Emergence Marketing: Corante Archives

October 29, 2007

Dinner at the New York Stock Exchange

Last week I was honored to be part of the wf360 summit at the New York Stock Exchange. The event started with a reception on the NYSE trading floor followed by an award dinner with 200 or so public company executives. The "360 Leadership" award this year was given to Anne Lauvergeon, the CEO of Areva, who was also profiled on 60 minutes.

One of the interesting experiments for this year's summit, which I was happy to help facilitate for Susan Bird, the organizer of the event, was to invite well known business bloggers to attend and blog the event. You can see some pictures from the event taken by Howard Greenstein here, and also peruse posts about the rich conversations that took place by Don Dodge, Howard Greenstein, CK, Tom Steinthal (also here and here), Tom Guarriello (with video), Dorian Benkoil, Russ Nelson, and Rob Leavitt. There were additional bloggers at the dinner and I will update this post with links to their posts when they write about their experiences.

Besides meeting some great bloggers for the first time in person, I also met some fabulous people from various industries who were interested in talking about how to "operationalize" all this new social media stuff into their sales & marketing, their educational programs, and their human resources processes.

[Tags: wf360 summit wf360 nysecorante NYSE marketing 2.0]

June 5, 2007

Covering the Global Messaging Conference in Monaco!

A group of bloggers from the Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog are blogging the Global Messaging conference as well as the MEM 2007 conference over at the Mobile Messaging 2.0 blog.

This morning I got to attend a series of sessions on mobile communities and user generated content - a topic near and dear to my heart, especially as I am preparing to take on the chairmanship of the 2nd annual Community 2.0 Conference which will be held next year. It was quite disappointing to hear that the two main business models that panelist could come up with during that discussion were subscription and advertising based models. Is there really no value in harvesting the content generated from multi-million user based communities and package it up in such a way that it can be sold back to vendors? Not only would that provide higher value to vendors than standard click-through advertising, it might actually benefit the users as well.

Another surprising factoid is that at this conference press representatives do not get fed... If you are from the press corps, you pay for your own food. What a great model to save money from those freeloaders :)

May 21, 2007

Enterprise 2.0 Webinar

If you get a chance, please join us for the Enterprise 2.0 webinar which I will be hosting this afternoon at 2pm. This afternoon we will have a conversation with a number of experts - including Euan Semple, Susan Scrupski, Bill Ives, Jevon McDonald, John Musser, Joe McKendrick and Lee White from GSK.

Tomorrow will be the second part at 11am ET with Andrew McAfee, Euan Semple, Jerry Bowles, Jenny Ambrozek, and JP Rangaswami.

You can find registration information at the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE site.

Those discussions will be recorded and available for replay after the conference calls are over. We will post the information on the Enterprise 2.0 Rave site as well as the FASTforward blog. Also make sure to join the Enterprise 2.0 Ravers social networking site at http://e2ravers.ning.com.

April 5, 2007

Ready for an Enterprise 2.0 Rave?

Here is another cool project I am working on - organizing an Enterprise 2.0 RAVE in NYC on May21-22 with the great team at Longworth Venture Partners .

If you are a practitioner looking at deploying web 2.0 tools in your enterprise or actively strugling with pilot projects to try to do that, you should not miss this event. And if you do plan on going, use the link below to get a $250 discount for the RAVE. Seating will be limited and we already have two registrants!

The paint is still wet, so if something does not work correctly let us know.

See you there.

[Tags: future of work enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 wiki tag blog]

March 26, 2007

Launching another group blog - on health care

This weekend was a very busy one as we prepared to soft launch another group blog - this one on the Future of Health care and as a companion blog to the European World Healthcare Congress which is currently taking place in Barcelona.

Suggestions & comments are welcome!

[Tags: health care healthcare]

February 26, 2007

IP related issues with communities

This afternoon at 4pm EST/1pm PST we will have a public conference call to discuss IP issues that arise when a company starts to integrate outside audiences within their business processes.

