Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I wanted to give a shout out to the podcast Marketing Over Coffee . In this weekly podcast, Christopher Penn and John Wall discuss online marketing, social media and tech trends. The podcasts are short (under 30 minutes) and I always learn something new. I like listening to them on my way to work to help get me mentally pumped for the day.

Are there any marketing podcasts you like to listen to?

I will admit, if you are a company, it's really hard to get me to follow you on Twitter or sign-up for emails, let alone tell someone else to follow or email you. Like everyone else I am bombarded and inundated with digital marketing, most of which are irrelevant to me. Two fairly new concepts that I not only happily follow, but also recommend to people are Groupon and Twongo. They are on the elite list of the few sites I visit daily.

Similar to Woot!, both websites provide a crazy good deal for a limited amount of time, usually a gift certificate sold at 50% or less of face value. Twongo has the added bonus of being based on the Chinese concept of Tuango, where the more people that buy the deal, the more they save.

Groupon and Twongo both focus on local small businesses. Groupon is available in many cities and is only a recent additional to the Triangle and Twongo solely focuses on Triangle area. I would tell every small business owner to partner with one of these sites. There have been several businesses that I would never had tried or even heard of if they weren't featured on these sites.

Why these sites work? Aside from the obvious price discount there is a good lesson here for all marketers. These sites are highly targeted, updated with relevant content and create a sense of urgency and immediate call to action. Twongo's additional concept of the more people buy, the more they save encourages word of mouth promotion, which is a difficult even under the best circumstances.

Are your marketing efforts are timely, relevant, targeted and promote word of mouth dissemination?

At Capstrat, we spend a lot of time creating marketing campaigns for high school students. On Friday at the NC DECA Career Development Program Liz Hamner and I had the tables turned on us. We spent several hours having high school students market what they have learned to us.

NC DECA is an association of high school students enrolled in marketing programs. Through DECA, students learn marketing, management and general business skills. This year more than 2,000 students from across North Carolina came to Greensboro to compete in a series of written and verbal competitive events which were evaluated by business, education and industry professionals.

I was pleased with the imagination of the students I met. In our role playing exercise I was an owner of a manufacturing company that was considering a four-day, 40-hour work week instead of a five-day, 40-hour work week. The student acted as a manager meeting with me about my proposal. The student was to show they understood how the proposal would impact the profitability of the company, show empathy for workers and determine the best way to roll out the plan to the employees of the plant.

The students had 10 minutes to read the scenario and prepare for the assignment. The creativity was inspiring. I could not have made such strong arguments as a high schooler. To respect the privacy of the students, I don't want to go into detail on the responses. It was hard to make choices knowing that my decisions would impact the future of these young students.

After meeting these quick-witted students I believe our industry will be in great shape. It also gave me a new way to look at some of our client challenges. I look forward to the competition next year.

In the Fall of 2007, popular British rock band, Radiohead, took record sales into their own hands and engaged in what was considered an "anti-marketing campaign." After Radiohead's contract ended with record label, EMI/Capitol, they decided to launch their seventh album, In Rainbows, with minimal marketing promotion. Since the majority of my work at Capstrat is through marketing clients, I am a firm believer in the importance of a sound marketing campaign. Big budget or not, I have to admit, what Radiohead accomplished was interesting - and sounds quite a bit like a "social media" campaign of today.

They decided to upload their new album online for two months prior to the CD release and let fans pay whatever they wanted. The business model that Radiohead went with gives fans an opportunity to think about what the album costs. It also makes them think about the artists and what goes into the production of an album. Do you still want it for free? This strategy connects the fans with Radiohead and lets them know that the band cares. It also shows a commitment to the art of music and not just business.

Most album launches coincide with a strong marketing push of media interviews, autograph sessions and talk show performances, this "anti-marketing campaign" was firmly based on their online sales idea and nothing else. It drove massive amounts of buzz, which is exactly what nearly all marketing campaigns intend to do.

While a lot of fans ended up purchasing the album for free, it still generated more money prior to the official release date than their previous album made in total.

How does this all relate to an English non-league football club? Last month, I read an article on CNN about a club football team in Mansfield Town that repurposed the same idea as Radiohead. With dwindling ticket sales largely due to the collapse of TV funding, Mansfield Town, found a way to bring the hype back to their club. They let fans decide how much they wanted to pay for tickets to a match against Gateshead. Fans paid between 5 cents and $80 for a ticket that normally costs $25. The match had 7,000 supporters in attendance, which is exceptional when compared to the previous match which had 2,800 fans.

