Digital Influence Mapping Project

Where is the Perfect Social Media Conference (for Marketers)?

There are too many social media conferences.

We are in a recession. Budgets on discretionary spending like travel and training are tight. And yet there are more social media conferences per square conference facility than before the crisis. This abundance of events speaks to a few trends in the marketplace:

• Marketers are taking social media seriously and want desperately to get a handle on how to do it well.

• An entire consulting industry - a bit of cottage industry - has sprung up over the years around social media and these folks bake in conference commitments in their "business plans". They must attend to drive awareness and business.
• Professional conference planners see the urgency around social media inside the enterprise and have shifted gears away from less popular subjects.

Many of these events are just no good.

The trends don't inherently deliver a great experience. I have been to a few this year, some that I would consider very valuable, some that were engaging or otherwise worthwhile and some that were just plain a waste of time. Now I seek the Perfect Social Media Conference.

Problems

• Same speakers: The trends I described force the same speakers out in front of folks again and again. Two problems with that. The first is obvious in that you hear the same key points - usually intended for newcomers - over and over again.

• Designed around speakers: The second problem - most conferences are designed around speakers - their needs, their credentials, their willingness to travel for free to speak. In today's economy, conferences should be designed around the learning experience they deliver for the paying attendee not around the speakers. This makes it difficult for the professional conference business with no skin in the subject matter to pull off any type of event that delivers significant value. All they can do is assemble speakers - usually the same ones - and hope that enough of them are informative, entertaining or inspiring.

• Over narrowing of the niche: One of the reasons I got a lot out of 140 characters, WOMM U. and even We Media was the diversity of the program and the participants. It wasn't all marketers. While I generally benefit from a marketing focus, marketing does not live in a vacuum. Too many conferences have an uneducated view of a profession. They believe that so long as all of the speakers come from the "marketing" organzation, or that all of them claim to be "bloggers" that they have created a focused event. I look at conferences as learning events. I learn from storytellers, media entrepeneurs, artists, non-profit advocates and more.

The Perfect Recipe for a Social Media Conference
There is no "perfect," but here are the ingredients for an event that is worth this brand marketer's investment of time and money:

• A program that is designed around learning not around speakers: if you start by outlining what your attendees will "know" and be able to "do" upon leaving, you stand a better chance of creating a compelling experience filled with great discussion leaders, engaging formats and tangible deliverables.

• Rigorous case studies with results: nothing teaches professionals better that really great stories of how others have done it. Many conferences include cases but take no care to ensure that rigor. We need business and marcom problems, insights that drive a program, creativity and real results. Too many people dress up a collection of social media tactics with no clear impact as a case study. That approach serves no one, not even the novice. As for results, I would argue we need good and bad. As someone reminded me, "what do we learn from success? Nothing."  I need case studies where we are not afraid to talk about failures and where we learned valuable lessons.

• Practical training from, get this, practitioners that is clearly distinguished between beginner and advanced: how many events have you gone to where the content and delivery was too basic to be of use. You tell yourself, "well, I guess that was designed for those new to social media marketing."  There is nothing wrong with social media 101, although if ever there was too well-trod territory, it is the introduction to social media and word of mouth marketing. identifying whether a session is intended for those just starting out or those with years of experience can only help set and meet the expectations of all those involved. 

• I need to hear practical lessons from those who actually do the work. If you are listening to someone tell you how social media marketing works and they have spoken at more than 6 events in one year, look a little closer. Chances are they are really a professional pundit with a shallow set of real experiences to pull from. Social media marketing is a new discipline that can best be learned from doing vs. observing. Look for those really doing the work for insight.

• Surprising inspiration: Conference organizers need to think long and hard about who will surprise participants espcially when those attendees are jaded marketers. Getting the CMO of brand X to speak is all well and good but often the real inspiration comes out of left field. Ray Bradbury once keynoted an unusual conference staged by Silicon Graphics way back when. I never would have expected such an inspiring talk about creativity and marketing.

• A social platform for discussion: conferences are as much about networking and being "social" in the service of business as they are about content delivery. Too many conferences don't plan for social interaction either by jamming in too many content delivery sessions (that "speaker-driven" mentality, again) or they rely on big meals as enough of a social platform. How can a conference plan around networking and even facilitate it? When I was with Discovery Channel some years back, we participated in a 'digital day' at MIT Media Lab (we were sponsors of the Lab). We broke down into groups of 12 or so and my group which also included Walt Mossberg participated in an hour-long exercise with a professor and his grad students studying filtering as it relates to email and messaging. That joint activity brought us together and gave us instant common ground for discussion. Not everything needs to be so structured nor does it need to just be the usual lunch hour here everyone spins off to address email business.

