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.

It was weird to see so many attendees nose-down to their PC screens. Like students in college lecture halls, many seemed to be, as we charitably call it, "multi-tasking."

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.

Size matters in media. The technology has changed but not the fundamental political economics of information. Scott’s illustration of how a David can slay Goliath with new media was the oft-repeated story of “United Breaks Guitars,” a video that went viral. What the story actually proves is that the secret to going viral is to get picked up by big media. Scale can fail but, everything else being equal, big is still a better bet. Venture firms have rushed money into selected low/no- revenue new media companies like Facebook and Twitter to gain the decisive advantages of scale. They fully expect a future payoff.

The second dumbest thing we heard is that one can “curate content” with an investment of only 20 minutes a day. The speaker was Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire. I may be misquoting because what he undoubtedly meant was 20 minutes a day with Curata, a HiveFire service designed to help organizations with content aggregation, production and distribution for marketing purposes (starting at around $1,500 a month).

No one can “curate” anything well without serious contemplation. While the Curata service is currently being used to produce surprisingly good looking online content, (sample here; testimonials on their home page) the implication that a reputation for content can be earned and sustained with a minimal time investment assumes that the “curator” doesn’t need to learn continuously but only needs to tweak search criteria once in a while. Its like bad journalism, automated.  And Deshpande’s concept of “curation” is based on the dubious assumption that people will keep originating and posting worthy content without some system of compensation from content marketers. Real thought leadership requires original thought and research. “Curation” may be the single subject of a future post.

The ugly part of the conference came from speakers who worked too hard to project an anti-establishment, spontaneous and outrageous persona. One’s material has to be good to make the pose work, especially in a business context. Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, carried it off most successfully with his harsh critique of conventional marketing. He garnered a lot of laughs and twitter traffic with comments such as “we suck at now, why worry about next?” At times however, some speakers seemed only course and tasteless. One speaker reported her mental reaction to a request for an honest appraisal of her product “I’m on salary, bitches!” Some thoughts are best left unsaid.  Another big name disappointed everyone sitting around me in one session with unprepared prattle and puerile humor from the podium.

The good news is that online social and content marketing are rapidly becoming main-stream. The flip side of becoming main-stream is a new level of accountability for clear thinking, respectful conduct and real results. So another piece of good news is that there is still room for improvement.

Labels: content marketing, curation, event marketing, Inbound marketing, new media, new meetia, real-time marketing, social media marketing, unmarketing

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. Weber, chairman of W2 Group, spoke last week at a regional American Business Media Seminar, in Boston.

The platypus, that peculiar duck billed, beaver-tailed, egg-laying, venomous, aquatic mammal from “Down Under”, is Weber’s metaphor for an integrated marketing paradigm which unites disparate search, branding, analytics, PR, performance marketing, social media and mobile communications as a single animal. In Weber’s taxonomy, traditional advertising isn’t in the mix.

“Traditional advertising is dying,” Weber asserts. He predicts that by 2015, there will be no newspapers or nightly news (media gurus can't be shy). The new role of advertising, according to Weber, is to “...get you to a digital or physical event…The content comes first, then the transaction.”

“It’s all about customer connections thru content,” said Weber, in an email exchange. Micro-segmented (deep topic) physical events supported and continued thru digital are going to be increasingly important.”

Evidence from publishers supported Weber’s thesis about events. John Craven, Founder/President of BevNet.com which garners significant revenue from events, said “People still want to meet.” Brian Randall, VP eMedia at Diversified Business Communications (describing a case we hope to detail in the future), credited a social media effort for 26% of paid registration at a recent trade event. Social media is getting “butts in seats.” said RD Whitney, the CEO of Tarsus Online Media.

However, the platypus has other lessons for content providers and marketers. The platypus is, after all, not an evolutionary all-star but a primitive oddity that survived in continental isolation. You may not need online social media any more than you  need a platypus bill for a mouth. A consumer show executive we checked with told us that, in contrast to what the B2B companies at the ABM meeting, “Social media is only a tiny part of what we do.” The shape of your business depends on who you serve and who you compete against.

One thing you can count on is that there will always be a place for face-to-face. And whether you are in World 1.0, World 2.0, or somewhere beyond, you have creative opportunities to combine events with online and other media to meet your goals. Even if we are hit with the political-economic equivalent of an asteroid, the weightings of the media mix - the size and characteristics of the media “species” that can survive, prosper and sustain themselves over time -  are as varied and wonderful as the creatures of the earth.

That’s why we love this business!

Labels: events and new media, experiential media, Larry Weber, marketing to the social web, micro-segmentation, real-time marketing, rich media