SocialMarketingExpert browsing and came upon a panel discussion in the article by Pete Blackshaw entitled “Ad-Tech “Master Class” Panel: If You Had $5 to Spend Online? ” In it a panel made up of the NY Times, Kraft, Intuit, Zappos.com, and 1800Flowers.com were asked, “If your goal is to sell management on the value of investing online, and you only had $5 to spend, where would you start?”

To summarize:
1) Invest the money in nailing key consumer insights around online behavior.
2) Invest it in customer service, call support, or even employee training.
3) invested it in product (his definition of “product” encompassed their user online communities.) Thought being it would act as a de-facto customer support labor force.
4) Efficiently spend it on online advertising on “participatory platforms” such as the New York Times. Why?  Because if you invest in areas rich with influencers, it can increase your odds of success since consumers look to their peers on how and what to buy.
5) Test and measure user-interaction, feedback, and even spending patterns.

Take some time and digest the information found in the article. Pay particular attention to the bottom of the article where they discuss “Lessons from Obama’s Digital Effort.”

Also check out the link for Paul’s post “10 Interactive Marketing Tips from Barack and Hillary” at
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3628604

I found a nice, but basic PowerPoint presentation given to Cisco Systems by Michael Brito from http://www.britopian.com/.

They participated in a learning series that trains employees about the basics of Web 2.0.  The class was about social bookmarking, tagging and labels.

Remember Web2.0? I’m often asked what the difference between it and social media is. My usual reply is that Web2.0 is an evolution of the philosophy of how we build the web. The social media phenomenon, however, is an evolution of the philosophy of how we use the web. Neither can exist without the other and both require their respective practictioners to re-think, well, everything, actually.

Last month’s Mesh Conference in Toronto was all about re-thinking everything. The pre-conference MeshU was an opportunity to re-think the nuts and bolts of Web2.0 for those who actually build the tools and platforms that we social media types use everyday. As a recovering web developer, I was tempted to attend the MeshU sessions to get an html/css/php/mysql/apache geek fix. I managed to resist.

The main Mesh conference was two full days of talking about re-thinking things:

Ethan Kaplan talked candidly about how we (as consumers) and he (as the recording industry) have started to re-think how and why we purchase music, if at all.

Michael Geist led the conference attendees through examples of advocacy and activism online that force us (and policy-makers) to re-think our preconceptions about who has a voice in society.

StumbleUpon’s amazing story of rapid growth and lucrative aquistion, told by founder Garrett Camp, was fascinating, but the application itself requires us to re-think the concepts of sharing and social identity.

Lane Merrifield, founder of Club Penguin, successfully captured the imaginations, and attention, of hundreds of thousands of kids. To do that, he had to re-think the business model - one with no marketing and lots of free stuff.

The morning keynotes I’ve mentioned above weren’t the only opportunities to re-think a few things. The afternoon sessions, too many to list here, encouraged us re-think everything from privacy, reputation management, and communities to the spread of video, the future of the venerable ‘home page’, and building brands online.

If the “re-think a few things” theme that I’ve intentionally beaten to death here sounds familiar, you’ve probably seen Dr. Michael Wesch’s now year-old video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. (embedded below)

I happened to be reminded of the video just a few days after Mesh, and after watching it again for the first time in several months, I couldn’t help but feel that it did a nice job of representing what Mesh is - an opportunity for Canada’s best web-heads to get together and really re-think a few things.