Quick MARCOM 2009 Debrief

It has already been almost 3 weeks since MARCOM 2009 took place at the Pearson Convention Centre in Toronto. Surely enough, the last 3 weeks have been so busy that I never got a chance to share my experience with you. Here’s a quick summary.

What is MARCOM 2009?

Basically the only marketing conference that is dedicated solely to marketing professionals working in the public and/or non-profit sectors. It is run by a sister company of CEPSM (our organization) called CMG Canada.

Why did I attend?

Besides the fact that I was chosen to speak and thus had to attend, I really love how niche of a conference MARCOM is and how much subsequent value I always receive. Most importantly however, I love surrounding myself with people that are passionate towards their jobs. The vast majority of private sector marketing conferences are about marketing product/service “X” whereas MARCOM brings together people that use marketing to improve such initiatives as classroom literacy,  public transportation,  spousal abuse, foreign credential recognition, etc…

What did I think of the speakers?

This year the line-up of speakers was outstanding. I was able to attend the following:

Arlene Dickinson (Venture Communications/Dragon’s Den) –> How can not-for-profit and public sector marketing get the respect it deserves?

• Brilliant marketing mind
• Emphasized “strategy before tactics”, which is what I live by.

Michael Cleland (City of Mississauga) & Rupen Seonie (Environics Analytics) –> Moving beyond demographics to psychographic segmentation

• If you’re a marketer and you haven’t heard of PRISM C2 yet, get on it. It’s the most comprehensive segmentation of the Canadian population, period.
• If you have a database of your target audience (with postal codes), then you can overlay the PRISM C2 clusters and find out crucial psychographic info.

Wayne Carrigan (ThinData) & Jim Jeang (Canadian Blood Services) –> Email and social media: natural allies

• While I was skeptical at first as to what social media has to do with email, I did end up enjoying this presentation due to Wayne’s thorough knowledge of the email industry.
• Jim spoke to the “tactical” side of social media , focusing on the tools he used within CBS as opposed to more strategic elements I like to hear (i.e. determining the best ways to meet objectives and desired outcomes before jumping into tactics). That being said, it is always refreshing to hear about social media initiatives within government that have actually been implemented. I will be adding this to the Gov 2.0 Wiki for sure.
• Overall, both speakers were well prepared and placed a strong emphasis on measurement, which is always a good thing.
• Some interesting stats:
  • On average Canadians receive 130 pieces of SPAM per week
  • 2005–> mass email deployments
  • 2006–> email versions deployed to specific segments
  • 2008–> 1:1 dynamic deployment
  • Great CBS initiative: www.thankyourdonor.ca

Rahaf Harfoush (Obama New Media Team/World Economic Forum) –> Yes we did: Strategic insights from the campaign that changed history

• Rahaf gave a brilliant behind the scenes overview as to day to day life at Obama campaign headquarters and the many all-nighters that lead to such a tremendous victory.
• Be sure to check out the Barack Obama and White House websites.

Louise Clements (Facebook) –> Facing Facebook today: How to use Facebook to stay ahead of the game

• Louise has an extensive private-sector background in sales and has just been recruited by Facebook to lead the  Toronto office. She gave an excellent overview of the re-vamped Facebook social advertising platform (adverts), which to my surprise, few people even knew existed.

Brian Thwaits (Brainspeaker Inc.) –> Engage your brain!

• I highly recommend Brian’s new book, “The Big Learn” ,to anyone interested in the latest theories and studies surrounding left vs. right brain thinking. Great closing keynote!

Overall thoughts

Besides listening to speakers, I very much enjoyed presenting myself. I conducted a full-day “social media 101″ pre-conference workshop followed by a more advanced “social media research tools” presentation during the actual conference. For the latter, I paired up with Nick Charney from CPS Renewal who did a wonderful job tying everything in to a government work environment. I also had a chance to host two roundtable discussions, one on “government 3.0″ and one on “attaining senior management buy-in for social media engagement”. Both turned into rich discussions during which I learned quite a bit myself.

To sum up, I will definitely be coming back next year.

