The newMeetia Blog Hit Parade
Below are our greatest hits. Your humble blogger is writing now about turning good information into good politics and public policy at CivicDecisions.com - its a natural evolution given the great clients we've served. If you have any questions or think we might be able to help you achieve your objectives, don't be shy! Call Roger Wilson at (781) 729-8611 or send an email to rwilson (at) civicdecisions.com. In any case ENJOY!
Four
Types of "Conference Hurt"
The
Simple Science of Business
Learning
from Your Mistakes - by the Numbers
Good
News from Egypt: “Less than 1,000 People Died”
2011:
First Impressions
What
it Takes to Make A High-Performance Event Team
Seven
Quick Ideas on Event Curation
The
Vision Thing -
The
Bad and the Ugly at the Inbound Marketing Summit
Last week your humble blogger
shared some of the smartest
things we heard and some of the fun we enjoyed at the Inbound Marketing
Summit which we sponsored under our NewMeetia initiative. But I promised the Bad
and the Ugly along with the Good.
A
Winning Formula: Preparation + Technology + Exhibit Floor Time = Sales
Yves Matson, Senior Account
Executive at Active
Conversion, knew he had a big opportunity earlier this year. The Global Petroleum Show was
coming to Calgary where he is based. From his experience as an exhibitor in a
previous job, he knew his lead monitoring and demand generation system could
serve some of the more than 1000 exhibitors. So how did he capture this
opportunity in only nine simple steps?
Iraq
war. The new technologies are formidable to be sure but they hardly “change
everything.”
Headline
News: CONFERENCES MAKE MONEY!
Media Outlets Embrace Conferences as Profits Rise
was a business page story the NYT saw fit to print on Monday between a
stories on the pending Twitter IPO and Gawker gossip regarding the sexual
preferences of media personalities.
When you see a “GOLD
DISCOVERED IN CALIFORNIA!” headline you can be sure somebody somewhere
is going to make some money. But being one of those somebodies
doesn't mean just rushing in with a shovel. Face-to-face will be fundamental forever. Live events
will be hot when our current tablets
are dead museum pieces. However, events are no easier as a business than
other communication medium.
David
Carr Wonders:
What Are We Thinking?
The New York Times Media Equation columnist
David Carr may be stumbling toward your humble blogger’s conclusion of last
month that Fear in the
Fourth Estate is Good.
Carr reports
with wonder, the rancor establishment journalists clearly feel for
the likes Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who brokered the publication of
Bradley Manning’s purloined information, and Glen Greenwald, the Guardian
Columnist who broke Eric Snowden’s NSA revelations.
The
Face of Terror;
Terrorists as Cover Boys
Keep
Paddling ‘Til You Hit the Beach
A state government executive,
serving for an effective Governor, once told your humble blogger that the
Governor continuously urged his cabinet to “run through the tape” with
their initiatives. Your humble blogger recently summoned his aquatic
version of this track aphorism, learned in kayak racing, which applies to event
production.
Let's
Have Fun:
Businessweek Angle on the Hedge Fund Story
When your humble blogger pulled this week’s Bloomberg
Businesweek from the courier’s sheath (an unheralded development in
print distribution), my first thought was “This is what happens when the
boss goes on vacation.”
Why
Fear in the Fourth Estate is Good
There a was a remarkably feeble defense of freedom of
the press in the “Media Equation" column
by David Carr, in the New York Times this Independence Day week, juxtaposing
journalists, whom Carr defines as people “responsible for following the
truth, wherever it may guide them” and activists whom he defines as
people dedicated to “winning an argument.”
Content
Ain't King...But...
Your humble blogger got hooked by the subject line of a
recent email from Target Marketing Magazine: “Why Content Isn't King.”
The linked article was a
disappointment but it prompted your humble blogger to examine why I bit on the subject
line bait.
