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Please join me for “The 24 Hours of Innovation Event” which will take place May 15-16. It’s a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives that promises to be be real interesting. Here is from the organizer’s web site:

The 24 Hours of Innovation is a non-stop, online marathon of innovation initiatives around the world. The event takes place during a full day and night on May 15-16 from 10.00 am to 10.00 am (CET). (as a reference: Sydney 6 pm, New York 4.00 am, Los Angeles 1.00 am)

The 24 hours are divided in time slots, each one featuring an exciting innovation ranging from an innovation award to creativity sessions, start-ups, and interviews with global thought leaders. Everyone can follow and join the 24 Hours of Innovation on www.boardofinnovation.com, from where the event will be covered cross-media on blogs, traditional media, twitter, slideshare, ustream, coveritlive, flickr, scribd, vimeo,…

My time slot will be at 8:20 EDT. I look forward to seeing you there!

The CMO 2.0 Conversations which I conduct over on the CMO 2.0 Site has been receiving a lot of great reviews – thank you for that! In order to broaden the conversation we have decided to expand the CMO 2.0 Conversations with key marketing influencers – those forward thinking authors and thinkers who CMO’s should be listening to.

We will be announcing additional CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversations as well as new CMO 2.0 Conversations shortly, but for now we were hoping that you could join us for the following sessions:

• May 5th (YES THAT IS TOMORROW) at 1pm ET, we will be having a conversation with Rob Kozinets, who is Associate Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. He is the editor of Consumer Tribes, a book that captures the diversity of international research on tribal marketing. Rob blogs over at Brandthroposophy. You can register for the event here.
• May  22nd at 10am ET, we will be having a conversation with Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke Professor in Behavioral Economics at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and author of Predictably Irrational. You can register for that session here.

We hope you can join us for those sessions as well as the upcoming CMO 2.0 Conversations with Pete Blackshaw, EVP of Marketing at Nielsen Online, and Porter Gale, CMO at Virgin America.

A conversation with Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of NPR, and Scott Anthony, president of Innosight and author of “The Silver Lining”

The explosion of choice, erosion of once enviable business models, challenging economic times and other factors are leading to major disruption in the media industry. With consumers more empowered than ever before, organizations are scrambling to find the right way to configure themselves and their products to provide value.

A webcast addressing this pressing trend will feature ideas and insights from Vivian Schiller, the president and CEO of NPR, formerly the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, and Scott Anthony, the president of Innosight who has worked with a number of media companies and spearheaded the “Newspaper Next” project with the American Press Institute, and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” from Harvard Business Press.

It is a recurring theme now – people often ask us: why are you doing what you doing? Why are you doing the CMO 2.0 Conversations, why are you doing the Marketing 2.0 communities, the Marketing Intelligencer, and what’s up with the Tribalization of Business Study?

The simple answer – we’re practicing what we preach.

We do not interrupt people and try to convert them into clients – rather we engage them in conversations that they want to have. And we make sure that we package the content that comes out of those conversations in such a way that they want to reuse it with their friends and colleagues (several CMO’s have now told me that they tell every single one of their team members to listen to the CMO 2.0 interviews). These offerings and activities also allow us to reach members of marketing industry associations who see benefits in sharing that content with their members.

Or take another example: our Marketing Intelligencer newsletter in which we are not trying to exclusively push our stuff, like most marketers do, but rather add real value by being trusted curators for what’s most important for marketers to read on the web – even if it means pointing them to content from competing firms. The Tribalization of Business Study is a lot of work – but it got thousands of people to download that information and pass it along. And our Marketing 2.0 Communities have almost 15,000 members – what push marketing program would give you this amount of attention you think?

We do not try to buy attention from people – we try to earn their attention.

Just as important as getting all that attention from people we may want to engage with commercially at some point is the learning that we get from doing these programs. We get to fully understand the issues that marketers are facing in today’s economy, and how they frame those issues. And equally important is that we have fun doing it!

Join us on March 11th for a webinar with three leading voices in small business – including Anita Campbell from Small Business Trends, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing, and John Field from Career Renegade for a Webinar.

Topic: No Time, No Budget, Fewer People? 5 Big Ideas for getting all that work done.

Hosting: The AppGap blog, an editorially independent thought leadership blog sponsored by Intuit.

Venue and registration: You can register here (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/585901512).

With tens of thousands of layoffs announced every week, the “workplace survivors” left behind are faced with doing more work with fewer resources.   What new thinking, strategies and tools can help teams work smarter, pre-empt personal burn out and help their companies weather the storm?  In this webinar you’ll learn about 5 ideas you can put to work today from 3 leading voices in small business , marketing , and career strategies.

In this webinar you will learn:

1. How to automate what you hate — tasks and processes that are time sucks you never noticed or didn’t know you could offload to new tools
2. How going virtual can help — prudent outsourcing can make more sense than ever
3. Why getting “social” at work is good for business — seek technology applications with social media features and that connect you with communities that can provide speedy answers, serve as “free” extensions of your team, connect you to customers faster
4. Why and how to reframe how you think about your job — advice for doing more of what matters and less of what doesn’t
5. How to get your head in the cloud — move more work to the web and save more time and money

Attendees will also have the opportunity to win one of 10 copies of the panelists’ books, signed by the authors.

We hope you can join us.