The call will be led by “blawger” and long time Corante Contributor Denise Howell and Michael Madison, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who blogs here.

Dial-in information is as follows:

From SKYPE - dial +990008275785861

From a regular phone:
Calling from the US call # 1-605-475-8590
(long distance costs apply).

In Europe, call:
Belgium 070 35 9989
France 0826 100 277
Germany 01805 00 7649
Ireland 0818 270 034
Italy 0848 390 175
Switzerland 0848 560 195
UK 0870 738 0763
The conference is free but national rate charges will apply to these calls.

We hope to see you then!

IP related issues with communities

This afternoon at 4pm EST/1pm PST we will have a public conference call to discuss IP issues that arise when a company starts to integrate outside audiences within their business processes.

The call will be led by “blawger” and long time Corante Contributor Denise Howell and Michael Madison, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law who blogs here.

Dial-in information is as follows:

From SKYPE - dial +990008275785861

From a regular phone:
Calling from the US call # 1-605-475-8590
(long distance costs apply).

We hope to see you then!

February 14, 2007

Upcoming Community 2.0 Conference

As I mentioned on this blog earlier, I agreed to be the chair for the upcoming Community 2.0 Conference. If you plan on attending the conference, which is shaping up rather nicely, remember to use the Corante Discount code - which provides you with a $600 discount off the list price. You can register through the conference's web site and get the discount by using the code FWMIH00.

We hope to see you there!

February 12, 2007

FASTforward '07 recap

FASTforward '07 - a project we were paid to support, and where we spent most of last week - was a great success. The FASTforward Blog, which we origianlly launched as a companion blog to the conference, but which quickly evolved into a central repository for thinking around Enterprise 2.0, has some great interviews with some of the speakers who presented at the conference.

Interviews by David Weinberger, in no particular order:

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of "The Long Tail"

John Battelle, author, blogger, editor, media entrepreneur

Jeanette Borzo of the Economist Intelligence Unit

Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research

John Markus Lervik, founder and CEO of Fast

Carl Frappaolo of the Delphi Group

Stephen Gallagher, Senior Director at Accenture

Susan Feldman, IDC

Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group

Bill Inmon of Inmon Data Systems

Dan Keldsen of the Delphi Group

Zia Zaman, Fast

Lydia Loizides, former exec of techn and emerging media at Interpublic Media

Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School

Tom Mandel of ConnectBeam

Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group

Hadley Reynolds, Fast

Jim McGee of the Huron Consulting Group

Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media

James Robertson of Step Two Designs

Michael Schrage, MIT

Euan Semple, consultant, formerly of BBC

Sandeep Swadia, Fast

David Watson, Digital Media at Disney/ABC

Interviews by Kathleen Gilroy:

"The meaning of search"

a montage of statements by conference participants on the meaning and future of search

Tim O'Reilly:

Web 2.0 is defined by building systems that get better as much people use them. This means asymmetric competition in the information business. But there are opportunities to work in the global information commons. O'Reilly hosted a panel where he interviewed the search person from Reed and the head of business development for Fast. They discussed producing more contextual search and looking at federated search where the data coming from multiple customers was combined and made available.

Andrew McAfee:

Enterprise 2.0 is about new forms of collaboration and unlike previous enterprise computing efforts, e20 enables the expression and capture of judgement.

E20 will not happen just by building new technologies and expecting people to use them. It is hard to get e20 to become part of the DNA of a company and it will require sustained management and leadership through coaching, rewards and incentives, leadership, and building a culture that is attuned to the benefits of working in this new way.

E20 is very different from groupware (Notes, Sharepoint) in that it is very unstructured. Groupware often failed because it demanded too many rules and the terms of interaction were defined from the start.

