There’s a lot of buzz regarding the wealth of data available for media and marketing execs by scraping and collecting within social media, but what do I do with it once I’ve got it?  Do I use it for targeting to drive brand awareness or do I use it for increasing the qualifications of my audience and driving higher click rates and conversion rates?  To be honest, I don’t even know where to get started, so please help me!!

In this age of transparency and authenticity, the most heated debate in the blogosphere is the merit over paying to post. To be sure, many companies have done it wrong and gotten burned, resulting in consumer backlash and tarnished brands. However, others claim there’s a right way to commercially engage bloggers and build brands. Payoffs might include online buzz, traffic, product feedback, search-engine optimization, content syndication and much more. What’s the right way to buy buzz. Is there a right way? What is paid buzz, anyway? 

Brands are excited about social media because of the medium’s promise of deeper and more meaningful engagement with consumers beyond enjoyment and usage. At the same time, social media is a minefield where tiny missteps in communication have the potential to blow up -- and not in a good way. Add to this the legal issues pertinent to legal-purchase-age products and you have ... a series of brilliant social media campaigns for Jim Beam Bourbon. Kelly Doss, senior director of Bourbons and Whiskeys for Beam Global Spirits & Wine, will explain how she got corporate buy-in to connect bloggers and Facebook users with the brand via user-generated media, while also making the legal department a strategic partner. Kelly will explain how a targeted broadcast buy kicked off an online contest with viral distribution -- and how her team keeps on top of the ever-expanding array of media channels.

Most users won’t build and maintain profiles across more than a few major social networks, so few content destinations even try building their own. Instead, content providers are struggling to find ways into Facebook and LinkedIn, Digg and the widget eco-system. But what are the proven strategies and untapped opportunities for plugging into existing social networks? Social media applications and widgets have produced uneven results. What does it take to make them work? Media sharing networks can be gamed, so how does your content get a fair hearing? And now networks like LinkedIn and Facebook offer APIs that let users bring their profile with them. How can publishers leverage this portability both on their own sites and back at the social net?

A revealing, behind-the-scenes examination of the social media and online marketing strategies that fueled the launch of HBO’s Emmy Award-nominated television comedy series, Flight of the Conchords. Learn about the trials and tribulations of organizing social networks, communities, viewers, talent and legal departments to successfully launch a breakout season of a cult hit. Learn the secret sauce behind this campaign and the lessons that can be applied to any brand. This special case study will be presented by Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, HBO’s partner which spearheaded the campaign.

The last couple of years have been all about social media as the hottest marketing channel around, but many marketers are still unsure of how to proceed. Savvy marketers are successfully questioning the primacy of immediate ROI tactics and instead investing in their reputation and in their customer relationships by first connecting and creating value online.  The return on their efforts is something more than ROI but can also be traced to immediate leads and sales. They gave – they got.  We bring top brands together to share their recent success stories with social media, to describe how they are measuring value from the channel and how they gained internal support for the program. 

Distribute everywhere, publishers have been told for years. But no one told us how to monetize all of that social media we scattered far, wide and away from the money centers at the destination sites. Whether through RSS feed, embedded video, syndication arrangements or just a whole lot of blog links, content has gone everywhere, but the ad support hasn’t always followed. This panel engages the question of monetizing your hyper-distribution strategy. Should advertising be embedded with your content? If so, how do brands and agencies partner with content when even the publishers don’t know how and where is might show up? Is product placement an important part of the solution so that marketing messages become fully integrated with content? Is there an emerging set of business models and technologies that will incentivize syndication with real ROI? And as marketing messages follow the content anywhere and everywhere, how do markers measure and value the various exposures and interactions?

There’s a bunch of buzz around Facebook Connect and Open Social, but whenever I read an article about them and their apparent benefit to marketers, I walk away scratching my head and more confused than when i started.  I don’t see the real applications of this to me, as a media planner. This session will provide action items for planners and marketers and show how to use these platforms for good, not evil! 

As the digital world explodes with new opportunities for consumer-to-consumer dialogue, marketers are jumping at the opportunity to follow consumers into their digital lives, where word-of-mouth opportunities collide with long-tail digital strategies. Learn how agencies and marketers are leveraging digital word-of-mouth to enhance their performance marketing campaigns.

Online advertising growth expectations are being trimmed. Offline media are imploding. Video is causing upheaval among television advertisers and content owners/producers. Social media sites and tools are gaining ubiquity while still searching for revenue. Mobile looms as the access device of the future. Meanwhile, new ad formats and technologies are introduced every week. How can you keep up with the constant torrent of change? Which trends are real and which hyped? Get an objective look at where we are and where we are headed, sector by sector, in this must-see kick-off session.

