• by Kelly Samardak , April 3, 2009

Google Hosts BMA:FWD, Google NYC, New York
April 2, 2009

Let's discuss the weather for just one second before I divulge the deep secrets of Google and BMA:FWD. This entire week the weather.com forecast has been so off the money you'd think they were on the pipe. I should have just stuck with my virtual boyfriend, Pat Kiernan, and his "Weather On the 1s." But no, I checked the report from my constantly ailing BlackBerry and was consistently inappropriately dressed. Why would I believe the 60-something degree prediction yesterday? I layered up and topped my meteorologist rebellion outfit off with puffy down and sloshed my way all over town yesterday because FOR ONCE, the weather people were right - about the rain and the temp (I was tragically overlayered). Erratic weather be damned, Google's famous cafeteria hosted BMA:FWD, the Business Marketing Association's new effort to wrangle in the younger B2B marketing crowd. How'd they do? Thought you'd never ask!

The Google office is a great space. Having your own watering hole makes any space great unless it's next to a sewage treatment plant. Fat red exercise balls littered the floor, a buffet with eggrolls, cheese quiches, crispy chicken fingers (which I blame for the alien-in-my-stomach hello-my-darling pain I'm in today), and fingers of sliced veggies lined the South side of the building -- which looked out on the high traffic area of Chelsea. It had everything you'd imagine: Google colors, simple primary designs dangling from the ceiling, the smell of Internet rule...

I hung back and soaked in the palm-squeezing, salesy-guffawing, and mostly a younger (say 25-40ish) business crowd enjoying some end of the day free booze and tasty treats. I overheard a few weird comments like one woman who yawped "American companies suck!, " while Josh Scharlinski of Think Box Media and Justyn Makarewycz of Paladin manned the entryway. Scharlinski agreed with me that humidity was making us sweat like wombats in the Sahara and Mark McMaster, B2B and Technology Markets dude at Google, confirmed they were having a few issues with the cooling system. They squared that situation away fast and the temp regulated to comfy.

As I was listening I Twittered (@socialmedium), took notes in Google Notebook (disturbing!), and searched on subjects and terms using Google (it's Google's world, I just do meta stuff in it) while presenters presented. Who were these presenters? Googlers Rob Goulding, Head of B2B Markets, and Matthieu McAuliffe, Team Manager, B2B. What did they say?

Search is a barometer for what's going on in the world's mind. In the last 12 months the big searches were on online education, resume templates, and unemployment benefits. Depressing, but not a shocking revelation. Google sees that B2B is healthy right now (or as their next big win), especially those of you online because B2B keywords are trending up. With that, McAuliffe bullets out three "duh" points that will help B2B marketers don superhero capes in this, our lovely economy: Duh, don't be afraid to take risks; Duh, use free online customer insights tools; and duh, integrate, measure and optimize.

Google doesn't use Google as a verb. Each slide had a "Do it at home! Search on ____" sticky note. But you know they say "Google that" in real life.

This is not a Google commercial. This phrase was uttered after Google Insights, Google Trends, and Google Ad Planner were showcased as tools you can use to grab customer insights on a $0.00 budget. "Forgive us for talking about ourselves, but it's what we know," apologized Goulding. He admitted there are other great tools out there, but you'll have to find them yourself. Applause for honesty. Does McDonald's get up at the burger convention and praise The Whopper?

Budgets are important, but it's about the big idea. Le sigh. When you have a job or you're the one charge of canning people or you're not going to fold with one wrong move then yes, that's a wonderful attitude, but to everyone else, that's a gag reflex tickler. Why should ideas be on a budget? However, realistically - high quality, valuable, resonating execution of those big ideas sometimes needs a bigger budget.

Oh, yeah, Twitter. In the midst of "Google's gonna buy Twitter!" rumors, McAulliffe dedicated a slide to the microblogging platform, saying he follows experts like: Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears, and Shaquille O'Neal. It's hard enough to show Twitter's business value to business people, so starting with the fluff irks me, but he did lead into Exec Tweets, a round up of your CEOs, CIOs, etc - enabling your stalking of the competition. He also promoted  Twist -- insights on Twitter.

One final tidbit: In 2004, disaster recovery, energy efficiency, and virtualization were trended as popular B2B server market terms. Disaster recovery was trending highest at that time (coincidentally, Bush was reelected that year. I'm just sayin'). Today, virtualization far surpasses disaster recovery. This isn't surprising, considering the buzz is all about being green and virtualization is about being energy-efficient, running multiple servers on a single piece of hardware - only one is physical so they're all sharing resources and such.

BMA:FWD will grow, no doubt - especially if jobs start opening up.  What I hope is that the content will move away from Google centric tool plugs and more into tools in action and showcasing successes in B2B - examples of actual results through utilization of the currently free services and insights out there. If anything, you'll want to get in on the palm squeezing!

Send party/event invitations to kelly@mediapost.com!

Stalk the Google kitchen!