Ray Lane on the "interpersonal enterprise"

Related posts:
Andrew McAfee - FastForwarding to a Better Understanding, part 1
Rod Boothby - Message From FASTForward: Search Changes Everything

January 15, 2007

The power of communities...and a new group blog

It is unquestionable that if done right, deploying communities in support of specific business processes can lead to game-changing benefits. To cite just a few examples:

Ducati was able to fire their marketing department and replace it with a central customer community group responsible for all aspects of marketing - from product design and marketing communications, to creating the overall brand experience.

In Germany, eBay was able to increase its revenue by 56% by getting existing eBay users to join customer communities.

And through their "Connect and Develop" strategy - which involves employees, customers, prospects and even competitors, P&G is now able to derive 35% of their innovations and billions of dollars in revenue from the community it's developed.

But it is also true that a majority of business community initiatives fail, and will continue to do so. Some companies focus too much on the technology architecture to support communities rather the social architecture - forgetting that some of the most successful communities are facilitated through email lists and discussion threads. Others are not investing enough in getting their communities up and running. And then, of course, you have those companies who try to exert too much control, not realizing that communities are like any complex system - you have too few rules and connections and the system disolves in chaos, too many and the system freezes up.

It is with these issues in mind that we are launching a new group blog on the Future of Communities. We have a terrific line up of contributors and hope that you will join the conversation.

[Tags: communities community management marketing plan community marketing]

December 5, 2006

Corante is sponsoring the WOMMA Summit this coming week

If you have anything to do with Word of Mouth Marketing, you should attend the WOMMA Summit next week!

As they say about the conference:

Have you heard of word of mouth? If you haven't yet, you will. It's the new way to market, and more and more companies are getting on board every day. Just ask the Inc. 500 (82% of their CEOs use word of mouth) and their customers (2/3 of consumer purchases are influenced by word of mouth).

Word of mouth is already happening TO you. Do you know how to make it work FOR you? Learn at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, Dec. 12-13 in Washington, D.C. It's the only conference that will give you a hands-on, advanced understanding of how to build truly deep, two-way relationships with your customers.

The Summit features:
- Lessons from 70+ experts
- Big questions, important issues, and straight answers
- Practical "how-to" instructions
- Everyone you need to know

Register today at www.womma.org/summit2.

They have a great line-up of speakers as well as many interesting people in attendance - making for great networking with!

October 3, 2006

Live Blogjamming BIF on the Corante Innovation Hub

Tomorrow Wednesday and Thursday a few of us will be blogging the Business Innovation Factory event live on the Corante Innovation Hub, which was just mentioned in Business Week this past week.

August 1, 2006

Mastering the new marketing practices

One of the great sessions at last month's CMO summit, which was organized by Corante and the Center on Global Brand Leadership, was moderated by Johh Hagel. While the session has been summarized in a variety of places, John now summarized his points on his own blog. At the risk of being somewhat repetitive I will summarize/paraphrase the post here as it has a ton of great insight...

So where does John think marketing is going?

For starters, he thinks that the current shift in the economics of business will force major changes in marketing. With attention being the new scarcity and customer acquisition and retention costs being on the rise - business will have to start focusing on economies of scope instead of economies of scale. In customer relationships it will come down to getting the largest share of wallet of any single customer rather than a fix share of wallet across a large number of customers. This whole trend is reinforced by the fact that the cost of interaction and the ability for customers to find information about vendors and products is steadily declining as well.

According to John, this all leads to the need for fundamental changes in the areas of marketing strategy, branding and performance metrics.

In the area of marketing strategy, we need to move from the 3I's (intercept, Inhibit, isolate) to the 3A's (attract, assist, and affiliate). Another way of looking at it is that we have to move from a "one to one" marketing to a "many to one" marketing mindset.

From a brand promise point of view - we need to move from a "buy this product because I am great" mindset to one closer to "buy this product because I know you and you can trust that I will configure it properly for you."