 
There are plenty of other things that can contribute to a worthwhile experience. Some things that help:

• I like smaller gatherings. Once you break the 500 person mark, I get a little numb.
• Focused sponsor exhibits where as much care has gone into curating the sponsors as teh sessions, themselves
• Diverse group of participants
• Easy to get to location (relatively inexpensive and a near airport)

These are the key ingredients I will look for in the events through the end of the year.  If you know of one, please let me know. Thanks.

The Exhuberance of Twitter: 140Characters

About 3 years ago, I attended Vloggercon in SF. It was held in the funky Swedish American Hall. Schlomo and company did a great job of extending the experience out for a few days and into a bar he owns. We brought a big brand there  and there were a few others there. Mostly it was the spectrum of folks who loved creating video programs online. Rocketboom were the video royalty at the event. Great pioneers like Zadi Diaz (EpicFU now) and Ryanne Hodson were there. Exhuberance. People were jazzed. It was a flat universe....mostly. Schlomo gave out "Bullshit" cards for audience members to hold up should someone on the altar start "selling" vs. sharing, so-to-speak.

A Twitter Community Emerges

I thought of this as I participated in Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters this past week in NYC. There is a flurry of Twitter events happening. From conferences to workshops to Tweetups. 140conf was a rapid-fire 2 days of folks from the social media "center" (sounds better than echochamber), publishing, news and media, politics, social causes, brands and much more. Rick Sanchez was there sticking his ....let's say 'foot' in his mouth. Wyclef Jean was there doing a gracious shout out with Jeff's kids. I was there with 3 brands on twitter. Folks came from across the globe for their 10 minutes on stage and two days of tweetups. People are as excited about Twitter as they have been about deomcratized video creation and distribution as they were about the historical tip of the spear - blogs.

People all over the world are excited about the flattening and immediacy brought on by Twitter. As more and more news (not News but news) is first transmitted via Twitter, people are once again comparing a new, more populist platform to the entrenched News businesses. Lots of mentions of the Tweets from Iran during the post election controversy and potests.

Twitter and Marketing

What does this have to do with marketing? Everything, of course. But unlike a marketing conference where just marketers come together with pre-packaged ideas of how to use social networks and ascending platforms like Twitter to sell stuff, 140 Characters, throws a whole bunch of enthusiasts together from different backgrounds to spark ideas and discussion which may lead itself to some real change and innovation. It reminds me a bit of what Dale and Andrew are doing with WeMedia.

We need more marketers at 140 Characters - both to learn and listen, but also to participate in the discussion about how Twitter and social media will continue to change how we communicate, who we trust, how we make decisions to buy stuff we need.

5 Steps to Choosing the Right Listening Post Solution

We always start with listening. We listen to what people say in blogs about things that matter to them, when they tweet about the brands in their lives, public discussions in forums and review sites. The social media (r)evolution has eaked along enough that most marketers would say they start with listening. We are presenting today at OMMA Social in NYC alongside our good friend Pepper Roukas at American Express. Our topic is Listening Posts. I wanted to share my experience choosing and creating solutions for ourselves and our clients.

Choose Wisely

How do you select the right listening "solution" for you? I say 'solution' as it isn't as simple as choosing a technology provider - one of the 120 or so who provide some form of cgm monitoring. Thinking it's all about technology will leave you with a technology contract and 2 months of data for which many execs in the company scratch their head and say "so what." To select and implement a program that has a quantifiable impact on your business, I would suggest following these five steps.

1. Define Your Listening Goals Across the Enterprise
CGM Listening can be a powerful additon to marketing, communications, customer service, product development and more. Different groups within the company can benefit. Since the infrastructire of a listening post has significant combined hard and soft costs, it only makes sense to try and leverage a solution across as many needs as possible.

There are really three essential purposes of a Listening Post:

• Guide marketing, communications and product strategy via insights from conversations
• Establish a rapid-response system to what is said across the Social Web
• Create a measurement benchmark and reporting system for word of mouth

Different groups will want a system that does different things. Marketing may want 1 and 3. Communications 2 and 3. Product development may want to learn insights from what customers are saying about the product. Customer Service may want a way to respond quickly to concerns and complaints.

