customers are far more receptive to change during tough times. And once you’ve got them, they are likely to stay with you when times are good.

So the question is “where do you want your business to be when the Olympics hit London in 2012?”

JDB
Visit the Internet World site

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Does Social Media Marketing actually work?

November 28, 2008 by internetworld

This is a really thought-provoking piece by John Battelle, who is well known as a digital guru, in response to a recent AdAge piece claiming that advertising on social media doesn’t work.
As John argues, “barging” into social media spaces with banner ads and other inventory that produces results in other spheres doesn’t work – where’s the surprise there?
At the recent Future of Social Media conference, we heard again and again that digital marketers need to live and breathe social media, and be passionate about what it can do, in order to craft unique, compelling propositions that raise awareness of their brand, their offerings or their propositions. The sledgehammer approach doesn’t work – because social media is so different from other media channels that we have grown accustomed to.
As John writes: “So far, there’s simply not an algorithm for understanding the nuance of conversations between humans, and conversations between humans are what drives social media.”
Digital marketers operating in the social media sphere need to understand the new paradigm and appreciate that whilst social media marketing doesn’t perhaps generate traditional returns, what it can be is extremely effective in beginning to change perceptions, in turning your consumers into advocates of your brand and getting your customers to spread the word about the great experience they had with your brand.
I will leave the final word with John Battelle:

In short, if your brand creates or underwrites a valuable conversation, you are accruing value to your brand, and more valuable brands, be they soap, computer chips, or charge cards, are brands more folks will buy. Customers will reward brands that have added value to their lives. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what marketing is all about?

Posted in Online marketing, The Future of Social Media, social media | 3 Comments »

stop moaning…

November 13, 2008 by internetworld

I think all the recent financial turmoil has got me into a habit of looking for and feeling a compulsion to read (in a car-crash kind of way) anything with any relevance to the economy. Even though I know it won’t make me feel any better about anything… And so I found myself reading with interest the IMRG’s recent e-retail sales index for November. Far from complete doom and gloom I came away with a rather strange feeling – maybe we WILL weather the storm.

Whether or not the entire banking system as we know it goes through a complete overhaul and changes beyond all recognition, one thing remains certain (and if anything will be effected positively in the downturn): that people will spend more time online. This seems to be reflected in the statistic from the EIAA that 81% of advertisers claim their allocated online spend has grown during 2008 and believe it will continue to do so over the next two years.

There’s tick number one for the world of online…

Will this just be people posting their holiday photos on Flikr (to Bognor Regis rather than Bahamas) or moaning on forums about being skint? Not if you’re to believe the IMRG

Online retail spend in Q4 08 is predicted to be 15% higher than the same period last year (a staggering 13.16 Billion…). Interestingly clothing, footwear and accessories are predicted to buck the general economic trends by rising more than 25% year-on-year to be worth £1,260 million during the final quarter of 2008.

The less positive side is that year on year growth for October grew by only 12.7%, the lowest year on year growth since December 2004. Oh no! What tragedy. How many other industries/sectors would bite your arm off for 12.7% growth year on year…

Which sort of brings me to the point of this post. We have all experienced unprecedented prosperity in our market over recent years. And all the figures point to the fact that we will continue to experience growth, just at a much slower rate, over the coming year or two. We really should count ourselves lucky. There are some industries which have little hope of any decent growth whilst we are worried that it has slowed to 12.7%.

There is still money to be made in online. Ok, so we may all have to work harder for each deal/customer but money is still being spent online and it will be the smart people who will come out of the other end with big grins on their faces and nice shiny sports cars. And they won’t be the ones who have spent their time hiding under the duvet or behind the sofa hoping that when it all blows over they will still have a business to salvage. They will be the ones who have been fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of business, looked at where they can provide real value and done everything in their power to keep their customers happy.

James Drake-Brockman
Internet World

Posted in News, Online marketing | Leave a Comment »

Future of Social Media roundup

October 30, 2008 by internetworld

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
Visit the Future of Social Media site
Visit the Internet World site

Posted in Blogging, Online marketing, Speakers, Sponsors, The Future of Social Media, brands, market research, social media | 3 Comments »

Online’s prospects: a look at the coming year…

October 20, 2008 by internetworld

So it’s not all doom and gloom for us here in the world of online. The recent IAB/PWC report showed a year on year growth of 28% in the first half of 2008. Crack open the champagne, keep looking for that expensive holiday and lets all be thankful we find ourselves in the one part of advertising industry that’s going to be OK…

All right, so perhaps it’s not really that good. First up, the last 3 months have seen unprecedented turmoil in the world economy, the most extraordinary having happened in the past few weeks. In fact Guy Philipson admits that ‘online is not immune from the economic downturn’. So where exactly does that leave us and what can we expect for the coming months and years?