As for the new metrics, try these on for a change: average life time value of the customer (customer service execs - are you listening!), 80/20 segmentation of customers based on profitability, ROA (return on attention), ROI (return on information).

And so what are vendors doing?

As John says, they are...well...acting like vendors!

In response to attention being the new scarcity - they are bombarding us with intrusive ads on animals, in urinals, in the sky, and with other desperate moves to "grab" our attention. John has it right when he says "Rather than just focusing on how to get attention, vendors might also want to consider how they can help their customers receive attention that is important to them and not just from the vendor, but from others that matter to the customers."

And as is typical with any new wave of tools, they are also jumping on the new social media technology bandwagon - deploying blogs, communities, wikis and other network-enabled marketing tools without really asking themselves how this will help the customer, or how "it will increase return of information for customers."

John finishes his article with some recommended actions for CMO's to take: affiliate with partners to create more useful solutions for your best customers, change organizational roles so execs are in charge of the total customer experience, and adopt performance metrics that measure and reward the increase of the lifetime value of the customer.

As usual - a post chock-full of great insights for marketers.

June 12, 2006

Coverage from the 2006 Innovative marketing Conference

While wearing the many different hats of MC, coordinator, wifi guy, podcast traffic cop, and many others at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, I was not able to take good notes of the great discussions that took place at the conference. Thankfully, many others did, and I will try to capture most of them here. I will also elaborate on specific sessions/discussions in future posts.

Overall I believe that we delivered against the promises that were made ahead of the Innovative Marketing Conference. We promised that it would be a conversation about the new marketing foundations that need to be built in the face of the ongoing breakdown of the old rules, and we delivered just that - few slides and one way presentations and many deeply insightful discussions. We also promised that this conference would be a conference about marketing as a whole – as one of the main premises for the event was that unless all aspects of marketing are tied together, marketers will fail! Here too, I believe we delivered against that promise - with many sessions focused on tying all the conversations together.

But enough bragging - here goes the summary and associated links to interesting posts from across the blogosphere.

Day 1 - CMO Summit

We started both days with a CMO telling us what it is like to be in the trenches. The first day's keynote, delivered by Russ Klein, CMO at Burger King, was insightful and surprising for its degree of innovation. He spoke of how they started looking at Burger King as a "social brand" in order to revive it, introduced their social currency strategy and much more. You can listen to a podcast interview with Russ here, and you can find some good summaries of the speech at:

Chris Carfi's blog - the Social Customer Manifesto

The product review site, which also has a good summary of the session - capturing a few of the "a-ha" moments

Next up was a discussion about the creation process of products and services, and the role of innovation, co-creation and many other new factors on that process. The discussion was led by David Sutherland and you can find some good summaries at:

The Fast Company Blogjam, which has a number of entries on this session including this entry on co-creation, this one on the challenges of co-creation within and outside organizations, and this one reflecting one of the live discussion groups led by John Winsor
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on the co-creation discussion
David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has a good write-up on this session

John Hagel's fabulous session on attention scarcity and what that means to brands, marketing and metrics is summarized at:

The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on this session, including the following summary posts this one, this one and this one, this one on choosing what business you are in, this one on what it is we can learn from evangelists, and this one on how companies have to change their marketing from the 3I's to the 3A's
David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has an excellent write-up on the session
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on moving from the 3I's to the 3 A's
Mario Sundar's Marketing Nirvana, where he also has a good summary of John's session.
Chris Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto, where he has a good summary of the session as well
Jason Chen's Blog

Next came David Weinberger, who led a discussion on the future marketing department. Good summaries for that session can be found at:

The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on it, including this summary, this post on whether the CEO should be the CMO, this one on the repair tools to fix the marketing department, and this one on whether a marketing department should manufacture demand
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he summarizes one important point of David's session, how blogs are complexifying messages

Prof Bernd Schmitt wrapped up the day by summarizing what we discussed that day and by attempting to tie it all back together. We have recorded this session and will post the audio transcript online shortly. For now you can listen to a podcast interview with Bernd Schmitt here..

