The folks that brought you the Blog Business Summit (the blog and related events/conferences ), which helped educate all of us bloggers on how to maximize and leverage business blog behavior, have just announced their new foray into the social media environment - The Web Community Forum. As their new blog reports:
"The Web Community forum is a site and event series dedicated to supporting and fostering online community building best practices. This blog is intended to track, facilitate and continue the conversation surrounding this incredibly rich topic, and the next conference will take place December 5-6, 2007 in Seattle, WA.
The goal of Web Community Forum Seattle 2007 is to discuss and propose some emerging best practices for community building for business, political campaigns, marketing, and other professional efforts using Facebook and the Facebook platform."
The event has signed up Jeremiah Owyang as its keynote speaker, who just announced on his blog that he has joined Forrester as their senior analyst for social computing and interactive marketing. Most recently he was at Podtech.net as their director of corporate media strategy. His blog notes that his keynote will cover:
Facebook Strategy: Opportunities of a Ready-Made Platform
Facebook is a media, community and application platform that offers an existing thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. The ability to understand users, their preferences, and networks, helps web applications to quickly segment and rapidly grow. Of course, no system is perfect, so attendees will come to understand the challenges with data, privacy and the growing conflict as work and personal lives collide online.
By analyzing users, their profiles, networks and affiliations there’s a tremendous amount of rich data that not seen displayed so readily. The ability to create a targeted web strategy to meet specific needs of the ‘long tail’ is more accessible than ever before.
Facebook provides targeted advertising unlike before, the ability to provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preference gives the ability to accurately market effectively
The recently launched Application Platform gives a small agile web team the ability to quickly deploy a widget, scale and monetize. Explore what’s worked as these mini-applications are launched on top of an existing community.
Attendees will learn:
-Demographics and Trend Data of Facebook
-Word of mouth and viral growth using the Newsfeed and Widgets
-Groups, Sponsored groups and other community features
-Harness Personal and Network information
-Contextual and targeted Advertising opportunities
-Monetizing your efforts
-Case studies of success and failure
-Understanding costs, and strategies to measure ROI
BTW, Podtech.net is a great social media resource and if you haven't checked out Jennifer Jones' social media show "Marketing Voices", this is a "must-listen-to" regular podcast. I worked with Jennifer at Regis McKenna, and she has a great background in marketing, social media and broadcasting - journalism.
And be sure to check out the new Web Community Forum blog, and stay tuned for what should turn out to be a fabulous line-up of speakers!
Shivonne Byrne, Innuity CMO
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