While the "pay what you want" business model could be perilous for some organizations, it proves again that the reward can outweigh the risk.

The future of advertising isn't just about the latest digital technology. Technology is, after all, just the "how" of a brand's communication strategy. There's an even bigger movement brewing -- brands bent on doing good.

It's not a new concept, but as of late more and more brands are searching for causes and incorporating them into their communications with consumers. In some instances, these causes become the cornerstone of their communications -- as is the case of Pepsi, who this week launches one of the biggest campaigns for social change I've ever seen from a brand.

It's called Refresh Everything, and it works a lot like our Lenovo Name Your Dream Assignment campaign did. Anyone in America can submit an idea for how to have a positive impact on his or her community. Online users vote for your idea and if it's one of the top vote-getters of the month, you can win a grant from Pepsi to put your idea into action.

For Pepsi, this is more than just a campaign to reach new consumers. Lee Clow calls it "a mechanism for young people to create ideas to make things better," that "will ultimately become part of the global behavior of the brand." It's a gutsy move, putting the entire stock of your brand into one campaign for social change.

But it's also the future of advertising. Why? Because consumers don't want brands to be leeches. They want them to be givers. It's so easy now for consumers to publicly talk about (and rail on) brands, they can easily demand goodness from them. And if every brand is doling out goodness to the world except for yours, well, that's a no-brainer decision for a purchaser.

To lose your brand's leech factor, you don't need $20 million in charitable grant money like Pepsi. There are things you can do, big and small, to make the world a better place. If you have no idea what those things could possibly be, ask us. We'll help you figure some out.

This past weekend, I traveled to Memphis to judge the Memphis Ad Federation's Addys. For the judging, I was joined by Gianfranco Arena from BBDO in NYC and Jeff Mahar from Cannonball in St Louis.

On the first day of judging we were handed our charge. The charge included some sobering language reminding us that the decisions we were making over two days were going to affect people's lives. Some people would be elated, some disappointed; some would decide to change their profession, some would ask for a raise. With a heavy sense of responsibility, we began our work.

We evaluated roughly 600 entries and made decisive decisions. Though we could not discuss our thoughts during judging, we were able to speak freely at the end of day two as we decided the Best in Show awards. We were pleased to discover our votes were similar (on many things). There were no easy choices and we had healthy debates. Since the judging is anonymous, we still don't know who was responsible for each piece.

The work was solid. I was inspired by several of the items I reviewed. I found it interesting that the city of Memphis seemed to influence the work. Overall I found everything creative and approachable with a bit of funky added in - this is a great recipe for effective advertising.

I can not discuss the work that we evaluated, but I can tell you some of the highlights of the trip:

• • Meeting all of the fabulous people at the Memphis Ad Club
  
• • Eating: Ribs and barbecue at Rendevous, Fried chicken at Gus's, Burgers at Huey's
  
• • The all inclusive trip to Graceland with Kelly
  
• • Seeing the ducks at the Peabody hotel
  
• • Watching Pam talk her way out of getting towed
  
• • Hearing Dan's monkey story - it's one of the best I stories I have ever heard

We were supported by a great group of volunteers from the Ad Club. They took our needs seriously and made sure we had what we needed to make decisions. I don't have the names of all the volunteers but we were able to spend some quality time with the current board: Sally Baker-Brenner the association manager, Susan Ewing from inferno, Marcia Anthony from ABC 24 WPTY, Pam Branham from Running Pony and Dan Barron from Entercom Radio.

Many thanks to Pam and Sally and all of the volunteers at the Ad Club. I hope to see you in Memphis again soon. And to James, I hope you had fun interpretting my messy handwriting.

For those of you competing: Good luck and congratulations on creating great work. I recommend sending a slam-o-gram to your competitors. 

Has your Facebook account gotten a little long in the tooth? Now you can pull the plug on that bad boy putting it out of its misery. Seppukoo.com, named after the Japanese ritual of honorable suicide is intended to liberate the digital body. You can create a customized memorial page in honor of your deceased account, and Seppukoo will even break the news to your virtual friends. Just sit back as Facebook pals blubber on about missing you. Meanwhile, you’re forming a new social network with others who have committed the same (sniff) honorable act.

