web 2.0 @ marketing tech

Earlier today, I spoke at Marketing Tech around the idea of treating email marketing as a conversation. From the feedback it seemed to go down well

The conference overall was good - I liked the interactivity of the sessions rather than the more usual presentations delivered usually - it is nothing like the interaction present in tech/web 2.0 conferences though - but then this is a much less tech orientated crowd - it was mostly brand or internet marketers present. In fact, I never even saw an open laptop during any of the sessions.

The session I was looking forward to, and most related to this blog, was the Web 2.0 session presented by Will Mcinnes (I am 99% certain he will visit this site again if he practises what he preaches and tracks his “ego” online!). These sorts of sessions are again completely different to the web 2.0 conferences. I asked a question regarding Twitter and how brands should look to get involved. I don’t think he really answered my question - mainly because not many had even heard of Twitter yet - even my geek savvy Account Manager had not heard of it as (though I sense she will be using it shortly) - I imagine this would almost be sacrilege in a web 2.0 conference these days! In any case, the session lived up to expectations and I thought he got across the concepts of “buzz marketing” and “sentiment analysis” and the idea of having a conversation with your audience which I believe is the way forward. Of couse to have a conversation you have to listen..

So one of the tools he mentioned was Brandwatch which I am assuming are these guys. They look interesting, and seemed to be able to show where conversations involving your brand are taking place. It is certainly a good place to start. Nielsen Buzz Metrics is a similar tool - I have used Nielson’s BlogPulse in the past to track conversations online and found it to be a useful free tool, though Will mentioned that Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics is paid for. Google Alerts is an even easier starting point to track your brand online, though possibly more time consuming.

Anyway, I don’t want to regurgitate the whole session again here - I recommend you head over to either Will’s blog or his company website for more info.

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ok so where did I go? well as you can probably see my post count started dropping right the way back in March when I got my Xbox 360 though as ever the game functionality hasnt managed to hold my attention very long - I haven’t actually played it more than a few times in the last few months - though I have used the video and audio streaming functionality a fair bit. It would be nice to have an itunes style interface inside xbox live.. maybe with zune coming out thats what will happen?

So if I have not been playing with the 360 for the last 2 months what ha been happening? Well major disenchantment with the whole web 2.0 thing (which managed to resurrect itself briefly phoneix-like from the ashes in my last post only to collapse further into the depths immediately after) and then even greater disenchantment with Wordpress.

For the last month or so I moved back to my old livejournal blog to blog about personal stuff that has been happening mainly cuz I needed somewhere to blog and the various permission levels inside Live Journal are a dream to use. Wordpress on the other hand involves me hacking core files or using a couple of plugins that give me no confidence that over time the posts will stay private to the relevant groups!

On top of that I have been having so many niggling issues with Wordpress since I upgraded from 1.5.2 that i knew I’d have to rebuild it and so I stopped using it till that was done. In the end the issues were all around the permalink system and my provider Kualo, which could only be solved by increasing the size of my “permalink file” from a few hundred bytes to 7k in size thankfully Wordpress generated that for me

So I’m back though I am going to continue using Live Journal for my personal posts going forward - if you want access.. request it from the contact Riaz page…

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It’s easy to see why the entire “2.0″ phenomenon has created so much buzz - there are so many different topics, technologies, concepts, whatever to grab onto that everyone feels they have something to contribute. This was very much shown at the mashup* event that took place tonight at The Commonwealth Club in London. The public discussion itself could have continued long into the night.. instead breaking into enthusiastic more private discussions later. Of course the sheer vastness of topics meant it was difficult to cover everything to the same depth or maybe even in enough depth. Time for another mashup*..

Anyhow, it all left a lot to think about so I am going to briefly list the areas discussed and one or two thoughts and then write each of them up a bit later once I have let things settle a little.

structured blogging
Basically tagging the individual parts of a blog post to create something more valuable. Is this the way forward?

IP ownership
Who owns user generated content across the various mediums - why?

(re!)launch of Gamespot UK with user content stylee
Is this user generated content too far or is it something that is going to drive users to Gamespot UK?

myspace uk
Can the US phenomenon make it in Europe?

the napsterisation of social networks?
Mark Canter talked about the launch of his new open peer to peer social network (it certainly uses enough buzz words to describe itself). Can it take on myspace and win?

old new media vs new new media
does old new media need to adapt and embrace the new way or can it sit out on its own separate to the “2.0″ phenomenon? have the bbc made a mistake when it says it is to invest in relaunching bbc.co.uk with user generated content?

trusting content
how do you know what you read online is true? is it possible?

the future
Putting everything discussed together to see where we might end up

I think that covers most of it.. meanwhile on a separate note I just managed to burn my hand in the oven.. no it seems 2.0 or not you cannot cook and blog at the same time

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