On February 21, I will be speaking at the Online Marketing Summit about an extremely white hot topic, social media.  While I believe this category is over-hyped (sort of like anything with the word “green” in it),  I have little doubt that social media can provide substantive value for consumers and businesses.  In my session, I plan on talking about how you go about planning a social media initiative.  A few of the topics I’ll be discussing include:

• - Things you can’t afford to skip: setting business objectives, user profile definition, and use case development to name a few
• - Shortcuts you can take if you have to:  this is for the vast majority of us who never seem to have enough time, budget or resources.  
• - Best practices in social media: are there any? What are they?
• - Case studies: review the real-world successes and failures that marketers have faced entering the Wild West of Social Media.
• - Build vs. Buy considerations

I’m told that the session will be videotaped so I’ll share what I can when it becomes available.

I am currently participating in a social media experiment for one of the more meaningful marketing conferences, the Online Marketing Summit.  I have joined with other scheduled speakers at the conference to engage with the 500+ attendees of the event via a forums website.   This site allows the attendees to:

• - interact directly with OMS speakers and panelists to help define the topics they want discussed
• - connect with their marketing peers and fellow OMS attendees before the event 
• - engage in educational dialogue and vigorous debate with OMS speakers, panelists and attendees

For this experiment, I am hosting a forum on customer loyalty – a topic all too often ignored by marketers.  So far, we’re getting a ton of participation and feedback.  Here’s the fun video I created to get people hooked into the Loyalty Forum (the forums site is private so I can’t link to it):

I will be sitting on a panel at the upcoming Social Networking Conference in Miami, Florida.  The panel’s topic is “The Business of Social Media – How Global Brands are succeeding Beyond Blogs”. I will be sharing my experiences running a variety of consumer focused social media campaigns for some major consumer brands including Boston Acoustics, Denon, and Denon DJ.