Future Marketing Summit scaled
Hillary and Tenzing enjoying a hearty cup of beef tea while scaling their own summit. Image courtesy of bernard-Voyer.com
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of chair in a panel session on technology at the Future Marketing Summit in London. With me were Steve Henry (creative legend and ex-employer), Rory Sutherland (Ogilvy supremo), Amelia Torode (VCCP's digital chief) and David Grebert (P&G's future guru on advertising and instore experience). We were a little light on technologists to be honest but I rather enjoyed myself having these brains at my beck and call.
It is always a pain as a facilitator that you can't lob in your own point of view so I make sure I pissed all over the subject to before hand in my introduction. I talked about the need to retain the magic and delight that new technology brings back to marketing, my preference for tech' that amplifies brand ideas and the need for us to be more modest when approaching new technology and media.
You can download the speech (if you are a regular reader don't expect too much you haven't seen here already) while the slides are on a slideshare (which you won't be able to see if you are reading this as a feed).
Download speech here
View lovely slides here:
Brands rush in where angels fear to tread
The The Charge of the Light Brigade is in so many ways a lesson for brands that think about social media as just another channel.
As you may know my basic philosophy about brands and web 2.0 is proceed...with caution. Social media is unfamiliar territory for brands and their representatives - largely because the rules are created by the community not the communicators - and they should stear well clear unless they know exactly what they are doing.
Unfortunately unscrupulous advisers and naive brand owners rarely employ this level of discretion and like the proverbial fools that they are rush in to this hostile environment ill prepared and end up as canon fodder for an angry community.
As Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote of the catastrophic charge at the Battle of Balaclava:
Half a league half a league
Half a league onward
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred:
'Forward, the Light Brigade
Charge for the guns' he said
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
I sketched out some rules for brands and social media here. But the man who really knows is of course Hugh over at Gaping Void. I rarely post abut other people's posts but you must read his analysis of why blogging has been so successful for English Cut and his stable of microbrands.
Brands and 2.0 - proceed with caution
I had the pleasure of being at NMK's Content 2.0 conference last week (6th June). We enjoyed some excellent speakers including Marc Canter from People Aggregator, Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo! and James Cherkoff from Collaborate. So I thought I'd put together a set of provocations based on my learning from the day which essentially come under the heading - its all jolly exciting but proceed with caution. This is available to view via slideshare or to download I'm afraid as this is the way the post suggested itself. For a more informed understanding of what went on check out James' blog or go to the NMK link at the top of this post.