Apps for Democracy “Community Edition”

I’m heavily buried in the process of preparing my materials for the upcoming MARCOM 2009 conference, however I wanted to post this up rather than just tweet about it. Basically, Apps for Democracy , the Washington D.C crowd sourcing initiative that I often use in my presentations, has just launched a new initiative called Apps for Democracy “Community Edition”. Citizens get to submit their community improvement ideas in real-time and vote using this insights portal.

Why do I think this initiative will work? Because last time they had very little support and yet they managed to have citizens develop 47 applications in 30 days using crowd sourced government data. The estimated cost had they gone through the RFP process, would have been $2.3M, not to mention 12 years of procurement. The total cost ended up being the prize money of $50K. The ROI therefore was 4000%.

Have a look at this video if you’re confused.

Apps For Democracy Community Edition from Peter Corbett on Vimeo.

Bishop orders: “Thou shall not tweet”

From time to time my father sends me quick scans of interesting newspaper columns and/or stories in case I miss them myself. Today he sent me something I just had to share with you. It’s an article from Saturday’s Ottawa Citizen entitled “Thou shall not tweet” about a Scottish Bishop ferociously opposed to digital communication channels. I have pasted it below along with some of my own comments.

Ok, so first and foremost, in defense of the Catholic Church, I should point out that this is an isolated incident of a particular Scottish Bishop (albeit highly prominent). That being said, comments from senior officials like this definitely don’t help the Church’s overall goal to be more “in-tune” with the times.

So what’s wrong with the Bishop’s comments?

Nothing at all. Everything the Bishop is saying here makes sense, including my favourite line:

“We should avoid an obsessive need for virtual connectedness and develop primary human relationships, pursuing true friendship with real people.”

Here’s what he completely missed the boat on: THESE ARE ALREADY REAL PEOPLE BEHIND THE TOOLS!

The “obsessive need” he is referring to is not for “virtual” connectedness, it’s for connectedness with other humans! The same need that has existed since the first human set foot on this planet. What’s new here is that these channels drastically amplify the spectrum of potential human connections that individuals can now make.

Last I checked, my Facebook friends were pretty real, in fact I spent Saturday enjoying some quality time drinking beers at a friends bar (for my buddy’s birthday) and then ripping up the dance floor at a club across the street.  How did I find out about the birthday get-together? Facebook. How did my other friend organize a scattered group of “late-twenty somethings” to come to his bar in a few short hours? Facebook. I don’t “hang-out” on Facebook, I use it to augment and strengthen my “physical world” friendships. Let’s shift to Twitter for a second. In the last 6 months, I have invited at least twenty “virtual business connections” out for a coffee or a quick lunch. These are people that I would have never met without social media channels that managed to bring us together. A few of these I now meet in-person on a regular basis but sometimes staying in touch on Twitter is absolutely sufficient. Much better than the alternative; not connecting at all. I simply don’t have enough time in each day for in-person meetings with the hundreds of people I consider myself to be good friends with.

Here’s my point. Nobody ever said these channels are supposed to outright replace face-to-face human contact, which is what the Bishop is implying. If that were the case, then I would wholeheartedly agree with him. Someone needs to give the Bishop a nice presentation describing all the incredible human collaboration occurring right now on a global scale thanks to these channels. Not just in the developed world, but in developing countries as well.

Next time let’s hope the Bishop does his research. I suggest a few good books as a starting point (in case the Internet is evil):

* Wikinomics – Don Tapscott
* Grown Up Digital – Don Tapscott
* Here Comes Everybody – Clay Shirky
* Groundswell – Charlene Li & Josh Bernoff
* Tribes – Seth Godin
* Naked Conversations – Shel Israel & Robert Scoble
* The Long Tail – Chris Anderson
* The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowieki
* Join the Conversation – Joseph Jaffe
* Cluetrain Manifesto – Rick Levine, Chris Locke, Doc Searles, Dave Weinberger

And of course, no intro research would be complete without some videos by my favourite cultural anthropology professor Michael Wesch.