We’ll kick-off the first conference recap with John Battelle’s (CEO/Founder, Federated Media) keynote on “All Media is Social.  Now What?”  John’s keynote was brilliantly right-on-topic to get us all kindling new ideas.  Here are four key areas he covered:

1.  The Rise of Conversational Marketing: First we declared our intentions (what we want) through search.  Then we declared our relations (social graph — who we are as defined by how we are connected to other people) on sites like Facebook.  Finally, during the past year we declared our utterances (what we are doing, what we are interested in, etc.) on sites like Twitter.  When you put all these declarations together — intention, relations and utterances, you have an economy of conversations.

2.  Conversation Economy: Every marketer is a publisher and every publisher is a marketer.  And every consumer is both.  What was once a one-way conversation has now become a two-way conversation. To succeed as marketers, we must leverage appropriate digital media and have conversations with customers at scale.  If you believe conversational marketing is real, we have to contemplate how we can best market in that native environment.  It’s a new form of exchange between numerous participants, and we as marketers are one of those participants representing the brand.  We are still in an early stage and we have to learn new skills by trying and relentlessly testing.

3.  What Brands Need to Succeed in Conversational Marketing: Marketing must become everyone’s job and it must become a horizontal practice rather than a vertical specialty.  This means rethinking from the top down and the bottom up.  To succeed in the Social Media, brands need the same things that are required in a Packaged Goods environment.

Scale + Safety + Quality + Engagement

4.  Conversational Marketing Guidelines:  Fuel for Thought tips and suggestions include:
-  Find conversations you want to join or start
-  Find the natural leaders of those conversations
-  Listen first, then join
-  Add value to the conversations
-  Make media annuities

To hear more great nuggets from John, be sure to follow him on Twitter at @JohnBattelle. To get an electronic copy of his presentation, please email me at jkim (at) sigmagroup.com.  The next post will recap Radian6’s workshop on “Why Listen to Social Media?”

Our first event last year focused on finding the optimum digital marketing solutions.  Geoff Ramsey, CEO/Founder of eMarketer shared his Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn and it sure got our attendees engaged in various discussions to help them jump-start planning in the right direction for the coming year.  Today, we’re thrilled to see that many of the attendees have implemented steps built from those insights/conversations into their marketing programs.  We as an agency also applied those insights and it helped us innovate and grow during the downturn.

The second Fuel for Thought conference will take place on Thursday, November 5th at the Hilton Parsippany Hotel.  This year, we’ll be focusing on Social Media Marketing — not on lofty, intangible theories and concepts, but on actionable smart practices, case studies, resources and tools that will help our attendees properly consider, test and incorporate them into their upcoming marketing programs.

We are thrilled to have John Battelle, CEO/Founder of Federated Media as our keynote presenter to fully profile Why All Media is Social and how it’s impacting the relationship between brands and consumers.  He will share how marketers can embrace new strategies and best practices to ensure their brands are positioned properly in conversational marketing.

We are also delighted to have our partners Radian6, Visual Goodness and Federated Media on-board with us at Fuel for Thought.  To equip our attendees with the right strategies and practical steps, each of our partners will lead an interactive workshop session customized for the conference. Attendees can join the session most suited to their needs:

* Maximizing the User Experience
* Why Listen to Social Media?
* Conversation at Scale
* Twitter for Business

The conference is complimentary to our clients and marketing executives seeking growth and innovation.  To request for your seat, visit http://www.fuelforthoughtseries.com.  We hope to see you on November 5th.

I’m a firm believer that challenges open doors to opportunities, and opportunities bring innovation with possibilities to further advance and emerge as a leader – as many brands did during the Great Depression.

As eMarketer CEO/co-founder Geoff Ramsey puts it, “Consumers are still consuming.” They are still out there, looking for deals and recommendations to make product choices. They are relying on all available resources to find what is right for them. For marketers, the good news is there are more options than ever to make a connection with customers.

Below is a compendium to Geoff Ramsey’s presentation at the Fuel for Thought event in November. It’s based on his recent whitepaper Digital Marketing Now: Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn that is available for free at eMarketer.

That’s it for today.   I hope we sparked some new ideas and look forward to seeing your test programs in market.

Our thanks to Geoff Ramsey, CEO/Founder of eMarketer, for an enlightening presentation and sharing his Seven Strategies for Surviving the Downturn.

It was a pleasure to meet and greet our distinguished guests. The dynamic Round Table Discussions could have extended well into the afternoon if time permitted.

A wrap-up of Geoff’s presentation and each roundtable discussion will be posted on this blog in the coming weeks and topics are listed below.  To get an automatic alert, please subscribe to one of our feed.

Seven Strategies to Survive the Economic Downturn

Focusing on Consumer

The New Web Page

Leveraging Innovation

Importance of Analytics

Businesses both large and small face similar challenges in today’s highly competitive marketplace: how to gain visibility, grow, innovate and connect with consumers — but do it all with less, with minimal risk, while bringing in fast results.

The convergence of digital and emerging media offers exciting new possibilities to connect and converse with consumers and stimulate brand awareness. But at the same time, it brings new challenges: with media fragmentation and brands being unleashed into unfamiliar frontiers, success depends on employing new marketing approaches and strategies.

Fuel for Thought will bring these phenomena down-to-earth with real-world data, case studies, insights and creative ideas. Our goal is to spark conversation, challenge conventional wisdom, and provide new options that will fuel growth and innovation for businesses.  Please join us online and offline.

Blog: www.sigmagroup.com

LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1136477

Twitter: @FuelforThought

Fuel for Thought Series: A quarterly event covering today’s hottest marketing topics

Fuel for Thought Starter: A personalized meeting to discuss how some of the new marketing practices could be leveraged for your brand and business. To schedule a meeting, please email smorris@sigmagroup.com