Day 2 - Marketer's Forum

The CMO who kicked off the second day was Deepak Advani, CMO at Lenovo. He spoke of the challenges to build a new brand across national and cultural barriers and also touched on what it means when your brand comes under attack by xenophobes. You can listen to a podcast interview with Deepak here, and you can find summaries of his speech at:

The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has a number of posts on it Including this summary of the session, this entry on innovation, and this post on where design should reside in a company

Heath Row's Squidoo lens on a new marketing foundation

Judy Breck's Golden Swam, where she has a good summary of that part of the speech where he talked about sponsoring a non-profit to help students with used computers

Bill Tancer's blog at Hitwise, where he reports on the session and ads some Hitwise stats in the process

Next up was a panel discussion on models for innovation, where David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Gwen Ishmael from Decision Analysts, Tony Ullwyck from Strategyn and Paul Zarookian from AIG debated all the different angles of innovation. You can find summaries of this discussion at:

Joseph Jaffe's Jaffejuice, where he talks about the importance of the 1 percenters...
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on models for innovation
The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, which has a post on this session here on innovation = creating things your customers will value

After that we had a great session on the new marketing tools that are available to marketers, which was ably moderated by Johnnie Moore, and included Kevin Lee from Did-it.com, Heidi Lehman from Third Screen Media, Max Lenderman from GMR Marketing, Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Diane Hessson from Communispace. You can find some summaries at:

Joseph Jaffe's Jaffe Juice, which has some interesting snippets from the session here
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the new toolbox
The fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has multiple entries on it - here and here, here for an interesting quote from Dianne Hessan, and here on the role of trust.

A particularly hot topic - the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content - was debated in the next session. The session was moderated by David Rogers from the Center on Global Brand Leadership, and included John Hiler from Xanga, Craig Newmark from Craigslist.org, and Chris Tolles from Topix.net. Good summaries of that session can be found at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on CGM
ClickZ News, which has a great entry on the discussion about where the money is in CGM, as well as an entry on Craig Newmark's plea on net neutrality

You can also listen to a Skypecast we did on the subject ahead of the conference

I was told that you could not have a marketing conference without a session on metrics and measurement, and so we put a great session together with Max Kalehoff from BuzzMetrics, Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, and Ruth Stevens from eMarketing Strategy. Summaries of the session can be found here:

Joseph Jaffe's JaffeJuice, where he has a summary of the session.
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on what's working
The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam

Kicking off the afternoon sessions were Larry Weber from the W2 Group and Lois Kelly from Foghound, talking about the future marketing department - a lively and provocative session to say the least - and which is summarized at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, where there are a few articles on this session (here on compensation for spreading wom, here on contributing to communities, here and here from some great quotes from the conversationhere for the answers to the 10 questions that Lois asked him, and finally here for a rough transcript of the whole session)
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of marketing

You can also find a podcast interview with Larry here and listen to a Skypecast that he and Lois did ahead of the conference here.

After that we had a session on the future of advertising - led by Joseph Jaffe from Jaffejuice and including Chris Hoyt from 141 Marketing, Lee Johnson from McCann, Rick Klau from Feedburner and Len Ellis, most recently with Wonderman. A set of summaries for this session can be found at:

The Fast Company BlogJam
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of advertising
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he comments on the mood and energy level of the session.

The last session before the wrap-up was a discussion on the future of PR - which consisted of a lively panel with Neville Hobson from Nevon, Lois Kelly from FogHound, Shel Holtz from Holtz Communication + Technology, and John Moore from Brand Autopsy. A good summary for this session can be found at:

The Fast Company BlogJam

Professor Bernd Schmitt then closed it all up and you can find the summary of his closing remarks at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam site

Other, overall conference commentary can be found at

John Moore's Brand Autopsy
Max Kalehoff's blog - AttentionMax on how you can have great conversations without PowerPoint presentations.
John Winsor's "under the radar" has some good things to say about the event in which he participated
Max Lenderman's blog, where he talks about blogging for the sake of blogging
Lois Kelly's blog, where she has a great post on the takeaways from the conference

A photo stream of the event can be found on Flickr.