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 Offline, the news about the economy seems to go from bad to worse. Online, the news hasn’t been great either. Researcher IDC recently made headlines forecasting that online spending would contract this year for the first time since the dot com bubble burst in 2001. How can estimates have suddenly turned so bearish for an industry that grew by as much as 26% in 2007? Is the online sector really in dire straits, or are industry watchers getting caught up in the negativity pervading the greater economy? We’ve asked Paul Kedrosky, noted economist, Web analyst and editor of Infectious Greed, one of the best known economics blogs on the Internet, to size up the situation for 2009. 

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In the early 2000s, profitless Web startups went public to enormous valuations, only for that bubble to burst, ushering in a two-year recession. Since, IPOs have remained a closed avenue to Web entrepreneurs and investors seeking exits, but the mergers and acquisitions market—thanks to stiff competition between Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and others—has been a more than adequate substitute. However, in the present climate the Web giants are cutting back on acquisitions and VCs are closing their purse strings, forcing startups to hunker down and ride out the recession. Is now an impossible time to seek new funding? What, today, constitutes a healthy startup? Which sectors and what companies are best positioned to survive?

Online ad spending has been growing at a healthy clip since 2001, and while brand marketers have certainly benefited from the measurability, interactivity and innovative new technologies of the whole online medium, search has been the real growth story. Now, in these trying economic times, marketers are relying more than ever on search and performance-based advertising to deliver new customers, but growth rates are flattening out. Does this mean that search is approaching some kind of ceiling? Can search providers get people to search more than they already do? Can innovations in SEM drive new growth? And where do Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies fit in? Mahalo Founder and CEO Jason Calacanis tells us how Internet advertising’s most dynamic sector will navigate choppy waters.

From the 400-plus ad networks that exist today to the new audience aggregation ventures launched by the likes of Havas Digital and Publicis’ VivaKi, it’s clear that a new science of advertising is overtaking the way ads are bought and sold. Upwards of 40% of publishers’ inventory is now sold on the secondary market, up from just 5% three years ago. Meanwhile, agencies are starting to aggregate audiences into networks, too—actually decoupling them from the content they’re viewing. Both trends enable the scientific tracking of consumers as they navigate across cyberspace. What happens to publishers now that ad networks and agencies are shifting their focus to audiences rather than content? Will the trend spark a resurgence in brand advertising on the Internet, or will it ultimately push branding further behind direct response?

Mention the term "conversational marketing to John Battelle and you can’t get him to stop talking. The Search guru and founder of Federated Media, a next-generation media and publishing company, popularized the term "conversational marketing" two years ago in a series of blog posts about the future of social media and marketing. Conversational marketing can take many forms, almost all of which directly involve advertisers, content producers and users creating an integrated experience together. As content providers move away from “packaged goods media” towards a more author and consumer-driven approach, many believe that conversational marketing will emerge as the primary revenue stream. But what, in scope, does conversational marketing refer to? Is it scalable? Can it save struggling Web 2.0 firms that have yet to find a business model? What are the near-term and long-term opportunities for advertisers?

Some media futurists argue that all media will eventually be social. That prophecy has yet to pan out, but instead of sitting on the fence waiting for the next Google to sort out the social media business model, media and marketing services firms are taking a much more proactive approach. As moderator and MediaPost writer Joe Marchese noted in a recent column, everyone from PR firms, to brand consultants, vendors, ad agencies large and small, even clients themselves, are hedging their bets against such a future by building their own infrastructure for handling social media data and communications. Surely, there isn’t enough room for everyone. So, who is best positioned to become social media’s "agency of record?" What kinds of services would such a company provide?
 

The emergence of mobile applications and the rapid rise of the mobile Web are giving brands and marketers a much broader platform on which to build direct relationships with consumers. The next generation of phones change the way people relate to one another and to information. Shouldn’t they also change the way brands relate to consumers? As millions of people now start to do by phone what they did online (messaging, search, media use) are just more banner ads and pre-rolls really the best way to leverage this opportunity? This panel of leading-edge mobile marketers will explore how mobile can and will change the way brands interact with consumers, how they must learn to talk "with" not "at" the user. Brands have to add value and utility to consumers’ everyday experience. They have to stop vying for attention and start understanding where the target is, what they need and what kind of conversation they want to have with the brand.