Digital Marketing World Spring 2009 Virtual Conference

Summary

Digital Marketing World Spring 2009 Virtual Conference is quite a mouth full! #mpworld is much more convenient, which must be why it was "the number two trending topic on Twitter" ((according to an email I got from Digital.Marketing this morning)).

I alluded to this last night in the video update; Twitter is a great tool for allowing information streaming. What this means is that the information on Twitter is constantly being updated, meaning there is always fresh content ((I'll get more into hash.tags, search.twitter.com & SMO in a later post)).

Though there are many ways a person could have experienced the event, my experience went something like this:

1) Logged into the event.
2) Went to the "auditorium" to check out the speakers.
3) Went to the "library" to check out the information.
4) Went to the "lounge" to chat & interact w/ other attendees.
5) Got on TweetDeck.
6) Tweet'd.
7) Tweet'd.
8) Tweet'd.
9) Took nap after a very high energy morning / afternoon.

Overall it was a very interesting experience. As this is the first "Virtual.Event" that I've attended, I didn't really have any expectations for it; I just wanted to get in there and test the waters.

Trends

A lot of mention was given to Social Media. While many people are still using myspace and facebook, the great thing about Twitter is it's instantaneous nature. While using TweetDeck you can set up different columns w/ different kinds of information ((ie @messages, DMs & search queries)). Using this tactic I added a search for #mpworld so I could stay uptodate on what folks on Twitter were saying about the event.

The biggest complaint in the chat room was that there was simply to much going on! With only one chat box and a lot ((unsure of the exact number, but it was A LOT)) of users getting their type on, it's not hard to see why there were complaints about it being hard to keep up w/ the conversation. That's where Twitter comes in.

Using Twitter as an information aggregator via TweetDeck allowed me to easily track conversations & topics. One of the most common themes when it came to tweeting was quoting. As the presenters would say something that had a lot of value, many "tweeters" would "tweet" the quote along w/ the mpworld hashtag.

I also noticed a lot of talk about what is being categorized as trust, permission &/or loyalty marketing. The concept is basically that we are no longer living in an era were it is acceptable for marketers to pitch AT us. This type of attitude is often sketchy ((who trusts spam?)), unsolicited ((w/out persmission)) and annoying ((not gonna build loyalty w/ me!!)).

In an era were information is currency, we are far from a recession. In fact the information economy is BOOMING!! It is now easier than ever to find out information, be via google, youtube, twitter, wikipedia or any other emerging source.

One of the people I spoke w/ was a man from IBM. We got to talking about interacting w/ users on the web. While B2B and B2C are generally what most businesses think about, I had the realization that Web 2.0 brings to the foreground C2C. It's now easier than ever to interact w/ unbiased users ((or biased by experience, which is genuine)).

To Sum It Up

The Digital Marketing World Conference was a blast!! Not only did I get some great information from some of today's industry leaders, but I also got to network w/ some great people.

I look forward to more Virtual.Events in the future && can't wait for VE09!!