October 07, 2005 | Friday
Online Marketing at the Crossroads
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Company News |Events |Latitude Strategy Forums |Marketing
We held our first Latitude Strategy Forum, Online Marketing at the Crossroads, last night in London. This is the first such event that Latitude has designed and held, so we were thrilled to have sold out of tickets last week.
The theme, Online Marketing at the Crossroads, seemed obvious for a kick-off event. The slow, painful death of interruptive marketing, contrasted with the scenes of engagement flourishing, is probably the single most relevant issue for online marketers today. Here was the pitch:
The claim that the “customer is king” may have rung hollow in the past, but in the new always-on internet world, it’s taken on a more literal meaning. Are you ready?
The ability of consumers to get information about anything they want, whenever they want, and freely exchange views publicly online, has serious implications for online marketing.
We address the new terrain that brands and content distributors are facing – a terrain where the first Google results page for your brand or service is as likely to feature prominent negative mentions from blogs and message boards as to carry links to your company websites and mainstream press coverage; where RSS distributes opinion and news (good and bad) to key opinion-formers globally in minutes; and where trust is based more on engaging with consumers in a direct and collaborative fashion rather than telling them how great your product and reputation is.
As the ownership of brands changes hands from marketing departments to consumers, find out how you can take the right turn at the crossroads and make the empowered consumer your most valuable brand evangelist.
We had fantastic speakers, talking about things that really seemed to get people going. Adriana Cronin-Lukas (founder of the Big Blog Company) spoke on how companies should - and more importantly should not - communicate with customers via blogs; Alan Moore (founder of SMLXL) gave a presentation entitled The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which had plenty of case studies of companies doing ROI-yielding engagement marketing; Alex Bellinger (founder of Origin PR) talked about value-driven podcasting for enterprise, and Dominique Busso (CEO of VNUnet Europe) showed us what VNU has been doing with its publications and blogging.
As some of those who attended have noted in their post-event blog posts, the discussion was indeed lively. A BBC staffer in attendance stoked some great conversation by asking, in essence, why anyone should trust customer voices over media voices. That alone could form the basis of a solid event, I suspect! As it was, we had more than enough to talk about, and many of those who attended came out with Latitude CEO Dylan Thwaites, CSMO Paul Doleman, and I for drinks afterward. (We all retired to the Bell and Compass in Villiers Street, which has wifi and the nicest and most helpful staff I have ever encountered in a pub. Highly recommended.)
All in all, our first Strategy Forum was excellent, and we can’t wait for the next one. Watch this space for details, which are forthcoming…
Comments
#1
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