Category: The Conversation Economy

CM Conversation: Laura Desmond, CEO Starcom MediaVest Group

FM's third CM Summit is just two weeks away (register here), and as I have in the past (and will with other speakers as well as folks I'll interview at Web 2), I turn to the collective intelligence of Searchblog readers to help me prepare. I'll be having conversations…

Speaker Desmond FM’s third CM Summit is just two weeks away (register here), and as I have in the past (and will with other speakers as well as folks I’ll interview at Web 2), I turn to the collective intelligence of Searchblog readers to help me prepare. I’ll be having conversations with Evan Williams (co-founder Twitter), Gian Fulgoni (founder Comscore), David Rosenblatt (CEO DoubleClick, now at Google) and many others.

But first up in terms of thinking out loud here is Laura Desmond, Chief Executive Officer, Starcom MediaVest Group, a unit of the Publicis Groupe. For those of you who might not follow the world of marketing too closely, SMG is one of the largest and most influential marketing services companies on the planet, its clients include Kraft, Allstate, Kellogg’s, Walt Disney, GM, Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, RIM (Blackberry), and on and on. The company collectively controls billions of dollars of marketing spend, including a significant chunk of the monies that fuel the Internet Economy.

In other words, Laura is one Very Important Person in the world of the web, even if you’ve never heard of her.

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TweetSense

I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it's going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter's mashup of Tweets relating to the election,…

Prmote Twitter

I think the business model at Twitter is going to be really, really interesting, and I think it’s going to leverage search, but search as a proxy for data and pattern recognition. We get an inkling of it at Election 2008, Twitter’s mashup of Tweets relating to the election, but there’s a lot more to think through. First off, Twitter is using its real estate to promote its deal with Current, which is a first, from what I can tell. The “ads” are on the right, right below each users’ profile. I remember covering every new pixel as the Google homepage caved to promotional reality, it’s interesting to watch it happen at Twitter, too, which I think has a lot of similarities to Google in terms of potential models.

Also worth watching is the hash function, where you can tag any topic (IE #redsox, as Churbuck pointed out). This function is not likely to catch on with my mother (I can’t imagine her adding hashes to her tweets, much less tweeting…yet), but what it enables certainly could. The problem is, when you create a site to pull hashed stuff out into a stream the result is often less than useful (as Churbuck noted in his post).

This is where the role of curation and editors is paramount. Voice, as Fred pointed out. There is voice in editing, voice in curation. And voice adds value. And where value is added, marketers can play, both on Twitter (imagine a cars.twitter.com, with auto advertisers on the right rail and at the top, perhaps using contextual TweetSense – yes, it’s owned, by…), and off (think about a feed of contextual Tweets and TweetSense next to conversational sites like Digg and, well, millions of others, as well as sites created simply from Twitter feeds on popular hashes…).

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All Algorithm, No Voice

That's how Fred describes Google's new blog search, a supposed "Techmeme (or Technorati or Blogs.com) – killer". It's a very good description of Google's services….

That’s how Fred describes Google’s new blog search, a supposed “Techmeme (or Technorati or Blogs.com) – killer”.

It’s a very good description of Google’s services.

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World Inside Out

Over at the Amex Blog we're starting a conversation about how this financial crisis effects small business. The site has given me a chance to think more deeply about what it means to run or be part of a small business – none of us here in the Valley…

Over at the Amex Blog we’re starting a conversation about how this financial crisis effects small business. The site has given me a chance to think more deeply about what it means to run or be part of a small business – none of us here in the Valley like to think of ourselves as “small” but by nearly every definition, we are. And FM works with nearly 200 other “small” businesses. Join the conversation, we all might learn something. From my post:

…But that doesn’t mean I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, worried about what might be coming next. Many of us in the Internet industry are veterans of the last big bust – 2000-2002 – and we can still feel the pain of losing it all (as I did with the Industry Standard), or at the very least, having to cut back to the bone and wait it out. And this time, something feels different. This crisis is not limited to an overinvestment in telecom and Internet, this time our entire financial system has been brought to its knees. How can you not be worried when Congress is in an extended session to determine the best way to spend nearly a trillion dollars, money that, in fact, we don’t actually have (we’ll be borrowing it, given our national debt)?

It’s a well worn saw that as goes small business, so goes the economy. If all of us start laying off employees and cutting back expenses by a third, our economy will go into a deep funk. If, on the other hand, we all declare faith in the future and start acting accordingly, our businesses will become the engine of economic recovery.