The best part? Your digital resurrection begins next time you log on to Facebook.

Innovative viral marketing, Facebook rip off or lame waste of time? Discuss.

OK, so I waited a loooooooong time before writing about my thoughts on Adobe's $1.8B acquisition of web analytics vendor, Omniture. I've probably missed the boat on saying anything groundbreaking, but I've wanted to espouse my beliefs ever since it was announced.

I've worked a ton with Omniture over the last 3 plus years and even interviewed with them for some positions recently, so when this showed up over the wire, people were peppering me with questions on what this means. So...I'll try to explore what I think it means and hopefully somewhere in here I have something that somebody else hasn't mentioned before.

Adobe?

This was the hardest piece to figure out at first. It seemed like it came out of left field. I always thought that it might make more sense for a company like SAP, Interwoven/Autonomy, or IBM to be the one to buy Omniture and integrate with their web platforms to create a seamless web ecosystem, where the content and the presentation of that content is based on the data being collected. Think of the Amazon model, where you come to the site and it 'knows' about you and suggests things based on behavior. That isn't done through magic. It's all web analytics and algorithms. Ok, and a little magic thrown in. So for an IBM, you'd throw Omniture on top of Websphere and all of a sudden you have a decision engine integrated with a web platform. Web personalization and delivery become a little easier.

But once I thought about it for a while, Adobe started to make more sense. Adobe wants Omniture so tracking of Flash and rich media becomes common place and tightly integrated. Tracking Flash applications today is not exactly the easiest thing in the world. Once you get the hang of it is not terribly difficult, but imagine if it was already in there out of the box with a few checkboxes to click to turn on. All of a sudden you have can track all the wonderful interactions inside of Flash. Here is something I learned a long time ago, if you can see how things work from a measurement perspective you end up doing more of it and do it smarter/better. The easier it is to track interactive media, the better the end products of marketers and web designers.

I'll give you a simplified view...one of the reasons Google Analytics exists is to drive more Paid Search and Banner ads. Why? Because if you can measure the effectiveness of these tactics you'll end up spending more to drive it. Google gives it away with hopes that it gives you a view into your online campaigns so you do more of them. I am thinking some of the same characteristics exist with this deal. If you can see what is happening with Flash or other Adobe applications, you'll use them more.

Optimization is key

A lot of folks might only use Omniture's SiteCatalyst and not realize that Omniture has bought a ton of technology over the years in the realm of optimization. In fact, over the last year they viewed themselves as an optimization platform, not a web analytics vendor. The notion is that you can leverage the huge amounts of data collected to determine what gets presented to visitors of a site. Behavioral targeting and personalization are possible using some of these tools as they utilize the reams of data to dictate the content, images, messaging, color, whatever you want. A/B and multivariate testing are part of the solution to designing better web sites as well as recommending content or products to visitors who have exhibited certain behaviors either on this visit or on previous encounters. Its pretty awesome stuff and a marketers dream. This is where the web is heading in a big way.

So...take it again into Flash or other rich media applications. All of a sudden you can have Omniture's Test & Target/TouchClarity platform underneath the application to generate different versions of content based on behaviors. This could be used on site as well as in off-site rich media banners for demand generation, especially around retargeting or different messaging based on what site you are on. Imagine if that was all integrated into the tools so you didn't have to think about it, you just come up with the content (no small task mind you). And you track it.

All of a sudden the applications become somewhat self-learning and the content more revelant for the visitors. I am oversimplifying, but I think you get the idea. The Omniture piece creates the feedback mechanism that drives the content through Flash.

Different Businesses

Unlike a lot of mergers where there is often cross-over with businesses and the deal is just to grow market-share, this is a deal that really broadens Adobe's business. Not much overlap with what Omniture does and what Adobe typically does. Theoretically, Omniture will benefit from Adobe's funding and software expertise.

Concerns

My biggest fear is that being owned by a particular web platform will mess up Omniture's agnostic view of web applications. For example, will Omniture devote as much time to figuring out how to track Silverlight applications now that its owned by the guys that create Flash? 

Will all the guys that have built up Omniture over the last decade jump ship and Adobe runs it into the ground? I've seen it all too often where a company buys another and all the talent eventually flees or the integration doesn't really fit because of cultural differences. Time will tell.