It is possible that you need all of these bases covered. Just as likely is that one of these has become the urgent interest and you need to satisfy it without cutting yourself off from the future.

2. Map Out the Work Flow That Fits Your Organization
Whether your a communications team member, part of marketing or trying to solve cgm listening needs across the enterprise, taking a moment to map out how the information is collected, translated into insight and then applied to action will save you time and frustration later.

I purposely didn't say "document your requirements" - not because you shouldn't but more because its obvious. Starting by mapping data-to-insight-action and how the workflow can actually happen in your organization is a great place to start.

If you are prmarily looking for Marcom insight, who is responsible for that now? Is there a insights and research person in your midst who can shepard this new source? If so, how are their reports and insights recieved now? Are they used to working at a fast, real-time clip? How geeky are they from a lexicon to a technology way?  Can they handle the interface themselves or will they need help?

Who owns the action taken from the Listenin Post goals you determined above? That will tell you a lot about how the path the information must take to convert into first insight and then action.

You may need to outsource or get help from a trusted partner to do some of this. By mapping out the process, you will discover your needs ahead of time.

3. Create a Prototypical Report
It's always helpful to envison the solution. Then you can make decisions and build to get yourself there. Creating a prototypical report with real data is a giant step towards knowing what you want. I suggest that you think of two reports - the voluminous one that you just can't help yourself from making and the 1-pager that will get to the C-suite.

Start by defining the 'conversation criteria.' These are the terms and phrases that will help you find conversations on brand-related topics. It may be brand mentions, competitors but even more important are those topics that intersect between customers and the brand. If you are a bank or financial services firm, it may be discussions parents are having about sending their kids to college or buying a house. 

The conversation is what you put into the listening engine. How well you do this step will determine how useful the output of the engine.

You can actually get data two ways:

• You can ask one of the technology companies to do you a solid and let you test drive the service. This is tricky as many of the them require a significant 'boot-up' phase where they feed the conversatoin criteria in and weed out erroneous or spam data. Still it is possible with some.

• You can also do this by hand. Using many of the available listening programs out there, you can get a pretty good bead on what people are saying

4. Review 3-4 of the Recommended Leaders
Don't look at them all. You'll go blind, become resentful or just plain lose all your time to the task. Find the 2-3 you think fit what you need and then throw a wildcard choice in there.

Depending on your answer to #1 above, you will weight these things differently. Most listening post tasks can be broken down into four steps:

Collecting

• What is the source collection the service is using? Many subscribe to third party sources that are limited in terms of what they have in them (e.g. some may only look at 10m blogs)
• What types of cgm do they collect? Blogs, Twitter, Video, Traditional media, Forums, Review sites....

Rating and Sorting

• Are they keyword-based or is there a more rigorous sentiment process?

• If they claim a machine-driven sentiment rating system, can you see it in action? (this is one of the hardest things to get tech to do well)
• How do they facilitate cleaning up the most likely spam? This is asking how they optimize the collection.
• What is the interface for adding human rating to the results?
• What is their proprietary vocabulary for things like influence? Every technology company comes up with something and often it is quite...let's just say 'special.'
• Do they identify "influencers" or whatever they call them from within conversations and what criteria do they use to determine influence?

Reporting

• What are the top three reports the system can generate?
• What is the most useful visual report they can make? ( I know of whole systems that provide little value beyond a couple of cool visuals. I am not saying that is enough but don't underestimate the value of a great social graph visual to a senior executive)
• Can you create a one-pager, preferably a pdf, to make that C-suite deliverable? How easy does thsi system make that?

Insights into action

Does the technology provide insights and action steps? This is a big, trick question. None can do this and anyone who claims this is likely lying or positioning their staff as expert strategists. This is the big reason why my team only offers Listening POst powered by X(we use three different technologies). Our listening Post is made useful because of the care we put into efficiently distilling data into insights and action (and determining the objective and defining the conversation criteria at the head of the program.)

5. Run a 3-month Pilot Program
Everyone needs results quickly. Many of the platform choices you may make require time to get up and running and refine results. If you plan a 3 month pilot, you give yourself a reasonable amount of time to prove out the choice, refine it and be able to communicate to the rest of the organization the value the solution is providing.

3 Brands Amidst the Twitterverse

Brands were in the minority at the recent 140 Characters conference. All sorts of people were there with no single tribe majority.