You can also listen to tens of podcast interviews which Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson did during the event - including interviews with Craig Newmark from Criagslist.org, Dianne Hessan from Communispace, Max Lenderman from Axe fame, Johnnie Moore and John Winsor on co-creation, David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Eric Mankin from the Center on Enterpreneurship at the Babson University, in addition to the ones listed above with Russ Klein, Deepak Advani, Bernd Schmitt and Larry Weber.

Keep checking the site as we will be adding additional edited audio versions of the sessions in the next few of days.

[Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]

June 8, 2006

Conference feedback on many sites at this point

Unfortunately I have not have much time to report back from the first day of the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference. The conversations so far have been unbelievable rich and at times intense. Fortunately you can read or listen to some of the things that happened here today on the Fast Company blog, David Weinberger's blog, Johnnie Moore's weblog, the social customer manifesto, and of course on the For Immediate Release report.

[Tags: imc2006 center on global brands innovation marketing corante]

June 1, 2006

Don't miss tomorrow's Skypecast - Larry Weber & Lois Kelly on the future marketing department

Tomorrow at noon (EST) we will be having Larry Weber, PR Guru, author and founder of the W2 Group, and Lois Kelly, interactive marketing pioneer and partner at Foghound, discuss the future of the marketing department in a Skypecast.. You can find more information about the upcoming Skypecast here. To join - simply go the Skypecast url at noon and log in with your Skype account. If you do not have a Skype account, it's easy, sign up for a free account, it will take you less than 2 minutes.

If you missed some of the Skypecasts that we ran leading up to our Marketing Innovation conference next week, you can go to the event's home page and look for MP3 recordings in the sidebar (contact me at francois AT corante DOT com if you still want to get access to the physical conference next week - I will find a way to get you in!).

[Tags: skypecast larry weber lois kelly marketing corante]

May 30, 2006

Another interesting conversation leading up to the innovative marketing conference

If you have not heard the transcript of the Skypecast conversation we had with Pete Blackshaw and Max Kalehoff from Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Chris Tolles from Topix on the threats and opportunities of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content - make sure to go to the Corante/Columbia University 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference's home page and download the MP3 file of the conversation from the sidebar.

While there, also make sure you check on the latest list of speakers. It is packed with awesome people who have shaped the field of marketing and are likely to shape the future of marketing.

If you have not signed up yet - make sure you do so - we still have some spots left!

[Technorati Tags: skypecast larry weber imc marketing corante]

May 24, 2006

Join us for a lively Skypecast @ 4pm EST tomorrow!

What are the risks and opportunities of marketing your brand in the context of consumer generated content - think Xanga, Myspace, Topix, or Google News & Yahoo! News.

As you may know by now, and in the weeks leading up to the Innovative Marketing Conference - June 8-9 in NYC - we will be hosting a series of provocative Skypecasts in which we will chat with conference participants as well as allow our audience to shape the conversation at the physical event. In this Skypecast we will sit down with Chris Tolles, Pete Blackshaw & Max Kalehoff for a discussion on the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content. (more info at: skype.corante.com)

[Tags: skypecast craig newmark bernd schmitt marketing corante]

May 13, 2006

First Skypecast went flawelessly...

Our first in a series of Skypecasts leading up to our Marketing Innovation Summit in June went flawlessly yesterday. You can listen to the recording of David Rogers, Associate Director for the Center for Global Brand Leadership, interview experiential marketing expert Prof. Bern Schmitt by downloading the Skypecasts' MP3 recording..