Four
Types of "Conference Hurt"
“Where does it hurt?” your humble
blogger asked fellow attendees at the Specialized Information Publishers Association Conference
this week in DC. I was collecting conference pain stories
to use in my roundtable on “Conference Pain Relief; Developing or
Fixing Business Models.”
As I suspected, the conference pain fell into four
categories:
Surfing
the Next Wave of Social Media
The tide of social media, which swept in as the recession
was hitting, has recently receded a bit. Some of the mighty waves of expectation
and overblown rhetoric have crashed on the rocks of media reality. Here are a
few data points among the flotsam and jetsam:
The
Simple Science of Business
Years ago your humble blogger was intrigued when one
individual, a leader in a third-world conflict who espoused and practiced “scientific
revolution,” switched sides and changed the course of that war.
Your humble blogger felt compelled to investigate.
The science turned out to be pretty simple,
when your humble blogger finally located the writings and reports of this
obscure, young, third-world General (no easy task, pre-internet). The
key to winning a war, according to the General, was to know:
Face-to-Face
is Fundamental
The event slice of the media pie is growing again
according to sources recently cited by BtoB
and Media Business. Events have been part of the
communications mix since before clay
tablets. Now we’re all atwitter about tablet computers and
smart phones. New technologies are absolutely
transforming communication. But events will still be important when we
are looking at tablet computers in the museum beside the displays of “micro
computers" of the late '70s, fax machines and telegraphs.
Learning
from Your Mistakes - by the Numbers
There are good lessons in mistakes and “natural
experiments” in events and across the media business. The lessons pose
both emotional and conceptual challenges. That’s why running the
numbers right is highly instructive.
Mistakes in the moment in any live media generate tension – you run low on food, cues are missed, wiring is wrong, the award that was supposed to be at the front of the room was left in the back – whatever. Somebody miscalculated, didn’t practice, didn’t plan or didn’t execute the plan.
Mistakes in the moment in any live media generate tension – you run low on food, cues are missed, wiring is wrong, the award that was supposed to be at the front of the room was left in the back – whatever. Somebody miscalculated, didn’t practice, didn’t plan or didn’t execute the plan.
Why Your Audience Wants to Talk About Your Content
You can’t assume your audience wants your information only
for themselves. People seek information to share and trade,
primarily in conversation as was discussed at the Inbound Marketing Conference last fall. This
primal hunt is especially vital to event curation.
Content that bears repeating is valuable to
people. Providing “remarkable content” is touted as a way to generate
online social media conversation that potentially “goes viral” (dirty secret: it rarely happens
without a big boost from mass media). But if information is your product
rather than a means to sell something else, you still should think
about what your audience will want to share and trade
with others.
Good
News from Egypt: “Less than 1,000 People Died”
“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt and less than
1,000 people died in this revolution,” said Wael Ghonim, according to Monday’s
New York Times. Ghonim, a 31 year old Google executive, is credited with a
key role in the on-line social media campaign that helped topple Hosni Mubarak
last week.
Gauging the grief of 1000 families as good news is a legitimate political-economic calculation. But it underscores the seriousness of the business Ghonim and his colleagues have undertaken. More broadly the calculation underscores the seriousness of the business of belief which is at the heart of media in all forms.
Gauging the grief of 1000 families as good news is a legitimate political-economic calculation. But it underscores the seriousness of the business Ghonim and his colleagues have undertaken. More broadly the calculation underscores the seriousness of the business of belief which is at the heart of media in all forms.
Gaining
Leverage on Life-Time Value
You know engagement sells. That’s
why you should take a look at a new analysis of customer engagement.
It is consumer-oriented but your humble blogger found lessons for
B-to-B marketers about engagement elements, channels,
and measurement in the report.
Buyers aren’t seeking
engagement for its own sake. They are looking to fulfill
a need. But they consistently judge the key elements of
engagement across channels according a study offered
by Razorfish. Buyers want to feel valued. They
want efficiency and they want to be able to trust
the seller.