I’ll be in NYC next week. The first stop is a workshop that I’ll be conducting with my friend Ed Moran from Deloitte at O’Reilly’s TOC conference on Monday afternoon. The topic: Building Communities Around Content. If you will be there and would like us to critique some communities, simply add a link to it in the comments below.

Next up are two events that are actually conflicting, but I will manage to attend both.

First I was invited to attend the Advertising Age Marketing 50 Awards Luncheon on the 11th. There are some cool marketers in attendance and hopefully I can interview a few for nuggets of wisdom or maybe schedule some for our CMO 2.0 Conversation series.

On Wednesday I will also be attending the Community Report Community East Unconference 09. I will have to split from there for some part of the day but that seems like a cool gathering as well.

If you plan on attending any of those events – drop me a note.

Today I had another opportunity to interview a true CMO 2.0 – Jeffrey Hayzlett, the CMO of Kodak (@jeffreyhayzlett).

Jeffrey and I started off by talking about the remarkable transformation and near-death experience that Kodak had to go through to remake itself as a digital company. We covered a wide array of topics, including how:

• “branded content” can become part of the conversations
• social media is in fact nothing more (and nothing less) than the platform that allows the “socialness” that makes us humans to scale
• you have to be pragmatic in the ways you measure the impact of all marketing activities on sales
• you need to train people to engage with others in a 2.0 world
• generational differences impact marketing and new product innovation
• gaining market insight and new product ideas have changed over the years
• the acceleration of product lifecycles is impacting the way we develop, launch and release new products

It was truly a rich and informational conversation. I will update this post with additional topics in the near future, and also make this and other CMO 2.0 conversation transcripts available soon.

(You can listen to the interview and sign up for upcoming CMO 2.0 Conversations with Leaders from FedEx, GE and Harvard on the new CMO 2.0 Conversation Blog which we set up and I will also make it available in the Marketing 2.0 Group – http://www.marketingtwo.com)

As part of the CMO 2.0 Conversations we have now scheduled two more CMO’s.

First we rescheduled Jeff Hayzlett, the CMO at Kodak for January 30th at 9am ET. We also scheduled Beth Comstock, GE’s CMO, for March 6th at 10:30 am. You can find information, including registration information, for both events on the new CMO 2.0 site – http://www.cmotwo.com.

We will be scheduling additional CMO conversations in the next couple of weeks (we have 3 other ones confirmed so far), so stay tuned to the new site to get updates.

Well – there you have it. It will probably not come as a great surprise that I think so, but after ruminating on it for a long time as part of a team of 12 great marketers which Valeria Maltoni assembled to provide some direction for social media marketing in 2009, that is how I decided I would characterize the state of Social Media in 2009.

Download the ebook in which 12 of us shared some great insights on the future direction of Social Media – it’s free!

From Valeria’s blog post, here are some bite-sized previews of what some of the other autors had to say – many of whom I consider real sharp thinkers when it come to marketing and some of whom I am fortunate enough to be friends with:

• “Basic metrics you can initially use to match up before, during and after sales deltas are frequency, reach, and yield” – Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder, @thebrandbuilder

• “There are three imperatives for execution programs in 2009 – start with measurement, create content for the open Web and for mobility” – Matt Dickman, Techno||Marketer, @MattDickman

• “The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution” – Mike Fruchter, My Thoughts on Social Media, @Fruchter
  

• “With social media as a platform for participation, people can behave the way they were hardwired to behave in the first place – humanly, tribally” – Francois Gossieaux, Emergence Marketing, @fgossieaux

• “Social media enhances marketing efforts as an additional indirect communication channel” – Beth Harte, The Harte of Marketing, @BethHarte

• “Companies with greater social intelligence have stronger bonds with employees and customers, and that translates into revenue” – Lois Kelly, Beeline Labs, @LoisKelly

• “Change ensures our own livelihoods – new opportunities and trends to capitalize upon, unique products and profit centers that merit development, robust innovation to leverage”- Christina Kerley, CK Epiphany, @ckepiphany

• “Social media interaction allows us to have… well, interaction with our customers. It lets us see them as people instead of statistics and it lets us hear their voices” – Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide, @JenniferLaycock

• “Goals absolutely must be built on business objectives” – Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding, @AmberCadabra

• “A proper social media education is more than just learning new tools. The most important lesson we can impart is the necessity to think ‘humans’”- Connie Reece, Every Dot Connects, @ConnieReece

• “Social media isn’t causing problems, but it is revealing them. And the problems aren’t new; they’ve been around for a while” – Mike Wagner, Own Your Brand!, @bigwags

• “The secret of success in social media is a product or a service that people actually like and use” – Alan Wolk, The Toad Stool, @awolk

And whatever you do in 2009, remember the words of wisdom from our fearless leader for this project – Valeria:

Don’t fear mistakes, welcome them. They will help you become more resilient and fl exible – in some cases even kinder. Nothing like the fresh breeze of reality to energize our purpose. Adapt your plan to circumstances and keep going.

I hope you enjoy and look forward to your feedback! More predictions coming up soon…

For those of you that have tuned in to previous CMO 2.0 Conversations, where I get the perspective of Marketing Leaders on the future of Marketing, we have expanded the program and created a dedicated site for hosting those conversation (www.cmotwo.com).

Soon I will be announcing a new schedule for upcoming CMO 2.0 Conversations – including interviews with some truly amazing people. We will also be adding transcripts to the site and make the interviews available through iTunes.

If you have any suggestions for the CMO 2.0 Conversations please email me or post a comment.