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Impressions of the 2010 WPP Stream Conference

Well it’s a couple of weeks after my first WPP Stream conference and I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the event so I’m offering up this personal summary.

In many ways Stream was as advertised with a surprise or two. First the accommodations were portrayed as Spartan and lived up (down?) to those expectations. The venue is an aging Club Med on the Aegean so the setting is benevolent while the rooms are a bit rustic. This discourages you from seeking the comfort of your room when fatigue (physical or mental) sets in. As a result, and due to the plentiful activities, distractions, libations and just plain great conversation, the social areas were busy from early to late daily. This helped amplify the biggest reason for hauling my butt halfway around the glob to attend: the people. The attendees were bright and engaged, their backgrounds and aspirations diverse and that resulted in many new connections and many fresh points of view. The event itself is run as an unconference with a host of rather playful interludes mixed in. On arrival we were encouraged to customize our badges and at the risk of having to defend my lousy arts and crafts skills I did so and these badges were colorful and personal markers for the rest of the event. Other distractions included a photo booth sponsored by Yahoo but the big winner was a gaming area dominated by Wii and Xbox, including a contest to win the new Xbox with Kinect. I'm a bit of a closet gamer and admit to adding this to my Christmas wish list this year.

The general format was driven by discussion leaders populating a schedule white board on with your fave topics. You simply then went to the discussion (1 hour format) that met your fancy. Feedback from others and my own experiences were that the discussions themselves proved to be a bit spotty. Despite precautions some were a bit dominated by solutions vendors which trended towards the edu-torial form. Another I attended seemed to steer the discussion towards some housekeeping issues among the WPP vendors themselves – how to collaborate more effectively. At any rate many of the discussions I attended were lively and thought provoking but this format could use a bit of updating; perhaps some crowdsourced focus areas set in advance as the spontaneous nature of the topic-setting seemed to result in some sketchy results though overall it seemed to work.

The highlight (again, I’m told) was Sir Martin Sorrel’s insights and reflections on topics ranging from the future (and past) of WPP to global economics and the future winners and losers in the global leadership space where he spoke repeatedly about how well China is positioning itself.

The biggest shortcoming of the event was the lack of reliable internet connections which puts the future of cloud computing in question in my mind. The inability to connect with my office to send files or use a corporate system was a material challenge for me and I spent a couple of hours in aggregate waiting… and waiting… for my VPN to connect, most frequently giving up and settling for whatever goodness my Blackberry could deliver. While one could argue that a high performing Web connection might have drawn eyes and ears from the sessions, in fact the time wasted for the handful of critical business issues I needed to attend to was a real distraction and frustration.

Which brings me to the notion of what was hot and not from a technology standpoint. When asked, the crowd hand raised about an even split of Android and iPhone adherants although Blackberries were populous too. iPads were prevalent this year; laptops seemed evenly split between Mac and PC. And I can’t leave the Xbox Kinect stuff out of the Hot category; it was fun and very differentiating in it’s utility.

I suspect that if asked again in a year I will ignore the flaws and travel challenges and join the conversation again. The bits of wisdom, the fresh global perspectives and the handful of new, fresh connections was welcome.

One final request if the WPP folks are listening: Despite assurances that you were making sure that your own folks didn’t dominate attendance they really seemed to. The WPP web runs deep and wide now and lots of tech and innovative folks were there who were indeed smart, savvy and added a lot but when so many handshakes were with someone directly or indirectly employed by WPP it felt as if I was crashing a company party at times.

Shame on Me

Okay, I really can't believe it's been nearly a year since I've added to my blog. Of course I've been blogging a bit internally at SAP but this is pitiful. I won't get caught up in a lot of self flagellation, simply see if I can't right this ship. Sad development, sorry to any and all who were hoping to hear from me. Actually I blog more to sharpen my wits and to sort out what I truly believe to be true. Let's take another shot at this, shall we?

Twitter is easy: Make your audience look smart

OK, Marketers, this is going to be short and sweet.

No matter how many Twitter followers you have the real magic is in reaching their followers. And so on.

The way you reach them is to have them retweet your content.

No one wants to retweet something that's personal about your life. Or dumb. Or boring. Don't be any of those things. Be really interesting. Be first with some news or insight or content.

Personally I almost never retweet something that doesn't have a link in it. But that's because I want my followers to see me as someone passing along rich, insightful content, a bar that 140 characters seldom gets over.

If you look at your tweet and admit you'd never retweet it if you saw it, go ahead and send it. To your followers; just don't expect them to pass it along. If instead you see something that your audience would like to share then you're onto something.

Not sure what that looks like? Search for retweets of your content - in my case I do a Twitter search for "RT @brianellefritz".

