Highlights of a Panel at the Media Convergence Forum featuring:

• Jeff Hayzlett – Chief Business Development Officer, Eastman Kodak
• Russ Klein – President Global Marketing Strategy, Burger King
• Nicholas Utton – CMO, E-Trade Financial

Role of the CMO faces evolution and reinvention unlike any of the peers of the CMO.

What the CMO role mean to each of you?

Jeff – My role as the CMO of the company is to create “tension” to move the organization and brand in a massive way. If I stop creating tension or pushing the envelope - I will be fired. And whenever someone says I am getting a little to edgy I show them the - ExtendedStay viral video – that usually works.

Nick – My role was to guide us thought a crisis time where we launched a 10M ad campaign to stem redemptions and customer defections – now our customer numbers are up, revenue are up, retention is up – CMO role is about acting when the chips are down!

Russ – CMO role is defined by being the best all around athlete – it takes the Power of Versatility. The Burger King was a brand people “knew more than loved” – I needed to turn that around – re-mystify the brand so consumers would reengage with the brand to become a “brand people would love to know more about” Digital was a perfect choice for that. Moved past the banner ad quickly to get into “content generate share of voice” rather than buying eyeballs.

Messaging in the digital world

Nick – web is our storefront – need to try to get more customers engaged with our brand online – I don’t have the fortitude to pull all the print and ad dollars offline. Don’t care about the price of media as long as it meets the target CPA.

Jeff – Moving the business model from broadcast to a narrowcast model. There is a 400 employees twittering with Kodak in their name – have to acknowledge how the brand is being using – don’t necessarily condone it or endorse it. The Apprentice integrated campaign mentioned Kodak 4.4 times per minute for 43 minutes – to make it more relevant to end users – making it more branded content.

Russ – there is user generated content which we love to fuel but there is “Content Generated Share of Voice” – if you get a 1/2 Billion hits on a viral video – what can you do to get that to spread? You create more content that is inviting and give them that content – it’s no different than the old P&G ad of the next 30 mins has been brought to you by P&G. Whopper Freakout – that spawned lots of parodies on YouTube – got a lot of hits and generated tons of traffic on the web. We love to see that stuff happen.

What advice would you give a CMO if you met them in an elevator?

Russ –Versatility – beyond the expected things – get smart on it fast
Nick – If you don’t take care of your customers someone else will
Jeff – Just go and get it done – no one is going to die!

Every once and a while you meet someone who inspires you to elevate your game to a whole new level and for me Doug Simon is that person.

I first met Doug on a panel speaking about Web Video and he invited me to do a vlog with him. Candidly I have wanted to use more video for my own blog so I jumped at the chance.

As my team knows I have been looking for ways to incorporate video in the marketing mix at BearingPoint not just as a nice to have but as a staple of our interactive go-to-market. And with the proliferation of tools out there to allow you to capture video that should be easy right? After visiting Doug’s facility I can safely say it’s still hard to do if you want to do it well.

Doug has an award winning Communication Company and he started a Vlog to document the change he see going on in his industry. Check out his mission captured on his Vlog and some of the impressive names he has been able to interview from companies like: CNN, New York Times, Southwest Airlines, Burson-Marsteller and Fleishman-Hillard.

Here is a link to our talk about how BearingPoint is using Social Media to help define the brand! - http://www.dssimonvlogviews.com/paul-dunay-bearingpoint/ 

Because of Google – everyone today has access to research that we have never had before. So when you are considering a purchase what’s the first thing you do – Google it. Therefore shoppers (B2C) and buyers (B2B) are armed with more data than ever before and its going to get worse thanks to social media.

In Web 1.0 we saw companies create websites as outposts of their companies and immediately everyone had to have one. But in today’s Web 2.0 world all you have now is your content.

I used to hate hearing in the Web 1.0 world – content is King. But you know what? It came true. It’s been a game of whoever can create the most content wins.

Everyone is into thought leadership, custom content, podcasts, videocasts, community – which I think is great. And this hasn’t gone unnoticed – recent B2B Magazine article mentioned the top M&A target is a marketing company strong in integrating custom content and live events!

So what? So that means the entire first experiences of your brand online are all around the quality of content you put out there AND what people have to say about it. It’s time to crank on the quality of your content machine not just the quantity!

A live interview with the CEO, Peter Friedman, from LiveWorld at Web 2.0 Expo about the launch of their new product called LiveBar.

If you ever dreamed of adding community to your website without having the hassle of a major integration effort involving your IT department then LiveWorld’s newest product called LiveBar is for you.

LiveBar adds contextually relevant community to your site by adding a single line of Java script to your header tag just to those pages which adds community to those pages in seconds.

If you’ve got a site with lots of content, it probably doesn’t make sense to have community features on every page. But, it does make sense to add real-time conversation to sections with high traffic volume—for example, content areas about a current program, or hot topics. Using LiveBar, you can add conversational elements like comments and “shouts”  (which are similar to Tweets) to just those sections, and enhance the experience for those users.

A&E, QVC, Tulane University are already pilot clients for LiveBar and other existing customers include – Neutrogena, P&G, American Express, Kimberly-Clark HSBC, Kraft, Campbells and more …

Listen to Peter Friedman discuss how to do this and the best uses of this for your brand!