Chris Brogan looked into the audience and declared, "...this is the makeup of Twitter...." With maybe 30 million people on Twitter I am not sure that statement is true but his intent was correct - there's a diverse collection of people and tribes on Twitter.  This diversity made the conference more interesting than many of the social media marketing conferences out there.  

I ran a session with smart marketers who are using Twitter and social media in their business and trying to figure out how to expand that use. We had:

• Kodak: Jennifer Cisney aka Chief Blogger

• Marriott: John Wolf - Senior Director,PR
• Time Warner Cable: Jeff Simmermon - Director Digital Communications

Each is actively on Twitter. They all shared some common experiences:

• The demand to use Twitter internally came from below not from above. While that may not be surprising, I would expect that by now plenty of CMOs and CEOs have felt the peer pressure to get their brands active in this space.

• Everyone has made mistakes on Twitter and survived. When I asked the audience who had made a mistake on Twitter a vast majority raised their hands. Most people there see Twitter as a forgiving universe where those who behave like human beings will earn acceptance from the heterogeneous community.

• Measuring ROI on these efforts lies in the future for now. While each company may be at a slightly different place in terms of adoption of socila media marketing as a core strategy, their twitter handles are embraced as a 'must-do' experiment.

Marriottintl talks at the corporate level (lots of sub-brands in the Marriott universe) with travelers interested in the brand. Often they offer deals or reminders of services. (like Marriott's free night promotion at 300 hotels outside North America)

Jennifer Cisney tweets about all things at the intersection of photography, social media and Kodak.
She has been with the company ten years and as her title suggests is very active in social media on behalf of Kodak.

Jeff and others at TWCable are trying to be helpful to customers by directing them towards customer service solutions while at the same time develop a communications-driven dialogue with customers.

Brands Must Proceed With Care
Earlier Peter Fasano from Coke commented on his own challenge driving social media inside the brand - "How do you steer a big ship with the agility of  a personal brand..." 

Via Twitter @macala made a point that I thought was dead on: "... More brands will try Twitter & create noise for visibility." We need to be careful how we use the platform. We cannot fall into the trap of just counting "mentions" of our brand in Twitter. It's teh quality of those mentions and teh conversations they are a part of that is valuable.

Some folks at the conference piped up that brands shouldn't be marketing at all and shoudl focus on just delivering great customer service. Many more people seem okay with brands on Twitter as the followers of major brands reveal (we do "choose" to follow, after all) 

Brands want to build real relationships with people for benign self-interest (being good to customers is good for business), or because they are actually staffed by people who want real, authentic relationships and see the transformative power of social media. That's who was on our panel. Yes, they want to achieve a business goal but they also respect the personal and trust-based nature of social media.

RESOURCE: Twitter for Business

We relaunched a new version of Twitter for Business: 6 Ways Brands Use Twitter. It features a presentation and a deeper-dive How-to guide that are very useful.

Practice Ethical WOM or Else

As more people become exposed to the proposed FTC Guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials the more they realize they may be facing some tough restrictions in the future. Thomas A. Cohn, a lawyer and former FTC Director sums it all up nicely in his article at Ecommerce News.

 The Setup:

"Blogs and online review sites have proliferated in recent years, as ostensibly "with-it" influencers offer "independent" reviews, endorsements and testimonials that increasingly drive consumer traffic to a wide variety of product sellers. However, as consumers are learning with great disappointment, many of those serving up rave online comments -- including coveted Mommy bloggers -- are being compensated by the marketers whose goods and services they're reviewing, either in direct fees or in the form of perks, discounts, giveaways and other rewards that constitute sponsorships of the content."

The Clue (as to what to do):

"In fact, most regulation of new-media and word-of-mouth marketing activities to date has been undertaken by the industry. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association ("WOMMA"), released an ethics code in February 2005, which emphasizes "honesty of ROI" ("relationship, opinion and identity") in all types of word-of-mouth marketing. Key provisions in the WOMMA Code of Ethics include a prohibition on the use by marketers of third parties to promote a product without disclosure of the relationship with the marketer when communicating with the public; a requirement that consumers who are speaking on behalf of the marketer give their honest opinions and clearly disclose their identities; and a prohibition on the targeting of children under 13.