I know, most of you already knew all this, so go out and practice it ok? And then I'll retweet you like crazy, I promise.

Measuring Social Media - Are we Wasting our Time?

I'm still consuming Marketing Sherpa's voluminous - but important - 2009 Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide. Here's an excerpt for you folks who want to get a free taste. Granted the full version costs $447 bucks (or just half that if you buy by Nov 30) and if you agree that time is money it'll cost you at least that much to consume it's 200+ pages, but ante up folks, it's money well spent.

Here's one interesting insight that already caught my eye.

"The Most Effective Social Media Tactics are the Least Measurable"

As you can see on this chart (it's also in their public excerpt above for you copyright police), those surveyed didn't see much correlation between tactics they could easily measure and thos they found to be effective. And yet in another question they said one of their biggest challenges is measuring social media ROI.

So there lies a big conundrum in this new craft of social media marketing: that which we conclude works well might not offer much evidence to support that conclusion.

How can that be? OK, let's be practical and acknowledge that lots of things we value in our business and personal lives can't be measured very well. No less than Albert Einstein pointed out that:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

The Marketing Sherpa report implies that B2B marketers will continue to struggle to provide evidence that their social media investments are paying off. I've blogged before that social media should drive hard for accountability but I also acknowledge that marketing has a long history of investing in hard-to-measure activities.

After all many in marketing would admit after a few drinks that if they wanted to be accountable they'd go into sales.

Joining SAP

To all my peeps and tweeps out there who might not have gotten the word I'm happy to reveal a new venue for yours truly. This month I started a new chapter in my career as Senior Director of Web 2.0 Marketing, joining SAP to head up the social media practice within their corporate marketing team.

For the last two years my team and I - and countless others - have worked hard to elevate Cisco's game in the social media space and I'm very proud of our accomplishments. But the SAP opportunity beckoned and so I elected to make a change.

Let's be clear: SAP is no slouch. Their community marketing is second to none in the B2B space and I'm anxious to share a cup of joe with Mark Yolton and compare notes to see how we can build on that momentum within marketing where lots of cool stuff is already going on.

I'd be remiss in leaving Cisco without a huge tip of the hat to all my Cisco compadres. Special thanks to Bill Robb, Jennifer Bocca and Stephanie Marx who worked their magic alongside me. All too often I got to take a bow for their blood, sweat and tears and I know their hard work and skills will shine on. Thanks guys.

And for the rest of the Cisco pros, too many to name in this blog, I'll miss our daily exchanges and the simple challenge of trying to stay as smart as you are. I look forward to seeing you around Silicon Valley and at the various venues you so deservedly attend.

Social Media Marketing - Strike Out or Home Run?

Recent posts by Laura Ramos and John Bottom, both B2B bloggers who I deeply respect, once again teed up the question about whether skepticism about the viability of B2B social media is well deserved. Their blog posts handle the current debate well so I won't try to revisit their conclusions here but let's fast forward to the inevitable.

Social media will succeed as a viable and cost effective marketing platform in the long term.

And here are three reasons why I feel so strongly:

1. Social media is full of people, millions of them, and more coming onboard every day. Willie Sutton was once asked why he robbed banks and responded simply "Because that's where the money is" (side note - marketers could take lessons from Willie when creating clear and memorable messages). Marketing has always flocked to large audiences because they're efficient to work with. Radio, TV, highways, magazines, newspapers, telephones, web pages and email have all been mastered over the years. Social media is next.
   
2. Problems will be solved. Just looking at the digital era we've seen lots of skepticism cast towards early efforts in web sites (remember the meager "home page"?), communities, email and mobile. All have gone on to prosperity that at least matched their early promise.
   
3. Customers will demand it. And by "it" I mean ready access to the content, service and insight of the brands I care about. And a willingness to listen to me, their customer. When I got near-instant gratification from Comcast after tweeting about an outage I lost patience for their phone queue. Overnight. Customers will raise their expectations, brands will figure out which ones they can meet profitably and we'll gradually move to a center from both perspectives.
   

The bottom line is there are too many motivators to keep social media from succeeding. Brands get access and preference; customers get better content, service, and brand goodness.

There is one more reason for my confidence. I've seen this movie before. I could cite a number of new platforms as example: web marketing, email marketing. But let's look at a monster: e-commerce. For two full years e-commerce rumbled along m0re as a debate than a phenomena. The cons were so numerous: buyer security, shipping, returns, taxation... but one by one these problems not only got solved but they jump started companies like Amazon, FedEx and PayPal. Customers got convenience, value AND piece of mind and brands figured out how to make a buck.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm betting my career that I'm right.