Implications

As I mentioned before, in theory this might help bring web analytics more into the mainstream as I would imagine this might get embedded inside of all of Adobe's software so that tracking is common place and not an IT exercise. I got to thinking though, if that happens doesn't that open up the door for some level of free web analytics? If it's in the tools, would you have to pay for an Omniture license or is it out of the box? And in that case, does it create different versions of Omniture SiteCatalyst where you have the free bare-bones one that comes with Flash, Dreamweaver, etc, or a pimped-out enterprise version that does everything and costs you something. Is that the way to compete with Google on this? And by being free with the tools, does that grow the usage of Adobe products? 

It's possible that Adobe isn't going to integrate it with their products so maybe the above never becomes an issue, but I sort of think integration makes the most logical sense. 

So...there you have my thoughts on the situation. What are your thoughts? Did I overlook something? Am I crazy/delusional?

 

 

I attended the Internet Summit ‘09 here in Raleigh last Thursday. The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and the topics were definitely timely. However, the one panel that was stuck in my mind was ‘Mobile Strategies.' The speakers - Andrew Lacy (Tapulous), Sam Matheny (News Over Wireless), Douglas Miller (Evryx Technologies), Barg Upender (Mobomo) and Jud Bowman (PocketGear and Motricity) - really understood the need to integrate mobile applications into all aspects of marketing: branding, acquisition and retention.

The speakers discussed the latest trends and the needs that businesses today face and drove home the idea that we have to engage our customers better than we have in the past. To that end, Barg emphasized that "technology is what is driving demand. Users want relevancy and accessibility" and it is up to us as marketers to meet this demand.

The question for a businesses to include mobile marketing into their programs is not an ‘if' but a ‘how' - what SMS program or what iPhone/BlackBerry/Android application they should invest in. The necessity to reach consumers through multiple, relevant touch points is clear. As consumers become more and more comfortable with mobile technology, they will seek out businesses that suit their abilities best. If mobile is not part of a business's strategy the result will be the risk of losing customers to competitors who have these efforts in place.

The main challenge businesses face when entering the mobile marketing world is the lack of consistency. The way campaigns are launched and tracked is not consistent across vendors and neither is the device users' use. A user's experience is dependent on what they view, how and on what medium they used. With over 1,700 different mobile phones currently in use, it appears to be impossible to get a consistent look and feel on the user end, thus not enabling control of the user experience. How do we make sure that users' have a good experience? How do we ensure that what they see is what we want them to see? There are always barriers to reaching your audience with any new form of advertising. Stay tuned as mobile marketing strategy unfolds.

My first post on the Capstrat blog!

Not sure what life this will take on but I hope to write a lot more often than I do with my current blog Diary of a Madman, which is as often as Halley's comet passes the earth. It's possible that I keep this blog more closely aligned with what I do professionally and the Diary will end up being a hodge-podge of randomness such as what I had for lunch. We'll see. On the Diary I tend to write on the wonderful world of web analytics and will probably transition those sort of posts here as well as occasionally veer into web marketing. Adjust bookmarks accordingly!

My first entry here focuses on my impressions of the Internet Summit that took place in Raleigh last week. Keep in mind these are my impressions and not those of Capstrat (unless we share a collective brain). I don't tend to go to many of these kinds of events other than the annual Omniture rock concert/Summit in Utah, so I don't have a lot to compare this to but I think overall I was a little underwhelmed by the Internet Summit.

From my perspective it was a little too high level for my liking. That doesn't mean it didn't have some value as there are definitely attendees with varying levels of experience and knowledge in this space. If you've never heard of Twitter then this might have been a very educational experience. If you are looking for pointers on strategy, examples of tactics that companies have deployed, or deep knowledge in areas than you probably came away slightly disappointed. I found most of the topics to be a broad overview of what people are doing on the Internet, but nothing tangible that I can use for myself. 

Because of the limitations of time and place I didn't get to see all the speakers, but here are the sessions I saw and my take on them:

Keynotes:

I found John Kosner from ESPN to be fairly entertaining and knowledgable and the fact that he's Bill Simmons boss didn't hurt him, as I am a huge Simmons fan. Especially interesting is ESPN's decision to be pipe-agnostic which is a key take-away from his speech. Being pipe-agnostic means that you as a company don't care how people get your content whether its on the web, print, tv, mobile, etc. As long as you check out ESPN's content, they don't really concern themselves with how you do it. That is a escpecially important as it allows your company to be everywhere and mass-consumed. Companies that ultimately wall themselves off and limit how you get content or products are going to stifle their growth because customers want freedom to choose how they receive it. Think of Netflix. By having multiple approaches for how you watch movies they are able to touch more people. Same concept here, let the customers pick. Something the record industry probably should have thought of.