The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly
at the Inbound Marketing Summit
We wanted to share the smartest and the dumbest
things we heard at the Inbound Marketing Summit last week –
fortunately there was stiff competition for the former. We were one of the sponsors
of the event under our newMeetia
initiative and we found plenty of value for marketers at the
two day event along with a little malarkey and lots
of stuff that was just plain fun.
Clearly, online social
and content marketing is now main stream. While some speakers
valiantly jousted against straw-man “old marketing” enemies the best
presentations were about integrating new online marketing with the old,
“inbound”(online-inquiry) with “outbound” and online media with offline.
And the rants against self-discipline were more than offset by practical advice
about how to measure and manage online marketing.
Bigger is Better: Why The Media Loves Facebook Stories
It was another big weekend for Facebook stories.
“The Social Network,”
won four awards at Critics' Choice Movie Awards last Friday and four more
at the Golden Globe Awards Sunday Night. The movie, which has
grossed over $200 million so far, has, according to the LA Times “won the majority of
critics honors this year, including the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.,
New York Film Critics Circle and National Society of Film Critics.”
Meanwhile,
Facebook was given a starring
role in the overthrow of Tunisia’s long ruling President, Zine
el Abidine Ben. The LA Times coverage with the head "Tunisia protesters
use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help organize and report" was
typical.
2011:
First Impressions
The seers poking at the messy entrails of economic data are
seeing good signs. Albeit with varying degrees of trepidation,
they are forecasting noticeable recovery. Based on anecdotal evidence,
your humble blogger agrees.
As some of the “old media” bounces back we’ll be able to
more accurately tease out the long-term secular trends, set in
motion by new online and mobile media, from the shorter-term economic
cycles that the seasoned among us have seen before.
What
it Takes to Make A High-Performance Event Team
“You can’t begin early too early and you can’t
communicate too much,” admonished a savvy collaborator at a
post-event debriefing. Your humble blogger had taken some lumps after running
what he’d thought had been a good team effort. But the maxim to became a motto.
Event production is a test of group intelligence. Events of any size take a team to execute. And the effectiveness of the team is not simply a function of the individual intelligence of people on the team.
Event production is a test of group intelligence. Events of any size take a team to execute. And the effectiveness of the team is not simply a function of the individual intelligence of people on the team.
Zip
Ideas:
Three Lessons from the CEO of Zipcar
Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar, recently
offered key lessons learned in the his seven years in the driver's seat of the
company. Zipcar is trying to “redefine the way people think about
transportation.” Giffith’s "Zip Ideas" could apply to
media companies in a time when the way people think about information
is rapidly changing.
Navigating
through a New Media World
“Human API” (application programming interface), mobile
platforms, new platform entrants, and of course, iPad
apps were among future hot topics tagged by speakers at the SIPA
UK Online Publishing and Marketing Summit last week. This year’s
event focused heavily on the mechanics of new product launches,
marketing automation, and web analytics.
Seven
Quick Ideas on Event Curation
Most people associate “curation” with the art of
museum management. Some might mistake it for a method of meat
preservation. But curation is now is the term de jour for the
process of selecting organizing and presenting content in
media and, more broadly, merchandise and even food. Lately it has been used to
ennoble the process of making any set of choices that create an experience.
The
Vision Thing -
It's Not About Selling Content like Hamburgers
"The Dawn of a New Age, Second Encounter”
was the promoted theme of the Second Annual Personal Computer Show held in
Chicago, around this time, thirty-two years ago. Your humble blogger was
reminded of that show as I wrote about the Inbound
Marketing Summit recently. The online/smart phone media business
keeps reminding me of the PC business in its early days. But I was surprised to
find that my memory was WRONG in key respects. And I realized I owed a personal
debt.