Here are few of our thoughts here at Internet World towers:

Downturn doesn’t mean a complete freezing of all expenditure
Companies still need to attract customers and as such will continue to spend money on marketing and advertising. Ok so they won’t be spending as much but what they will be spending it on will be looked at very carefully. ROI will be king and what medium is the most accountable? Online… For example, what FD is going to pull a PPC campaign that cost £xxx but returned twenty times that in revenue? What commercial director is going to let them?

Marketing budgets must follow the consumer
A recent IMRG survey revealed that 77% of shoppers plan to carry out about half or more of their Christmas shopping online (up from 57% the previous year). Clearly online is continuing to grow its share of media consumption, especially when it comes to key issue of buying things. If more customers are going be online this year, where do you think savvy (and even less savvy) advertisers will be looking to spend budgets? Online…

New developments – what effect will they have over the next 6 to 12 months?
BBC iplayer set the bar earlier this year for viewing video content online. Now more and more destinations are cropping up where you can watch perfectly good video content online. This is starting to represent a pretty compelling story for advertisers (OK so not on iplayer specifically) looking to target specific audiences.
Online coupons are allowing the highly sought after FMCG advertisers to have some form of tangible way to track effectiveness of their online campaigns. Whilst people are rarely going to click on a banner ad to buy Coca-Cola, they will print off an online coupon offer and take it to a store to buy it. And in an era of belt tightening, how do you think the popularity of 2 for 1 coupons and other offers are going to be affected? I for one would be amazed if this didn’t take off…
Social Media – if our upcoming conference is anything to go by, there is a huge demand for understanding how social media can help your business. Brands like asos.com, AXA PPP, BBC, Bounty, Cheapflights, Chelsea FC, Clinique, EDF Energy, Ford, Intel, iplayer, ITV, Johnson & Johnson, Orange, Panasonic, Telegraph, Thomas Cook, Tiscali, Transport for London, Unilever, Visa are all part of the 250 strong delegate list that will be descending upon the Hilton, Tower Bridge on the 28th October… AT £500 a pop this suggests to me that budgets are there and companies are looking to invest in Social Media.

So where does that leave us?

Now more than ever customer retention is crucial. Why go through the expensive exercise of generating new customers when you know of a whole group of people who have already bought from you. And you (hopefully) have a whole raft of data about them and what they may be interested in. surely a well crafted campaign of incentives to this group would be money well spent.

And also, if you sell stuff and you don’t do so online, you’re quite likely not to weather the coming storm.

James Drake-Brockman
Find out more about Internet World

Posted in Online marketing, The Future of Social Media, online coupons, online video, social media | 1 Comment »

Whither Social Media?

October 1, 2008 by internetworld

Do you find yourself under increasing pressure to answer the question – “what is your social media marketing strategy”? Do you worry about what the great unwashed (sorry, your customers and prospects) say about your brand and product/service offerings in emerging social spaces like blogs, message boards, in user-generated videos posted on YouTube ranting about your company?

Is this kind of conversation familiar:

Marketing Director (middle-aged, not very digitally savvy): “My kids spend all their time on Facepage, or something, and Mootube”
You (hip, savvy, digitally uber-connected): “I think you mean Youtube”
Marketing Director: “I know what I’m on about – and I want to know what is our strategy for targeting people on these sites. We’ve spent loads doing SEO, on our shiny new set of websites, our email marketing is compliant and effective, we do some Adwords – but what are we doing in social media?”
You: “Um, Let me get back to you on that one”.

The fact of the matter is that most marketers are still in the “wait and see” space when it comes to social media. Some pioneers are in the “suck it and see” camp, getting some targeted display ads on Facebook, maybe even showcasing some viral vids on Youtube, perhaps creating interest groups on LinkedIn or Myspace (depending on the target market of course). Fewer have strategies in place with KPI’s the determine degrees of success or failure.

The problem is, how do you know where to start? What works? What shows the best response and return on your marketing investment? Recent economic turbulence indicates that the drive for return and value is likely to intensify pressure on digital marketers, and social media offer the canny marketer a golden opportunity to reach specialised niche groups for very little outlay. This is the oft-cited “long tail” effect in action – increasingly, people are happy to self-identify themselves as belonging to certain specialized interest groups, in theory making the hard-pressed marketer’s job easier.

There’s an event happening at the end of this month that has attracted some of the worlds leading players when it comes to Social Media. people far more qualified than me to give an opinion. And by all accounts there are many of you out there who see the value of Social Media and of tapping into this wealth of knowledge. In fact our brand new conference, The Future of Social Media on October 28th (to which I am referring) has already attracted 150 paying delegates, smashing our target of 100, with a month left to go.