The next keynote I saw was from the CEO of Technorati and it was sort of pedestrian with a lot of data thrown in. A lot of folks I chatted with were not terribly impressed. The one sort of surprising thing was the rising amount of professional bloggers of which I guess I am sort of one now.

Onto the sessions....

Blogging: New Media and Personal Branding:

This session was probably the highlight for me as the speakers were pretty good with Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) and Rick Klau (Blogger/Google) being the standouts. I thought they had good ideas for how to generate more traffic, followers, etc., such as writing a lot and getting linkages. I wish they would have spent more time on measuring social media. It's one of the dirtiest things to measure, success on social media, but I would have liked to hear tangible things they've done to measure ROI or change perception based on companies actively participating in this space. I know a lot of people would cringe about trying to tie social media to objectives but I think at the end of the day you need to have some sort of measure as to whether or not you are doing this well. A lot of folks have mentioning tracking # of comments, followers, subscribers, and rankings as a way to measure but wondered if there is something more.

I suppose that if you have a measure of success such as moving from 10 followers to 100 followers then that is success. But I'd rather measure it against changes in perception (via surveys) or cost avoidance (such as reducing customer attrition or reducing customer support calls). Like the panelists said, it all depends on your goal. So the key take-away...if your company is getting into social media, have a purpose. Don't do it just because it's the 'in' thing to do or just to say you're doing social media. Have a reason and measure against that goal. 

As a side-note to social media measurement, I know Avinash Kaushik has a chapter on it in his new book, Web Analytics 2.0. I just haven't gotten to that chapter to absorb his teachings, but you should definitely go buy it here. I need to become an affiliate for Avinash as I tell everyone I know to go get his book. I should at least try to profit it from it.

For personal blogging I think there are more interesting goals. Quite honestly, the more you write and the more passionate you are about particular subjects, significant doors can be opened. Personally, I know my meager blog doesn't get a ton of traffic, but it gets the right kind of traffic, especially in the web analytics space. I've had companies contact me about job opportunities and I've had closer communication with Omniture because of my blog. If I was actually serious about it I could probably get speaking engagements and book/movie deals (I mean wouldn't you want to see a movie about this?). Klau mentioned he blogged so people would perceive him differently and not pigeonhole him. Additionally, someone on the panel mentioned that quantity is not as important as the quality of the people reading your content. Are the right people reading? So the take-away....blogging and blogging well with a purpose can help build your personal brand and get you places such as being viewed as a thought-leader or even a job.

Analytics:

Next on the agenda was the Analytics panel. Obviously, that was of keen interest to me. What was awesome to see is that it was one of the most heavily attended sessions, standing room only.  This is important for a couple of reasons...1) the continued interest keeps me employed which is of paramount value 2) shows that companies are starting to grasp the importance of measuring their online presence. Unfortunately, I think we are still in the infancy of web analytics, where a very few companies are actively measuring and, more importantly, reacting to it. Intuition and HIPPOs (Highest-Paid Person's Opinions) still run a vast majority of decision making, but that is going to change rapidly as smart companies view analytics as a competitive advantage. 

As for the panel itself, I didn't get the sense that the participants were that knowledgable in this space. That's not to say they aren't, I just didn't hear much that led me to believe it besides Ron Garmon at VueLogic (he was good). As I mentioned before, it seemed like the theme was that you need to measure stuff and test. Basic stuff, but surprisingly few companies are doing it. Why is that? 

My take is multi-pronged:

1) Companies think web analytics is hard or you need a PhD in stats to do this which is completely incorrect. The tools are getting easier to use, all you need is curiosity and a will to learn. 

2) The implementation of tools is complex and difficult. It definitely can be, as tools like Omniture aren't for the faint of heart, but that is starting to erode or at least has the potential to, see Adobe buying Omniture (more on that in my next post).

3) As mentioned, intuition still reigns supreme despite evidence to the contrary. People want to believe they are right or don't want to hear their baby is ugly. Often companies view their content or website as if it was their child and don't want anyone to tell them it's not the greatest site ever. As a side story, I heard a VP at Ford mention one time they used to internally bet on which banner would get the best results. They were wrong every single time. Lesson is that we look at things with our own inherent bias, instead of how customers view us.

