17:33h – Ok, I skipped a session: quantitative vs qualitative viral marketing by viral seeding company elbkind. Very interesting session with a goood discussion about reach of campaigns in generell (i.e. millions of views) vs reach within a certain target group (wich might result in viewer, but qualitatively lesser views).
Now I am sitting in this (last) session:
Agenturgezwitscher: Twittern zwischen Tratsch 2.0 und echtem Mehrwert
Bastian Scherbeck and Nicole Simon about twitter for agencies.
One opportunity: internal communication instead of mail and IMs: it can reduce mail but doesn’t offer all functionalities needed.
External Communications for clients: it’s all about transparency and trust. The agency needs empowerment when doing this, clients need „courage“.
(missed the third scenario, as I had to answer an email for work)
Interesting question from the audience: why should companies twitter? Answer: It depends. And: you can, you don’t have to.
A further discussion with lots of questions from the audience arose about why should you twitter, personal accounts vs corporate accounts, etc. Temporarily it was stated that you can do customer service well (not cheaper) – in the future I believe that. Currently twitter has around 60-80.000 users in Germany. That’s a bit small to be a relevant channel for customer service…
14:00h – the first afternoon session started with:
XING und die Klassiker
wahlfreie Informationen und Networking statt einfach nur Werbung
Oliver Nickels of IBM starts the session explaining how IBM uses WoM and direct networking to sell their solutions to the German Mittelstand, because it works better than pure advertising.
Networking is extremely important in German Mittelstand – when it is based on trust. Advertising is too expensive because it’s too broad for this B2B segment.
IBM created and advertised a „mittelstands“-group in Xing. IBM employees actively posts articles and comments, even distributes flyers during events, etc.
Speaker changed: now it’s Dirk Reimers of FAT IT Solutions, speaking about benefits of the IBM Xing group.
In total, it appears to be completely logical to build awareness and consideration via networking – isn’t that how B2B usually works best? Only difference: with Xing these networks expand over time and space…
14:45h Next up is Wolfgang Hünnekens talking about crowdsourcing:
Crowdsourcing
Funktioniert die Kreativität der Massen für das Agenturgeschäft?
The session runs with Markus Roder and Oliver Nickels, but first Wolfgang Hünnekens speaks about crowdsourcing.
Hünnekens starts way at the beginning and tells the old tale of how crowdsourcing was first noticed and researched…
The cases mentioned are the usual suspects: Tchibo, Dell, Fiat500… And now that he wants to show a clip, there are technical difficulties.
The discussion starts with the question: what is creativity? That was a discussion during the last ADC awards.
Markus Roder doesn’t believe in crowdsourcing, because even if a single person gets to estimate things several times in a row, his aggregated estimates are more on target than each individual estimate. Also: people quite often don’t know what they want from a brand. Cites Henry Ford: if he had asked people what they want, they would have said: faster horses.
Oliver Nickels: the examples for advertising crowdsourcing were all „risk-free“. Crowdsourcing in product development is always possible. A brand should not be handed over to the „crowd“.
Interesting question being debated: for which brands could crowdsourcing be relevant? Some brands need to uphold an illusion, a placebo effect to keep up their brand values (Markus Roder).
Next question is: how do you manage consumer perception of a brand – how does crowdsourcing contribute, if a brand needs to be lived?
Another fact: brands have to face an increasing lack of control.
10:55 at the Museum for Hamburgische Geschichte, and the show will start any minute.
The speakers of the first panel are already sitting on stage. First topic:
Share Economy, Collaborative Marketing, Radical Individualism
Markenführung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Klassik und Online, Stabilität und Individualisierung, Kontrolle und Partizipation
The first panel is with Bernd M. Michael, Gregor Stemmle and Dr. Stefan Tweraser, moderated by Mark Pohlmann.
Adwords makes up 95% of Google’s revenue… after a small calculation Mark deducts that Google in Germany makes about 2 billion Euros.
Question posted to the audience sparks the first discussion: can you separate between off- and online.
Bernd Michael states: there are many experts in this room, but not much knowledge about the effectiveness of what we’re doing in terms of revenue. We are not able to give a 100% media recommendation for ROI.
Dr. Tweraser: The seach box mediates between attention and brand promise.
Michael: The average German knows 3.000 words – how should they memorize 50k+ brands?
Stemmle: there are examples of successful brands in this digital world – but not built on traditional principles.
Zara was mentioned as an example for brands that are successful without any advertising whatsoever. Instead it gew by WoM because of the subjective brand qualty. (Triggered a discussion about subjective vs objective benefits of brands)
Good advice by Michael: collect casestudies of companies that were successful during the last crisis (2000-2003 or thereabouts). Show these to your clients when talking about facts.
Stemmle: Use free content online to build your brand – then use the brand power to sell paid content offline.
Michael: does not agree… calls it a huge strategic blunder, what happened a couple of years ago. Traditional media was to fat, to saturated, they didn’t take the internet serious enough.
Stemmle: the business of the future for media: prioritization and weighting of content. Defining what’s „talk of the town“…
Discussion is going back to the original topic: branding today. Tweraser: brand marketing is already a dialogue, some brands already admit that the brand has partially been taken out of their hands.
Michael: the apple store in NY has a simple way of adding value for R&D: every question that the staff gets and has never heard before, they write down and send it to Cupertino… (Great, that’s what every company with direct customer interaction should do!)
Markus Roder (in the audience): Viral Marketing can work, when brands give promises and then overdeliver: that triggers excitement and hence word of mouth.
Last question by Pohlmann: what’s in it for the future. Stemmle: network, interact. Tweraser: use the information available on the web (Google was able to predict the winner of the eurovision song contest, for esample). advertising is no longer art, it’s a science. Michael: We need experts. It’s still difficult to get experts. Offer more opportunities for knowledge gaining.
Tomorrow is the first remix conference: classic meets online (advertising). To recap what it will be all about:
Fachleute aus dem klassischen Marketing-Umfeld treffen die Aktiven des Web 2.0 für einen professionellen und persönlichen interdisziplinären Austausch.
Feste Konferenzelemente treffen auf die adhoc-Strukturen von BarCamp und Open Space – Beim remix09 mischen sich Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmer, Vorstände, Freelancer und Angestellte. Von U-30 bis Ü-60. Eine breite Wissens- und Erfahrungsbasis aus klassischem Marketing und Web 2.0 – ganz ohne Peergroups, Selbstreferenzialität und Tunnelblick.
The agenda is up with a few fixed keynotes and speaches. The rest of the conference will be organised barcamp-style. Looking very much forward to this experiment, which also happens to take place in a really nice surrounding: the Museum of Hamburg History. Even the party in the evening will take place in those surroundings!
I shall be live blogging tomorrow. Well, as live as I can manage during the conference anyway 😉
The year the media died… This video is great. almost 10 minutes long, like the original song by Don Mclean, and in bits seemingly redundant, but fun to watch and listen to nevertheless – well done!
Wo ich sonst so bin...