Silicon Valley AMA Marketing Thought Event/ Contest

I attended the Silicon Valley AMA Marketing Thought Event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The event was focused on ideas or concepts that solves the challenges we face today. What is the next big idea to change the face of marketing? Many thanks to President Gene Hall and the folks at SVAMA for putting on such an inspirational event.

There was an associated marketing thought publishing contest for the best idea. I was deeply honored when my entry "Web 2.0 Makes You ReThink the Basics" was chosen as the winner! The model below will be published in a book on Marketing Thought in September.

This is a model that I often use with Crimson clients in the Interactive Practice when doing web strategy or web marketing. It provides us with an innovative way to think about the more traditional "acquisition, retention and growth" marketing model in a modern way. It was great validation of the work we are doing in Web 2.0. There was a lot of fantastic marketing ideas submitted in the contest - you can see all of them in the SVAMA's blog.

There were many fabulous speakers at the event: Robert Goodwin from Gartner Research shared his insights on the "Ten most Effective Marketing Activities" and Tony Palazzo of Jack Morton talked about nGuage a new analytics measurement tool. Andy Sernovitz spoke about Word of Mouth Marketing - I loved his comment that "Advertising is the Price of Being Boring" ... basically that everyone should have something compelling that can be said about them that can be leveraged in WOM marketing! I picked up his book and I will do a review of it at some point. Guy Kawasaki told us about his new venture Truemors, which he was proud to tell us he launched in 7 days for a total of $12,107.09... in his lively talk there was a good lesson - which is that anyone can bootstrap a Web 2.0 company these days at minimum cost and in record time.

L to R:  Andy Sernovitz and Guy Kawasaki

Comments

[...Paul]

While Truemors may have proven you can build and release a Web 2.0 app in record time and at limited expense, it also has proven (so far) that it's not always wise to do so. Shortly after it was released, Truemors was soundly trashed by most Web 2.0 blogs, such as TechCrunch, because it had rapidly devolved into a pool of spam and garbage rumors. The logic behind voting for favorite rumors fell apart because the incoming feed of new rumors (which would get posted at the top) would quickly scroll decent rumors off the front page, and there were no appreciable search features.

It's also very important to point out the difference between releasing a product and releasing a successful product. I don't believe Truemors has a significant revenue model going for it, and I don't see it being anything more than another Web 2.0 flame-out. Perhaps it'll get an extra minute or two of fame because it's Kawasaki's project, and people know who he is. He's known enough to be able to get press coverage, and thus generate buzz that the average man-on-the-computer simply can't do. Like me.

[Gene Hall]

Karen, You wrote a great article and beat some other marketing thought leaders - in Silicon Valley and around the country. Congratulations on being SVAMA's Marketing Thought Leader of the year.
Gene Hall
President
SVAMA