The
Bad and the Ugly at the Inbound Marketing Summit
Last week your humble blogger
shared some of the smartest
things we heard and some of the fun we enjoyed at the Inbound Marketing
Summit which we sponsored under our NewMeetia initiative. But I promised the Bad
and the Ugly along with the Good.
The dumbest thing I heard at the conference was “Scale
and media buying power are no longer a decisive advantage.” The
speaker was David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Freshspot Marketing,
who, to his credit, was also the source of some smart commentary about "Real-Time Marketing" and
some good fun, including the donning of a tie-dye t-shirt (under his sport
coat) to flog a book he and Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot have put together
about “Marketing Lessons of
the Grateful Dead.” But the notion that new media negates scale is wishful
thinking.
A
Winning Formula: Preparation + Technology + Exhibit Floor Time = Sales
Yves Matson, Senior Account
Executive at Active
Conversion, knew he had a big opportunity earlier this year. The Global Petroleum Show was
coming to Calgary where he is based. From his experience as an exhibitor in a
previous job, he knew his lead monitoring and demand generation system could
serve some of the more than 1000 exhibitors. So how did he capture this
opportunity in only nine simple steps?
Why the “Junk Web” is Getting the Action
It’s not the media but human nature that shapes marketing
principles. That’s why so much of the current web environment feels like “junk
mail,” a medium developed by tracking response.
Urgent! Pass It On: Three Big Secrets About Going Viral
Myths about going viral are part of the regular fare offered
by new marketing gurus. “You create great content, and show it to ten friends
who show it to ten friends and pretty soon it goes viral and a million people
are looking at it.” Too bad the real world doesn’t work this way. So, what are
the true secrets?
The Web Ain’t Dead - The Long Tales of Chris Anderson
“Ludicrous” is how a savvy reporter of media trends
describes Chris Anderson's latest big idea: “The Web is Dead” advanced recently
in Wired. People like Anderson have made good careers by generating
plausible and interesting “big ideas.” But they are not producing reliable
knowledge about the world.
Marketing Impressions Still Matter
New Study: Digital Dazzle Won't Last Without Results...
Virtual media is being quickly adopted by event marketers, a
new Center for Exhibition Research (CEIR) study indicates. But the measurement
of investment results is lagging in virtual and other types of Digital media
the study finds. The findings are based on an online survey, now in its second
year, of show producers, corporate marketers and advertisers.
Solution to Media Overload: Make Every Day Independence Day
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that free people must
think for themselves. While I have written about the positive impact of Way Too
Much Information (WTMI) others see media overload as a problem.
A Customer is a Terrible Thing to Waste
What Publishers Can Learn from the Platypus
Live events are a “huge” part of “content that you can
experience," according to Larry Weber, author of Marketing to the Social
Web and a new book, Stick & Stones. Real-time, experiential and rich media,
he says, are parts of a new “World 2.0” spawned by today’s communications
technology.
The Future of F2F: How to “Save” Events
Event spending is under attack. The purveyors of “inbound
marketing,” SEO, and various forms of lead-generation and tracking, are
advocating reallocating event marketing budgets to fuel online growth. New
simulated or “virtual” events offer information seekers and marketers some of
the benefits of events at lower cost.
Non-profit Fund Raising: The Warm Fuzzy Formula
Keep influencers in mind, make the benefits emotionally
appealing and be systematic if you want to motivate adults to come out and
donate money to your cause. As a board member of a local non-profit, I saw how
an event promotion on a tiny budget executed by volunteers could work like a
charm.
Media Strategy: Dot Com Déjà Vu?
Are you feeling Dot Com déjà vu? You are not alone among
media and marketing people if the current wave of Next Big Things is making you
queasy.
