• by Catharine P. Taylor , April 8, 2009

If you read last week's column, you know that I'm crowdsourcing the next OMMA Social New York, which is scheduled for June 23. Here is my promised second column of ideas, most of them submitted by readers; thanks to all who helped out. As with last week, pleasecomment below, or, if you want to be more discreet (as many of you did last week), email me at cathyptaylor@gmail.com with ideas, feedback, and speaker possibilities. One panel idea I'm particularly in need of is something that brings in mobile apps and marketing. Love having you guys do my job for me:)

Meet the Corporate Twitterers: Companies That Tweet Show How to Follow in Their Keystrokes. A year ago, the corporation that maintained a Twitter account was a rarity. Now early adapters like Zappos and Comcast have been joined by Dunkin' Donuts, TurboTax, Publishers Clearing House and a host of others who are trying to use Twitter as a public relations tool, customer service mechanism, and marketing vehicle. This panel will consist of those who man (and woman) their company's Twitter account. They will share what they've learned with the OMMA Social audience.

Choosing a Social Monitoring Tool: How to Find the Right Fit. The good news: as social media has grown, so have the options in terms of social monitoring tools which can help companies figure out what their market is talking about. The bad news: they are all expensive, and it's hard to find the right fit. In this panel, those who have had to choose a social monitoring tool explain how they came to their decisions, and whether or not their evaluation of which social monitoring tool to use was on target. (This could also be run as a workshop.)

The Focus Group Is Dead! Long Live the New Focus Group! Marketers and agencies all debate whether the focus group is dead, and, indeed, perhaps the days of picking a group of subjects to answer questions in a conference room, while the client looks on through a one-way mirror, are gone. But the explosion of online media may well give way to the new focus group, one that exists among a small group of passionate consumers and takes place not just for a few hours over dinner, but continuously for months, if not years. It could even take other forms. This panel explores how social media is reinventing the focus group.

Is Social Media's Real-Time Revolution Creating the New Search Marketing? As the rumors that Google wants to buy Twitter have proven, there's a lot of buzz around social media being the new search marketing, something with the potential to not only reach the right consumers, but at the right time in their serendipitous quest to connect. Whether Google buys Twitter or not, many have talked about real-time search being the magic bullet that will create its business model. Other social networking tools, such as Friendfeed and Facebook, are also jumping on the real-time bandwagon, because of its instantaneous documentation of what people are talking about. But social-as-search also has real differences from search marketing as we've know it; it tends to fall higher up in the purchase funnel, delivering hyper-relevance at the exploration phase of the decision-making process. This panel will focus on whether social and search can make beautiful music together -- the ka-ching of a social media monetization model.

The Fan Page, 2.0: How to Build It Beyond a Solitary Web Presence. Several years ago, when Facebook and MySpace first let advertisers build fan pages, part of the attraction, for both marketers and consumers, was their novelty. But now, as marketers discover social media, it's time to figure out how to build out these marketing destinations to do and be more, truly creating community as opposed to merely being another static club for users to join. This panel would look at where the fan page goes from here.

Please let me know what you think of these ideas. I'll let you know when the official OMMA Social agenda is complete. Thanks, all.

Cathy