Some David Plouffe and Katie Paine Takeaways

David Plouffe (uploaded to flickr by barackobamadotcom)I have still just barely scratched the surface of the offerings at the MarketingProfs Digital World conference, and I look forward to peaking in a few more times.

In answer to my pondering about what the conference site would be like after the conclusion of its "live" events, it is basically a ghost conference.  All the content lingered, but there were barely any people poking about.

The power of real-time is far from gone, despite our new On Demand world.

(Although the irony is that a many of the actual speeches at the event were pre-recorded. All the speakers were on-hand via phone for direct Q&A after their presentation, though, so there was real-time interaction going on.)

I did a bit of tweeting during David Plouffe's keynote on the Obama campaign strategy, and there were a few things that struck me, even if they weren't exactly new.

• The smart recognition on his part that the utilizing new technologies to communicate to the American public was going to be crucial, and so he elevated the new media team to report directly to him. He saw right away that there would be a feedback loop between the campaign's overall communications strategy and the techniques that proved most effective in getting their message out and having it resonate. I think sometimes we get stuck in our linear ways and forget that all our best plans should be adaptable when we learn more about the conditions around us.
• Part of this included the discovery, unsurprising as it may be, that the "more video we did, the better off we were... people were more interested by it." While he didn't detail the metrics behind this statement, I take it to mean it wasn't only increased views of video v. text messages, but increasing qualitative response to the video as well. As the power of video takes more control online, I hope for increased linking interactivity with it (a la Innovid's capabilities), since I don't want the "deep dive" aspects of the Web to fade as video grows more popular.
  
• Finally, I appreciated his note that beyond the campaign's addiction to metrics, they still realized that "what wasn't measurable was people talking to people." Like any brand, what they could do was give their supporters the best tools they could to spread the word, but they couldn't exactly measure what those interactions were like (although I'm sure they did pre- and post-surveys to get some idea).

I also really enjoyed the overview Katie Paine provided in her presentation on the important things to measure in a social media effort. In particular, her reminder that the primary metrics should always be goal based. These may sometimes be direct ROI expectations, but in the "must have ROI" frenzy, she pointed out that not every communications effort can directly bring ROI numbers.  A car company can use messaging to drive people to the dealerships, but it is up to the independent dealers (and the quality of the vehicle) to make the sales.

For a quick summary of some of her great tips, and sites that she recommends for analytics efforts, check out her interview with Lee Odden here.

The Virtual Conference Experience. I Can Dig It.

Today I took part in my first virtual conference--an experience I'm sure my friend Alex over at (DIS)Engaged would enjoy checking out one day as well.  There were over 12,000 of us registered for the MarketingProfs Digital World Sping 2009 Conference.

Like any conference, it is the content that is the real value driver, but I'm not going to tackle that here--mostly because I had only 2-3 hours to spend at the event so far (it is archived for 90 days, with late registration). I did enjoy hearing David Plouffe talk about the communications strategies of the Obama campaign.

The whole event is free, anyway, so there'd be no legitimate beef even if you didn't like the content. (Ian MacKaye, front man of the band Fugazi, once said that their decision never to charge more than $5 a ticket was so that they could have nights where they sucked.)

For now, all I'm going to ponder is the platform (created by InXpo), and the potential of the virtual conference format.

This isn't a Second Life type of experience.  Graphic backdrops create the feel of a virtual world, but there are no avatars moving around in a 3-D space.

There is some real exploration to be done, however, and with the 90 day archive, a chance to take the time to fully engage with anything at the event that interests you.  There were the real-time presentations, a resource center, a prize center, and the person-to-person interactive elements of an exhibit hall and a lounge. Cyber drinks were not on the house, though, darn it.

While it was hard to develop any good content-based discussions in the public chat areas from what I saw, there was still a dialog going on. And at the exhibitor booths, I saw a good bit of private chats getting set-up to talk about the services offered there.

Most people that I clicked-on hadn't placed much content in their profiles--much like a real conference where all you see is that name badge.  This was unfortunate, as we all had a chance to give a little peak about ourselves to all these strangers, which I think would have help initiate some more connections between the attendees.

Continuing to provide more granular subsections for the attendee interactive elements would also be great for the future.  The twitterverse is already tweeting about future improvements like specific interest-area chat rooms.  I also see adding place-based chat rooms as a key enabler for real world meet-ups.

All-in-all it was pretty easy to get "lost" in all there was to do in the environment and I can easily see myself taking advantage of other virtual conferences with content that interests me. 

I am really curious to see if any socialization continues to take place back at Digital World as I spend time there over the next few weeks to check out some more of the content. Give me a shout if you plan to be there anytime soon.