Don’t miss out on this essential event for ANYONE interested in finding out what their future in social media looks like. It’s aolso a great chance to network with you peers including delegates from Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, BBC iplayer, AXA PPP, Clinique, Bounty, asos.com, Cheapflights, Channel 4, ITV, COI, Microsoft, Thomas Cook, Siemens and many more…

Please also join our LinkedIn group for all things social media – click here to join: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/661127.

Posted in Online marketing, Sponsors, The Future of Social Media, Web 2.0 Experience, social media | 2 Comments »

Guest Blog: Rob Chandler from Microsoft – Time to invest or invest in time?

September 2, 2008 by internetworld

We have a special guest blog from Rob Chandler at Microsoft this time round. It was featured in the latest Buzz newsletter and feedback has been so good we wanted to give people another chance to read it if they missed it first time round.

for those designers and developers out there, Microsoft are also running a conference called Remix UK 08 in September. Check it out – their speaker line up looks awesome…

Here’s Rob’s guest blog…

It’s not looking good is it? Housing market crashing, retail drying up, credit cards max’ed out, fuel and food prices rocketing….. doom, doom, doom….
Or is it?

I must admit if I were running an agency, I wouldn’t fancy having my main clients in the banking, housing or building sectors. Not a comfortable place to be, mind you on the flip side, I’m guessing most would bite your hand off for an energy client, who’s earnings seem to be breaking profit records with every announcement. But will the current economic downturn will be as hard on the Internet development and design industry?

It does bring a wry smile to my face referring to the Internet as an industry. Go back ten or so years and I remember it just being a idea, something you send letters via an ‘email’ address (whatever one of those is) and to navigate a small collection of garish, luminous pages on the most obscure hobbies. You employed guys who had a passion for developing and who knew something about ‘the web’. Generally, because we all felt we had to have someone who knew about it in our teams as we didn’t have a clue about it ourselves. I can still remember the pain of getting my boss to copy-edit web pages on A4 print outs, as he didn’t ‘get on’ with a PC and if you can remember how rubbish web pages were rendered on a printer you too will have just had the ghost of Internet past bang whispering in your ear. And still to this very day, if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear the chirping of a 56k modem breaking the silence half way through an all nighter. Oh the heady, heady days.

Fast forward a couple of years to the early nought’ies and the excitement some say hot air, exploded. And then it literally exploded in the bust. It was a fledgling industry then, blown out of all proportion it seems by a lot of strong cheese consumed just before bed time. This was a time when investors were sold concepts that Dave Lister or Kryten 2X4B-523P would have been at home using on planet Znobi. The number of times i heard ‘in a couple of years tumble weed will blow down the high streets of the world’ because why would you chose to go shopping? Why, oh why would anyone go to a crowded, busy under stocked shopping centre, full of ambling ‘people’ when you could sit in the comfort of your armchair browsing an amazing experience of luminous flashing pink stars? Clink on this… click here and click there. What a wonderful idea. They forgot a couple of things….. a) Generally non-internet savvy shoppers just love shopping, a nation of retail therapy addicts, where the drug is not just the item, but the experience. Not to be generalist, but possibly an alien concept to the majority of single men who had share of voice of the ‘new way’. And b) technology… we all forgot it takes time… time to get to market and time to establish a market. Just think how long broadband, 3G, Sky and the iPod have actually been around and they are only just coming in to their own….

Then ten years later we’re smack in the middle of a multibillion pound industry, employing thousands of developers, designers and infrastructure professionals, let alone the packers, purchasers, courier companies that earn a living from supporting it.

So is the Internet industry about to hit on bad times? Quite possibly yes, but unlike 7 years ago, this is now a strong growing economy. There are something like 300,000 software developers in the UK, of that something like 70,000 develop and design for the internet, and that doesn’t count the PC based software developed to utilises data served via the Internet – There is no bubble in this economy that i can see, and more importantly it’s a part of most, if not all large corporate businesses. Cutting back on investment could be highly risky and would only come and bite back later down the line.

Another important thing to bear in mind is that historically, the first spend to be cut in a downturn is the marketing expenditure. Generally this cost cutting tactic is to help the company accounts look healthy and it’s pretty hard to for a marketing manager to justify the return on a campaign without guarantees to increase sales. However, now through on-line advertising reporting, a direct link to the cost of a banner ad to a sale can be measured. Effectively meaning that withdrawing marketing spend will hit sales. Surely no sales director would be happy doing that? Perhaps the days of John Wanamaker’s famous quote ‘Half the money i spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’ are numbered. It’s been around for over a hundred years, so it’s about time we had a new one.