Also of interest for the upcoming event is that we will be having a team of bloggers who will blog the event live on a Fast Company marketing BlogJam. Bloggers who will make up the team so far include:

Shel Holtz from a shel of my former self
Nevile Hobson from Nevon

Social Customer Manifesto

Renee Hopkins Callahan from IdeaFlow and the Corante Innovation Hub
Lois Kelly from Foghound (she will also be interviewing PR Guru Larry Weber for an upcoming Skypecast
John Winsor from Under the Radar

from the good seed and

Future Tense

David Rogers from the Schmitt Blog
Paul Gladen from the Chief Innovation Officer
and Rob O'Regan, former editor in chief of CMO Magazine.

[Technorati Tags: skypecast larry weber imc marketing corante]

May 8, 2006

Series of Skypecasts leading up to the marketing conference

In the weeks leading up to the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference - June 8-9 in NYC - we will be hosting a series of provocative Skypecasts in which we will chat with conference participants as well as allow our audience to help shape the conversation at the physical event.

The first one will be a chat with Columbia Business School Marketing Prof. Bern Schmitt, while the second one will be with craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark.

These should be fun...make sure you attend! We will announce more of them in the near future.

[Technorati Tags: skypecast craig newmark bernd schmitt marketing corante]

May 1, 2006

Corante Marketing Innovation Event off to a great start!

Awhile back I mentioned our upcoming Marketing Innovation Event which will be held on June 8-9th in NYC, and which is produced in partnership with the Center on Global Brand Leadership and the Columbia Business School.

The first day - our CMO Summit - is reserved for CMOs and VPs of Marketing only - and will consist of a series of highly interactive discussions around the some of the fundamentals of marketing. The second day - our Marketer's Forum - which is open to the public will feature cutting edge thinkers and business leaders who will present new models for innovative marketing and lessons from companies that are leading the way towards a new marketing foundation.

So far we have assembled a really nice lineup of both attendees as well as speakers. One of the nice achievements so far has been our ability to assemble marketers from a wide variety of industries - including representatives from consumer packaged goods, high tech, automotive, travel, financial services, and the pharmaceutical industry. Combine that with a few international registrations and you end up with a mix that should really lead to innovative discussions.

There are a few great partnerships that we are about to announce, which would give the conference a dimensions that would go beyond the physical event - stay tuned for that! And if you'd like to register, visit our registration by clicking on the registration button in the sidebar!

We also launched a new weekly Marketing & Innovation Digest. I have added a subscription box for the email digest to the sidebar of this site, as I believe that the content will interest people that read this blog. It is also an easy way to stay up to speed on the latest developments of the upcoming conference.

[Technorati Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]

April 25, 2006

Boston Blogger Meet-up on Saturday

Susan Getgood from Marketing Roadmaps is organizing a Boston Blogger Meet-up this Saturday on the occasion of Elizabeth Albrycht's visit from Europe. If you can make it, join us and leave a comment on her blog.

[Technorati Tags: meet-up boston]

March 29, 2006

[announcement] innovative Marketing Conference with The Columbia Business School

As you will have noticed from the button in the sidebar, Corante is organizing a two day marketing event in partnership with the Columbia Business School and the Center for Global Brands. The event will be held at the Columbia University campus in NYC on June 8th and 9th and promises to be a chock full of interesting activities and sessions. You can find up-to-date information about this event at http://events.corante.com/imc.

The first day of the event will be a highly interactive day for a small group of VP's of Marketing and CMO's. The main premise is that the current marketing rule book has dissolved and that we are in need for a new marketing foundation. During the first day we will tackle 3 main topics - the emerging challenges related to creating new products and services; "attention" being the new scarcity in the marketing value chain; and whether you have the right skill sets in your marketing department - or whether we actually still need a traditional marketing department. Those three topics will each be introduced with a short 10 minute provocative point-of-view. Following those intros, attendees will split up in smaller groups to discuss those topics from slightly different angles with qualified facilitators. So for example, following the attention scarcity point-of-view, one group might go off and debate what attention scarcity means to reach your audiences, while another might go off and debate what attention scarcity means to your brands. Following those small group discussions, the group as a whole will reconvene, where we will have report-backs from the small group discussions, more interactions, and then a closing summary by the original speaker to tie it all back together. The day will be framed by two keynote speakers, an opening keynote by a CMO who will talk about life in the trenches, and a closing keynote by Prof. Bernd Schmitt from the Columbia Business School, who will attempt to tie it all back together at the end of this exciting day.