WOMMA has revised that code since its initial release and also supplemented it with its "10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers," for use when sending products to bloggers. The Commission has recognized WOMMA's ethical code and its role in word-of-mouth marketing, both in its 2006 letter to Commercial Alert and in the January 2008 notice in which the new examples were first proposed:

"The Commission has long believed that industry self-regulatory codes play an important role in consumer protection, and that the development of ethical standards emphasizing transparency for marketers who engage in new forms of marketing is an important step to this end." "

The Answer (in case the clue wasn't specific enough):

(Full disclosure: I am the President of the Board at WOMMA)

If brands and marketers joined WOMMA, they would demonstrate their commitment to the WOMMA Code of Ethics. That would signal a stronger desire amongst marketers to self-regulate. This move gives members the confidence that they are guided by best practices on ethics. WOMMA's code changes with the times. While the FTC is trying to make its first significant change in decades, WOMMA has a process to evolve from year to year as practices and technologies change. Full disclosure, one of the major issues concerning the FTC has always been at the heart of the WOMMA Code.

Brands can take the high road and join WOMMA now. Or they can react when the FTC Guidlines are put in place compelling them to fly right later.

WOM & Restaurants: Form Your Own TasteCasters Posse

I love a few restaurants. I love Jackie's in SilverSpring. I love Pete's Apizza in DC. I know how hard it is to make a sustained buisness out of  a restaurant. I tell people about both whenever I can. I have no material connection to either business and sadly am not even recognized upon my frequent visits. (I mean, come on, I was at Jackie's opening night.....)

So when I discovered Tastecasters, I was intrigued.

A simple service, TasteCasters lets folks with social media juice (followers) form their own local groups to try restaurants and food shops with the express purpose of sharing their experience via their social  graph ( their blog, Facebook page, Twitter, YouTube - you get the picture). Your self-formed group will then get invited by restaurants to come have a session. It's kind of like a tweet-up with an informal commitment to share your experience at the establishment via your own platform.

Dan Harris is the founder and is bootstrapping this effort. He is building the car while driving it so to speak. So, he gets lots of points and latitude for the scaffolding still being in place, so-to-speak. Being a WOMMA ethics guy I had to make a few suggestions that will only help what is an interesting idea. But first it begs the question of what gap is he trying to fill. There are lots of restaurant review sites and the ascendency of Yelp seems to leave little room for improvement. Still, I like the grassroots promise. And the chance to be a more prolific advocate for a restaurant or food shop you care about. But if the only gap TasteCasters fills is free food for tweeters, then this idea cannot fly.

Here is how Dan describes their purpose:

"At TasteCasting, we view this effort and our purpose as a way to help restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries and other food service businesses grow their business. Who knows, we might even positively contribute to our country’s economic recovery."

Disclosure Will Help

His FAQs start to tell the story of how it all works - restaurants do not pay to be covered yet they do provide a free meal. This seems to fly in the accepted wisdom that restaurant reviewers pay for their meals and attend restaurants anonymously to protect their credibility. Not sure that's how it always happens in practice, however.  Things are different now in social media. Offering "influencers" a product experience such that if they choose to post about you they will have something to write about is common. So long as there is full disclosure.

Suggestions: 

1. Make TasteCasters check a box indicating their commitment to disclose their "material connection" to the restaurants - namely that they received a free meal. While Tastemakers has no connection to WOMMA, I cannot help but want to encourage them to adopt practices that will only help their business. 

2. Restaurants (and food shops) have their target customers. How can a restaurant invite a tastecaster event and expect they will get someone within the range of their customer base. It wouldn't work if Jackie's drew a bunch of college kids from University of Maryland. Perhaps if members added a little profile information about the type of food and dining experience they enjoy, the service could do a more refined job of matchmaking.

Building Personal Brands Starts With Being 'Real'

I was in a bad mood last week. I get tired of the over-promotion of social media (e.g. "you must engage in a conversation with your customers and I'm just the guru to help you with that...) as much as the attempt to "leverage" social media from segments of the marketing community (e.g. "can't we just use it as a content channel...") I had also been away from my family for a bit so that might have had something to do with it....

Then I got a much needed reminder from a man I had only known digitally.

Stream Breakfast NYC

Jeff Pulver and I came together to host a Stream Breakfast in NYC via WPP. (Stream is WPP's digital conference and community that culminates in a Yossi Vardi-fueled unconference every Fall). We spoke with about 25 or so marketers within WPP about personal branding. I referred to some of the ways people much craftier than I are managing their digital brand via Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, their blogs and more. I referenced our own Rohit Bhargava who appears to be intuitive in his ability to breath social media and build his brand (he actually works hard at it). All very practical stuff.