4) Lack of staff with experience or expertise. It really is difficult to find anyone that has any sort of long-term experience in this space and even more surprising is the lack of higher-education programs in web analytics. North Carolina State has the Advanced Analytics program and the Univesity of British Columbia has the Award of Achievement in Analytics, but other than that I can't think of a program that exists. There aren't any teachers to teach essentially. As a side-note, this would be a great opportunity to embed these kinds of courses in an undergrad marketing degree or an MBA. 

As for the panel, things tended to stay on the generic side and maybe that was fine for everyone in the room but I wanted someone to get into strategies to solve some of the big problems with web analytics such as campaign attribution, how to pick revelant KPI, or how to measure offline world influencing the online world (and vice-versa). It's possible that the panel setting wasn't the best way to do this and maybe case studies or someone talking about the new developments in the analytics space would have been what I was looking for.

Social Media: Engage:

Quite honestly I missed most of this session because I decided to take a walk down Fayetteville St and get a bite to eat because I am crazy about what I eat and couldn't dine on the food provided. I wish I would have seen more of it because I do think its fascinating about the phenomena around people sharing things with each other. Of course, I love to measure the effect of that behavior as well. Smart companies are making it easier for people to share stories, content, links, etc in a multitude of ways such as Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Google reader, etc. The key to that is not just enabling the ability to do so, but actually creating something that someone would want to share. I really believe companies (and people) lose sight of the fact that, in order for things to be shared, there actually has to be something interesting/important to share. Sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. 

Online Advertising Strategies:

This to me was one of the more disappointing sessions as there was no strategy to be found. It literally was an overview, and a fairly shallow one at that. I should have taken more notes, but literally it was basic tactics like Paid Search. I would have loved to hear how a company like Expedia looked at how all their tactics work together to generate sales on Expedia. For example, how do they evaluate where to spend money in advertising in a media-mix? Do they understand the effect of banner ads on their paid search? Those are the kinds of strategies I wanted to hear discussed, not that companies need to do Paid Search and then banners and so on down the interactive marketing food-chain. Even with banner ads, what kinds of things are they doing such as multivariate testing with different creative approaches or retargeting? Just needed more depth instead of the basic "here are things to drive traffic to your site".

Online Video Discussion:

Stepped out of my area of experience and ventured over to hear about video. I don't know much about this space but thought the speakers were entertaining, especially Max Haot from Livestream. Again to rehash a point, being able to distribute media across multiple outlets is more important than walling off where people view the content. 

Twitter/Real time:

Its very possible I missed some valuable insights by this point in the day as it was getting late and my caffeine buzz was deminishing. Nothing terribly revolutionary here but somewhat informative to learn of some new business ventures using Twitter as a platform such as Twitpay and Spitter. What I can't figure out is how those ventures are going to make any money. More importantly with Twitter is whether or not the real-time search stuff eventually screws the Google search monopoly. Twitter has a crazy amount of traffic and searches, wait until they start monetizing it. I am not a huge user of Twitter but I do use it for finding out whether or not people have the same problem I have with software vendors or other products. Example, if I create a support ticket for Omniture, it might get answered in a week. Do the same thing in Twitter and I have a response from either Omniture or another user in like an hour. The ability to have problems or issues amplified and searchable is going to completely change the nature of customer support. Companies that are listening and reacting build up trust and credibility as well as learning insights about their customers. 

Coda:

Its very possible that I don't understand the intent of the conference. Maybe it is designed to just give an overview and not get into specifics. Maybe it's just a place for vendors to showcase, job seekers to meet people, or an excuse to hang out at the new convention center all day (which is fine as well), but I was looking for things I can take back to my company or clients and use. I wanted to hear of something I hadn't considered or can easily read about. My suggestion is to potentially have less panels and more demonstration on what companies are actually doing on the web and get underneath the overview and dig into strategy. Sometimes seeing is the best education, I just didn't see much that caused me to write down something to check out later. I know this conference is in its embryonic stages, but I hope to see the topics explored a little deeper next time. I think the Internet Summit can become a really valuable event, it just needs a little fine-tuning. 

If anyone has other insights or take-aways from the session, especially the ones I didn't post about, please feel free to add in the comments. Or call me an idiot for anything I've written above. But if you are going to call me an idiot, please have proof.

Looking forward to posting more soon.........