The second day will follow the same themes, except that we will have a lot more speakers as well as report-backs from the previous day's findings. We will also experiment with some different formats that will ensure a high level of interactivity.

We want everyone who attends this event to walk away with actionable things to do and test out.

If you would like to nominate someone for the first day, please fill out the following form. If you'd like to register for the second day, click on the button in the sidebar of this blog.

[Technorati Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]

November 30, 2005

Are you focusing on big "M" Marketing or small "m" marketing?

As I may have mentioned before, we (Corante) are in the planning stages for a Marketing Symposium which will be held early next year. To help us create a real compelling event, one where the debate around the future of marketing goes a few steps beyond what you would find iin most other venues, we assembled an advisory board of thought leaders and practicioners. They include:

Elizabeth Albrycht - a public relations professional, consultant, blogger, and permanent student of the industry

Tom Asacker - writer, teacher, consultant and frequent speaker - Tom Peters calls him a "Marketing Guru"

John Hagel - writer, consultant, business strategist, and frequent speaker

Renee Hopkins Callahan - Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst, and blogger

Lois Kelly - strategic communications professional, consultant, speaker, blogger

Grant McCracken - cultural anthropologist affiliated with the MIT Brand Culture Lab, author, and consultant

Johnnie Moore - marketing consultant, speaker, writer and fascilitator

During our last advisory meeting we debated what might interest CMO's, the circumstances under which they might be highly participatory, whether traditional marketing is dead - or merely going through a major transformation, whether companies have the right skillsets in their marketing departments, old models vs. new models, and many other topics that might help shape the event. If you have any thoughts on the topic - feel free to contact me!

But then we came to a topic that really struck a chord with me - how many marketers out there are focusing on small "m" marketing (the tactical stuff), when they should really be focusing on big "M" marketing (the fundamentals, the strategic stuff)?

I bet you it's way too many of them...

Marketers are often primarily focused on optimising tactics - how to get a better ROI on lead gen or other programs (or how to get to an ROI - period), how to drive more traffic to online seminars, how to get customers to upgrade faster, or how to better manage the PR and advertising budgets. In reality, and if marketers were brave enough to reevaluate their big "M" marketing - do you have the right value proposition, do you have the right customers, do you have the right people - many of the small "m" stuff would take care of itself!

I suppose that a lot of that is driven by job-preservation motives - but as counter-intuitive as it might sound, I think that having the guts to challenge the fundamentals, no matter how deeply ingrained they are in the corporate culture - will result in more successful careers than if you're just a good "operational" marketer. And regardless of that, such an attitude would definitely benefit your shareholders and customers.

[Technorati Tags: marketing marketing strategy strategy]

November 14, 2005

Corante Symposium on Social Architecture

Tonight is the start of the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture. It promises to be a very interesting conversation with a very interesting cast of characters (disclosure - I am a partner at Corante). Watch for some more news coming from us later this week!

There are still a few (very few) seats left if you are interested in attending.

Stowe wrote about some of the latest updates to the program on his blog, and John Hagel also wrote about why he was excited about attending, just to name a few.

We will try to keep a blog going, which will also aggregate other posts that are tagged with "corantessa" (no quotes) at various tagging services.

[Technorati Tags: corrantessa]

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Are you focusing on big "M" Marketing or small "m" marketing?

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Corante Symposium on Social Architecture