Internet World 2009
There was a lot of companies punting their wares and old jokes about swine flu, but in the end I thought it was a quite a success. Lots of interesting people and companies doing some cool stuff. Really. 300 Exhibitors and 200 Seminars over 3 days, you really need to get to it.Take aways: As a general case, there are was a definite buzz about twitter and using social media tools to boost brand awareness of your business, however everyone’s experience would be unique depending on the seminars they visited, so I won’t say my experience is what the whole conference was about.
In my case, I found that there is a real need for multi-platform tool(s) for measuring and managing business marketing strategies. In todays world the web is crossing boundries, into other forms of digital media like TV and mobile, and still most businesses still measure, market to and engage with people on each of these different platforms completely separately. It’s true that each of these platforms are different and need to be used diferently, take advantange of their strengths, however in order to understand your customers you need to understand them holisticly. Your customers don’t just use one technology, they use all and you need to understand the whole story.
The keynotes I enjoyed most were David Walmsley’s (Head of Web Selling at John Lewis) talk on 6 rules for smarter e-retail. Simple advice which most people simple don’t practice, because it’s not the next best thing to sweep the (inter)nation, but oh-so important.
Alex Hunter (Head of Online Marketing at the Virgin Group) did a great presentation on Brands 2.0. Really spot on. To summarize. Do you believe enough in your brand enough to put you name and reputation on it? Or better yet do your employees love your brand enough to put their name on it? or from the other side, if you work for a company would you put your name and your reputation on that brand.
Encourage all your employees, from management down to the cleaning staff, to represent your brand.
Other notables that stick in my mind include Simon Calver, CEO of Lovefilm, who spoke about their business model;
and Andrew Walmsley, Co-founder of i-level, who spoke about intergrating digital channels, and sneakily droping an interesting slide into his presentation with a graph showing the movement of customer interaction with an example business through various digitals channels (web, tv, mobile, etc) to determine an acurate story for that customer, as opposed to looking at dashboards of data trying to understand your customer through disparate analytics from different forms of media.
Anyways, that’s it for now. For check out some videos on YouTube there was apparently supposed to be presentations from the event uploaded to slideshare, but i haven’t found them, so I don’t know what’s up with that. I found that for a free 3 day expo in the middle of london, there was suprisingly little buzz about it on the web.