So put yourself in the place of an advertiser, and you’re looking at your recently reduced marketing budget. Would you spend your budget on traditional media, which the tracking of is ambiguous at best, or within the on-line media where you can accurately see where your advertising budget is going and its direct effect on sales? If it’s the latter, then someone will design it, build it, deploy it etc, etc, etc…. that sounds like growth to me…

What also makes this area really exciting is the explosion and convergence of technology. The nirvana of converging desktop, mobile devices and TV (holding off of the car and fridge reference but they won’t be far behind) that we’ve been promised for so long is nearly here. So when the infrastructure is in place, there is likely to be a push for this convergence. Also there are the London 2012 Olympic games…….. 4 years seems a long way off at the moment…. but railways, roads, bridges will need to be built let alone the stadiums and they’ll need the systems in place, let alone the TV, radio, Internet and mobile deployment of all of that content –the idea of being able to watch every single event live or recorded on your TV, computer or mobile on a cheap mass market scale may not be that far away…….

So what would I do if my business allowed me to do in a downturn? Keep ahead of the curve. Get myself to any and every relevant show, event and conference, meeting and networking opportunity. Get up to speed with what’s coming down the pipe from all of the technologies. Understand their priorities and where they think we will be in the coming months and years. Bear in mind, technology convergence, content consumption and advertising spend as that is where the focus will be. And above all, keep up the passion.

Rob Chandler
Marketing Communications manager – Developer & Designer Audience
B: http://seeingthesilverlight.spaces.live.com/
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The Future of Social Media – Conference Update

August 20, 2008 by internetworld

Social Media: everyone’s talking about it, many are including it in their marketing strategies, some have even done it! We recently researched the subject with the ‘buying’ community and discovered that whilst there are many events and conferences that talk about what CAN be done, few talk about real life experiences of early adopters and none allow the delegates to come away with an idea of what ‘good looks like’.

We saw this as an opportunity to provide the market with a unique look at Social Media, try to break through the hype and create a business focused event that gives delegates the information and insight they need to implement a comprehensive strategy around Social Media. To do this we went to the US to find the leading players in the market as well as picking out some home grown talent.

The result is The Future of Social Media conference (28th October 2008, London) a fantastic program teaming up speakers from US companies such as Slide, Rockyou, Ogilvy and seo-moz.org with the likes of British Airways, tripadvisor Linkedin and agency.com.

Normally when you launch an event like this you go through a fairly nervous opening month or so waiting for delegates to get budget sign off to attend. Not so with the Future of Social Media. This conference broke all records here at CMPi for delegate sign up. And it’s not just the speed at which people signed up. The list of delegates (already at 45 against a target of 100) includes top decision makers and teams from some of the UK’s leading organisations, including Johnson & Johnson, Johnson & Johnson Medical, BBC iplayer, AXA PPP, Unilever, Visitbritain, Miscrosoft, Clinique, COI and Tiscali to name but a few.

“Well done Internet World” I hear you say sarcastically, “but why do I care about how well your conference is going?” A fair point. The reason I am writing about it is not just to pat ourselves on the back and encourage further delegate and sponsorship sign up (although we obviously don’t mind this).

The real reason I’m writing about it as because I believe there are certain bits of evidence in the launch of this that give us an insight into where the UK market is in relation to Social Media

1. The speed at which some of the major organisations signed up to the event was steggering – just a matter of minutes. This suggests that these are organisations that already have budgets allocated to Social Media projects – otherwise the sign up process would have been much slower requiring sign off.
2. Many of the delegates are bringing teams of people, often from both the marketing and IT departments. This to me is a sure sign that they are already sold on the fact that need to do something about Social Media and are looking at the specifics of implementing projects.
3. The job titles are interesting too. Marketing Directors and Heads of Online/New Media/Digital will be sitting next to Heads of Ecommerce, IT Directors, Website Managers and Project Managers who in turn will be sitting next to CEO’s and Managing Directors. This is a subject that is seen as crucial to a company’s online activity and communications strategy and as such is pulling interest from everywhere in the business.
4. The size and type of companies involved are also interesting. You have mass market consumer brands (Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Clinique) for whom social media could be a great way to tap into their already massive customer base. New media organisations such as iplayer, who have huge numbers of users and who I would guess are looking at ways they can capitalise on this. You’ve also got the public sector including universities, an adult education service and of course the COI itself. Is this a sign that the government is embracing Social Media and if so, what does that mean for the market as a whole. Finally you have your fair share of digital agencies who are most likely involved in looking at Social Media strategies for their clients.

But what insight do we gain from this?

For me, there can be no doubt that we are finally fighting our way through the hype of the past 2 years which have focused on what is possible and are at a stage where Social Media is about to come to the fore. What will be interesting is seeing how these Social Media projects end up and what impact they will have on the consumer. As an avid user, I’m personally interested to see what BBC iplayer come up with over the coming year…

Check out the conference website here: http://www.futureofsocialmedia.co.uk

Posted in Internet World visitors, Online marketing, Sponsors, The Future of Social Media, Web 2.0 Experience, social media | Leave a Comment »

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