A little skepticism is in order. Nobody really knows how all
this Great Stuff will work or what will survive. This early in the economic
cycle we have room to maneuver and try new things, but most of us still have a
business to run and bills to pay. Five quick thoughts:
Got Content? Seven Ideas for Monetizing with Events
The current lingo for pounding coin out of content is
monetizing. The old term was making money. However you phrase it, new events
are a key opportunity for old and new media alike as the economy begins to
turn. Monetizing sounds sanitized but
making good content profitable is usually a messy muddle. Events could be your
best way to package your content for a price. Here are seven quick thoughts to
help you succeed:
Attn: Media Entrepreneurs, Don’t Take Risks!
The best media entrepreneurs don’t take risks. They take
what other people think are risks. Bernie Goldhirsh, the founder of Inc.
Magazine and a quintessential entrepreneur, was one of the most risk-adverse
people I’ve ever had the privilege of working for.
Better, Faster and Cheaper Events
I met the CEO of Kaon Interactive, Gavin Finn, the other day
at Mass Innovation Nights (a great local event) and immediately found yet
another reason to get excited about the future of face-to-face events.
Are You Hungry for a Sale?
Some people think “selling” is a dirty word. That’s why a
phrase caught my eye as I scanned the posts of an online discussion group:
“People are hungry to be SOLD,” asserted Dwight Ingram, an experienced
direct-marketing pro.
“Business starts with a sale.” was my motto in the early
days of my event business. A savvy event guy told me I had it wrong. “Business
starts with value,” he piously insisted. But I’ll stick to my guns. Until you
get someone to buy, creating value is a hobby.
Events for Love and Money, Book Review
For IT consultant and computer science professor Adrian
Segar, the journey started with a bad conference experience. Determined to do better,
he set out to create an event that would truly serve him and his peers. Now,
seasoned by years of experience and research, he has written a book:
Conferences that Work, Creating Events that People LOVE. It’s a good practical
guide for running participant-directed conferences.
If You’re Spinning Out, “Gas It!”
“Gas it! Gas it! Gas it!” radioed a spotter to the lead
driver as the car went into a sudden spin coming off a corner. It was the final
lap. Under full power, the open-wheel, rear-engine race car did a full 360 but
somehow emerged from a huge cloud of tire smoke headed in the right direction.
The driver held on to win the race. After I happened to see this spectacular
save on TV, I posted a little card in my office as a reminder of the vivid
lesson it imparted: If you’re spinning out, “Gas it! Gas it! Gas it!”
In 2010, Think About the Political Economics of Information
You might say it started with event-magic in 2004, the year
Facebook was founded. On a cool, damp July night in Boston ,
a tall, handsome, (secretly) cigarette-puffing University of Chicago
Sez Who? Will WTMI Cure Gullibility?
Sorry but in Media, Size Does Matter
Some mavens of new media see a nirvana of social networks
and small media entrepreneurs replacing big bad old media. The visions get
romantic, with the media equivalent of microbrewers toppling the giants.
In reality, we could soon see massive consolidation of new
media into new giants. It’s impossible to predict the timing of such a
consolidation, but the implications for B2B are huge.
Success with Your Business Model - It’s Not Just About Money
Our advice is the same across platforms: if you are trying
to build, rebuild or tune your business model for an event or any other media
product, first figure out what you want to say, and then figure out how to make
it pay. Use this approach and your satisfaction is guaranteed.
What We Can Learn from Loyal Attendees
“I don’t take notes at a conference, I write a to-do list,”
a company president and regular conference attendee told me. “I get started on
execution while I’m still at the event,” he explained. You can improve your
retention rate by learning not simply why your loyal attendees return but also
how they achieve the benefits that draw them back.
There Will Always be a Place for Face2Face
The panic in traditional media today is painfully evident.
The watchword of the day is “digital.” Old marketing and media assumptions are
being tossed out. It’s not just a cyclical situation. It’s a secular change in
the sense of a long-term, large scale phenomenon as big as the advent of radio
or TV or even movable type. So why am I sure that events aren’t going the way
of print media?
Labels: business planning, conference management, content marketing, media development, newmeetia, Roger Wilson, The conference department
posted by Roger Wilson at
7:18 PM
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