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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.

As part of the Marketing 2.0 Community, we are having the third in a series of CMO 2.0 Conversations with Best Buy’s CMO Barry Judge tomorrow. We hope you can join us for this interesting session tomorrow at 2pm ET.

Please register here (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/808222669). The format is very much like a talk-show format, where Barry and I will start off a conversation for about 15-20 minutes, after which you will be able to raise your hand and be un-muted to join the conversation.

Again, we hope to see you then and there!

After presenting at the Web 2.0 Expo last week, we have a lot of other events coming up. The first is this coming Thursday, when I will be kicking off a series of CMO 2.0 Conversations for the Marketing 2.0 Group. This first conversation will be with H&R Block’s VP of Marketing Paula Drum. You can register for that conversation here. If you have anyone you would like to recommend for a future conversation, please let me know.

After that, we will presenting the results of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study at the BRITE conference at Columbia University on October 15-16. Following that I am getting involved with the Social Media Strategies Conference in San Francisco at the end of October. Shortly after that there will be the Society for New Communications Research Symposium here in Boston. I will try to add the buttons that will give you discounts for these events on my site in the next couple of days.

Hopefully we can find some time to connect in person at one of those events.

The study on tribalization of business which we (Beeline Labs, my new company), Deloitte and the Society of New Communications Research (where I am a senior fellow), produced this spring/early summer is out.

There were some real interesting takeaways from the study, many of which I have been writing about in more detail over the past few months. They include:

• The worst practices (i.e., build it and they will come, focus on technology first, etc.) for managing communities are well entrenched and will continue to cause many community efforts to fail.
• Business communities have the potential to transform the role of the CMO, but for that to truly happen it will take some new management thinking
• There is a significant mismatch between the goals that companies set for themselves and their size and the associated investments and measurements that they use to measure the success of those communities.

If you would like a briefing on the findings, please contact me (francois [at] beelinelabs.com or 617.899.1698) and I will arrange for you to get one.

On July 30th, you can also join us for a webinar debrief which will be hosted by Deloitte and for which you can register here.

I’ll be attending the BRITE conference at Columbia this week and I’ll be leading a session with my partner Lois Kelly during the CMO day. The broad topic is: what do you do when traditional marketing is no longer working for you, when customers and prospect don’t want to hear from you, when they don’t care that much about you to give you meaningful feedback, and when all the cool new viral stuff only seems to work for others. If you have ideas or examples that might work well, please post a link in the comments.

We will also be blogging the conference – with 10 of us (David Berkowitz, Don Dodge, Paul Dunay, Tom Guarriello, Max Kalehoff, Lois Kelly, Valeria Maltoni, Amanda Mooney, and Christine Whittemore) participating and reporting on what promises to be very interesting discussions.

There are still a few seats left – so if interested please register. You can get a 10% discount by using the code briteblog08 during the registration process.

We hope to see you there or to receive suggestions for our session through the comments.