Mike Moran is a Genius! Event Recap: Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit
This year’s ISF Executive Summit’s overarching topic was “Web 2.0: Social Strategies”, and featured some stellar speakers including Robert Scoble, Yahoo! CMO Cammie Dunaway and IBM Engineer / SEM author Mike Moran.
The first thing that struck me when I walked into the conference was that this is the Web marketing networking event of the year. The Governer Hotel ballroom was the who’s who of web marketing in Portland. I ran into a ton of friends, clients & contacts from around town, and I spotted more across the room that I just couldn’t get to. Apologies if I didn’t get a chance to chat with you.
The speakers were all pretty much on message with the Web 2.0 theme, and everyone kept repeating the following mantra:
- The evolution of the Internet has transformed marketing
- You (marketer) are no longer in control, your customers are
- Engage your customer
- Identify, embrace and enable your evangelists
- New buzz word: “prosumer” (new to me anyway)
These are the themes I walked away with – did you pick up any other key messages from the conference that I’ve left out?
My favorite presenter of the day, and the most relevant to my role as a search marketer, was Mike Moran. His presentation “Marketing 2.0: Do It Wrong, Quickly” discussed some specifics related to measuring web marketing programs, and of course he repeated the “you are no longer in control” mantra.
My favorite takeaway from Mike’s presentation was the “Do It Wrong, Quickly” concept. Meaning, marketers today can’t labor over what the perfect campaign or message or web page layout might be, the key is to act & optimize by fixing your mistakes as you go. Mike demonstrated the point as he discussed the hesitation that many feel about the inherent risk in creating a dialog with their customers via blogging. His quote went something like “There is no risk in blogging. It is inevitable that you’re going to screw up. It’s a matter of how you deal with it.”
This point is all the more relevant to us as we labor to get convince some clients to adopt blogging – not only to support our SEO efforts, but also to engage their audience.
Footnote: I missed Mark Colombo from FedEx – but I was told by several people that he didn’t really get or understand blogs vs comments etc. And didn’t have a satisfactory answer as to why FedEx didn’t maintain their own blog. I wouldn’t mind some of your comments if you caught his presentation.
Related Posts:
- http://www.semportland.com/events/internet-strategy-forum-was-excellent/
- http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/archives/405
Update (9/27/07):
Mike Moran saw this post and expressed his thoughts with respect to the fact that I think he’s a Genius. See his On Genius post.
Ha -
I’m glad I’m not the only one who’d never heard the word prosumer. Within seconds, I tried to register prosumer.xxx at Godaddy on my Blackberry, but every variation was taken already.
The problem with Mark Columbo’s answer was that I felt he contradicted himself a bit, and sounded confused to about who can write where, and when and how it gets displayed, if at all.
From what I heard of his presentation, he sounded like he was preaching the importance of building community and trust, and participating on the web.
But then he answered that the reason for not having a corporate blog was because they did not want to have to police everything that was “blogged” by all those people.
Surely he must know the difference between bloggers who are officer, employees or representatives of the company, and commenters?
The longer he went on, the more it sounded like he wasn’t even aware that you could moderate inappropriate comments, or even disallow them altogether.
I also vote for Mike Moran as the best presenter of the day, and I do hope he sends a copy of his new book to Mark at IBM
[...] micro-blogged on Twitter that FedEx’s bad service was even on popular news site Digg. Other ISF attendees are commenting on what happened with Mark [...]
[...] aforementioned conference, I’ll just link you to some folks that recorded every detail, and a good high level summary, and a critique of the FedEx speaker’s strategy, and some pictures of the event on flickr, [...]