But it was Jeff who reminded me and the others about being real and offering something of yourself to others. He shared some very personal stories quite casually about growing up to use ham radios and his immediate experience with volunteers showing up via a tweet to help with the grunt work of 140conf. His suggestion to the crowd that morning was to be 'real' in whcih I think he meant both be yourself and be generous. There is no reason to build a brand based upon a false sense of who you are.

He listened as much as he spoke. And he offered me a personal insight about being self aware that really made me think. I immediately felt relief. Being real and connecting via social media has opened up my life in ways I cannot describe. I have met people in all parts of the world who I will always think about and hope to connect with again and again.

Jeff gave me a literal and figurative 'hug' when I most needed it.       

Thanks.

A Photography Brand Gets More Experiential

I always loved the Kodak photo moments I once saw - brand yellow dots on the ground in a public park or sightseeing stop."Kodak Moments" has since earned its way into our vernacular as anything worth photographing.

Now another brand is taking that experience concept farther. Canon is running what looks like a pretty routine photography contest online called, Canon Photography in the Parks, between now and September.  What's supercool is the Workshops they are running in Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Acadia throughout the summer. Travelers can shoot with Canon cameras and lenses and even rub shoulders with some expert photographers like Darrell Gulin.

Ultimately this is not new. This is the 4th year Canon has done this. We often overlook some great solid brand experiences trying to find the next new thing. I merely loved it because of a brand providing a useful and real-world experience for its fans. Not sure how many people will show up for the 60 or so workshops throughout the summer but given a good experience they could all turn into word of mouth ambassadors worth their weight in gold....

Thanks to Springwise....

Facebook as a Complete Marcom Platform

With this weekend's sprint to capture vainity urls on Facebook behind us and a week of Twitter immersion thanks to Jeff Pulver and his 140 characters conference in NYC, I continue to see facebook as a strangely underutlized markting and communications platform. It's not quite as bad as SEO which remains the most underleveraged digital tactic today.

Let's face it, Facebook is complex. Not only that but the staff at Facebook have little patience for anyone without a six figure ad budget on the table. I actually don't blame them. Out of sheer self-preservation, they need to qualify the folks vying for their limited time and attention.

So, it is up to all of us to document the many ways that we can use Facebook to achieve some tangible marcom goal. I wanted to share a summary from a valuable blogger I follow periodically named John Keehler. He works at Click Here in Texas. I follow his Random Culture blog and, now, his Click Here blog. I think he did a great job summarizing a couple of ways that brands can be thinking of Facebook.

A Solution for Any Discipline

Blogging on Click Here, John calls Facebook, a "marketing microcosm where virtually any marketing objective will find a solution." He comments on how to use Facebook for:

• generate awareness
• engender loyalty
• increase online sales
• revela customer insights
• build a database
• And my favorite: drive offline sales -

"Run Event Ads: Having a special sale? Buy the “event” ad format on Facebook and users will RSVP to your event directly through the ad. Plus, you’ll get an extra viral push when their friends are notified."

In addition, John made a great point in his Random Culture blog about Facebook's recent redesign of brand pages to feature tabs. Are brands defaulting to brand microsite design tendencies by deafulting their Facebook page to a custom tab that has been heavily massaged by the agency design team? Like him, I see that as a small price to pay to get brands into Facebook and putting less emphasis on their microsite (which takes a ton of media to drive users to)

Come to the 140 Characters Event in NYC This Week!

Join me on June 16 & 17 as I and, presumably 139 other characters kick off a Jeff Pulver extravaganza - 140 Characters -  in NYC that is bound to be the must-participate Twitter event on either coast. Twitter is being applied to brand marketing and business everyday. It’s simplicity and power has captured people’s attention beyond other Web 2.0 platforms and even the big social nets, themselves. Brands like Dell, WellsFargo, Ford, Marriott, Kodak, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, PBS and so many more are on there driving results.

Here’s how Jeff describes the conference:

“While the original scope of the event was to explore “the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and (maybe) Politics”, the scope of the event has expanded and we will be covering these topics and a lot more. #140conf will be taking a look at twitter as a platform and will be taking a look at some of the industries which have been disrupted by the advent of twitter.”

I will be running a panel on Twitter and brands. Don’t just come for one panel. Come for the rapid fire, immersive collection of characters from all sorts of brands, companies, orgs and individuals. If you are into Twitter or know you need to be, please attend:

What: 140 Characters Conference

When/Where:  June16 & 17  - NYC

Get more and register now>