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The Case for Local Conversation: Saving Corbet’s Hardware (Latest Open Forum Post)

(image credit Marin IJ) I've just posted my latest missive on the American Express Open Forum blog, where I Think Out Loud about my local hardware business, which just might be forced out of business. It's titled "Think Local, Act Conversational – It Just Might Save Your Business." From…

Corbets (image credit Marin IJ)

I’ve just posted my latest missive on the American Express Open Forum blog, where I Think Out Loud about my local hardware business, which just might be forced out of business. It’s titled “Think Local, Act Conversational – It Just Might Save Your Business.” From it:

Corbet’s Hardware is my neighborhood hardware store, it’s something of a local legend. Let’s see what happens when I put it into Google (I omitted the apostrophe, as most folks do).

Interesting. First up is a link from “zinsser.com”, which appears to be some kind of a shellac company (no, really, a company that makes shellac). Corbet’s probably carries their products – the Zinsser site lists its distributors – but man, what on earth is that doing being first? Clearly, Corbet’s has not exactly joined the conversation economy quite yet.

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The Conversation Economy, Sketches

Thanks to Adobe, who sponsored this work, I pulled together some sketches for the book I keep talking about. It's blog posts from Searchblog, a talk I gave at Cisco, work I've done for the Amex Open Forum blog (which just won a Mixx award!), with Powerpoint and video….

Adobe Dmwnld

Thanks to Adobe, who sponsored this work, I pulled together some sketches for the book I keep talking about. It’s blog posts from Searchblog, a talk I gave at Cisco, work I’ve done for the Amex Open Forum blog (which just won a Mixx award!), with Powerpoint and video. A nice package, in fact, and I’m proud to say it all happened thanks to a sponsor. Check it out here (download will initiate). Thanks, Adobe!

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Firing up the Burners: Android Starts to Boil the Telephony Ocean

Here's Boy Genius' take on the first phone to use Google's Android platform….

Here’s Boy Genius’ take on the first phone to use Google’s Android platform.

Google G1 Phone Group

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Texting Is Stupid

(image) After seeing the clearly obvious story about texting being a bad thing to do while driving (er, no sh*t), I just had to write that headline. Sorry. I text with the best of them. I love the concept and efficiency of short messaging. But the interface is deeply…

Texting On M1082022(image)

After seeing the clearly obvious story about texting being a bad thing to do while driving (er, no sh*t), I just had to write that headline. Sorry. I text with the best of them. I love the concept and efficiency of short messaging.

But the interface is deeply stupid. I see these commercials from carriers extolling speed texting, and think to myself – “We’ve already invented an incredibly efficient way to get thoughts from our brains to others – it’s called speech.”

Why I can’t simply say to my phone: “Text Michelle” and the phone gets ready to send a note to Michelle. Then I say “Mich I’d rather hit Left Bank than Ambrosia for din love you bye” and the damn text goes to Michelle?

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Google’s Perfect Ad: Missing the Marketing

I missed this blog post last week from one of Google's most senior VPs of Product, Susan Wojcicki. Titled "Ad Perfect" it starts: Google's advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is…

I missed this blog post last week from one of Google’s most senior VPs of Product, Susan Wojcicki. Titled “Ad Perfect” it starts:

Google’s advertising business was founded on the core principle that advertising should deliver the right information to the right person at the right time. This is very similar to our mission in search, and, like our colleagues in search, those of us on the ads team are constantly striving to achieve better results. We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers who collectively have millions of products and services, and out of that vast amount of information our goal is always to show people the best ads, the ones that are the most relevant, timely, and useful (and, from the advertiser perspective, measurable). Achieving this ideal has been difficult since the early days of ads, but now, with the Internet, it is within reach.

Then comes the nut graph:

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Click to Get Your Searchblog Discount: CM Summit Returns to San Francisco

Last Fall we took a big step at FM and launched our own conference series focused on the media business, in particular, the marketing piece of the media business. Called The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit for short), our inaugural event was a hit – though it didn't sell…

Cmssf08

Last Fall we took a big step at FM and launched our own conference series focused on the media business, in particular, the marketing piece of the media business. Called The Conversational Marketing Summit (CM Summit for short), our inaugural event was a hit – though it didn’t sell out till the very last minute, leaving me a bit terrified no one would show up.

But given the speakers – Kevin Rose, Sarah Fay, Steve Hayden, The Ninjas, Suzie Reider and tons more – I should have known it’d be fine. We then repeated the event in New York this past June, and that was really a blast – we were joined by the CMO of GE, CEO of Ning, CEO of Hulu, and tons of case studies. And that one sold out early.

Now I’m proud to announce our line up for our second Fall conference, and offer SearchBlog readers a hefty discount to book. Here’s a selected list of our speakers:

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