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About Peter

Peter founded LiveWorld, Inc. in April 1996. With 20 years experience in the executive offices of Fortune 500 companies, he connects strategic and operating strategies, as well as financial metrics, to community strategy. Peter sets the LiveWorld vision and directs overall operations. He is an executive sponsor for several of LiveWorld’s major accounts, working with clients to define how our services will directly support the client’s business objectives, as well as developing creative concepts for the programs. He is one of the few Internet executives to have launched and managed multiple online services on a global scale. His background is an unusual mix of creative, business, entrepreneurial, and corporate, but has always focused on bringing people together in successful collaboration. Prior to founding LiveWorld, Inc., he was the vice president and general manager of Apple Computer’s Internet/Online Services business unit. He oversaw the creation, launch, and growth of Apple’s online services, including AppleLink, Apple’s global online loyalty marketing and customer support community service, and eWorld, a consumer service based on AOL technology and Internet services such as Salon. During his 12-year tenure at Apple, his responsibilities also included managing Business Systems Marketing and product line management in Apple’s Macintosh division.

Peter holds a Bachelors degree in American History from Brown University, and a Master’s in Business Administration from The Harvard Business School.

 

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Here are a few companies in alphabetical order I thought had shown some real promise at the Web 2.0 Expo

Ascentium – A model for the agency of the future

I spoke to the CMO, Romi Mahajan who explained Ascentium’s go-to-market strategy to me. They are the nexus of a digital marketing company mixed with a technology firm that does Microsoft CRM, Business Intelligence and Analytics to provide creative solutions for brand perception and instantiation.

No doubt very useful and very powerful when they come together (I read this as an agency mixed with a lead nurturing platform that can track ROI!). Not only do they build cool marketing campaigns but they can connect to your sales process. They in effect unify sales and marketing so that clients see that their campaign pay off – thereby eliminating the normal tension between sales and marketing.

Romi was also a speaker on Agency 2.0 on how should agencies of the future be organized. Clearly I would think Ascentium is a model for agencies of the future.

Brickfish - Measuring Social Engagement

Brickfish offers an innovative way for brands to connect with their target audience online. They offer a launching pad for highly viral marketing campaigns that allow you to reach consumers where they live on the social web. They get them to listen to your message and interact with your brand, and more than that, they produce the results.

What does this mean – as I understood it – they make various viral marketing campaigns or social applications that can then be shared with friends who can customize them to post it to their blog or website via an iFrame. The iFrame technology allows Brickfish to measure where, when, who and how many times your messages were viewed.

Some examples are Coach engaged consumers to design a new tote. Nike asked consumers to share their inspirational athletic achievements. Kodak got consumers to share their Kodak moments to celebrate their new low-ink printer. All of these examples needed consumers to make customize the message and make it their own then spread it virally. Best off Brickfish is an all in one platform to do this.

HiveLive – Platform for building unique communities

I spoke to the CEO John Kimbel and visited with HiveLive crew on the Expo floor and was very impressed. HiveLive has a very different take on Enterprise Communities. In short, what they do is act as a platform that aggregates all your types of media (both new media and social media) to create a very different type of experience than say a standard community. So that means they integrate things like blogs, podcasts, wikis, forums into a “Hive” (one could say mashup here). That can be customized to the experience you want to create for your users.

One of their customers is Serena Software. Their CMO, Rene Bonvanie is a forward-thinking marketer who’s been leading the community charge for quite some time now at places like SalesForce, SAP, BusinessObjects, and Oracle.  Below is a video where he does a great job explaining Serena’s vision of a new model of community-powered marketing and how they’re using tools/technologies (like Facebook, HiveLive, and YouTube) to reinvent their business: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDsJE98NPbM

InsideView – Smart marketing and sales tool

I was lucky enough to have breakfast with the CEO Umberto Milletti. Who started InsideView in 2005 because he saw that “business information was becoming more distributed over the web” though articles, interviews, various databases and then eventually social networks.

He viewed this as an opportunity to aggregate these sources of information to provide a composite view of a person or a company through the use of some proprietary Natural Language Processing.

All comes together in a mashup within your own CRM – InsideView integrates with all of today’s most popular CRM systems namely Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and recently announced Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, and Landslide.

InsideView also tells you who you are connected to in Facebook or LinkedIn. It’s a form of “Smarketing” as Umberto called it.

Over 200 companies use their application with hundreds of sales reps using the application. They sell per seat licenses but they also have a free version in the spirit of Web 2.0 with a limited version of the functionality. No doubt this is a company to watch in the coming years!

Wi5Connect – Welcome to Social Learning 2.0

I spoke to Matthew Bowman, VP of Sales and Marketing, of Wi5Connect who explained what they did as a “different approach to learning that marries two technologies – Social Networking and eLearning” into an easy to deliver SaaS solution.

Their new product LearnSocial is a revolutionary new way for businesses to train employees. Different than online learning, user manuals, or instructor lead training, LearnSocial is an online community that captures the power of social networks and fortifies with a state-of-the-art Learning Management System (LMS) platform. Finally, an effective learning tool that allows you to better engage, track the engagement, correlate progress to training, and measure ROI.

Matt called it “a way to combine the brain trust hidden in all levels of your own organization with the magic of your own corporate social network!”