Avenue A | Razorfish 2008 Client Summit takeaways

Last week we hosted our client summit and what a week it was! Between client meetings, hosting a panel on social influence marketing, listening to presentations, meeting analysts, and catching up with peers across the agency it was my busiest week of the year. But needless to say it was thrilling, intense and extremely educational. Here are my key takeaways from the two days.

1. Social Media has gone mainstream and there's no doubt about it. Unintentionally, practically every speaker and and every panel discussed social media and social influence marketing in some form or the other. Whether it was Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, our Ford and Levi clients, or Joe Crump discussing digital brands, everybody was talking about social influence marketing and social media. David over at Superhype was also struck by this.

2. User Generated Content enhances a company's reputation. CNN's Jon Klein made this point when talking about how UGC is changing CNN. The reality is that brands and especially media brands need to stop thinking of social media as a threat. It can strengthen an established brand and if you're not active in the social space, it'll be considered a negative.

3. We're still just beginning to understand user behavior. Charlene Li gave an insightful presentation where she highlighted findings from her new book, the Groundswell. One take away for me - while the book takes a big step closer to understand behavior in the social domain, we still have a way to go. And not just user behavior, but its group behavior that needs to be understood much more.

4. Social Media is not just in the browser. There's been a lot of talk about social media extending to mobile devices but that's just the beginning. Microsoft Surface presents huge opportunities and the AT&T demo showed that as did the nifty surface application we had running in the marketing lab. Anyone at the summit could swipe their badge over Surface and get customized information pertaining to them.

5. Internal Social Media can be taken outside. John Klein made this point too. He talked about how Political Ticker was an internal news service for CNN members. One day they decided to put it in the public domain. It now has 35 million users. Who'd have thought an internal innovation would become an external one. I'm waiting for the day when companies and universities open their internal mailing lists to outsiders. Its going to happen.

6. Its all about integrated marketing across platforms and devices. The CMO of Coors (pictured above) showed how his 4:53pm campaign lived everywhere - in phsyical spaces, in banner ads, on YouTube and Coor's own website. That's one way to think about social media - as a key part of an integrated marketing campaign. Not something slapped on at the end. Furthermore, the sooner a marketer stops thinking of it as a channel and more as a philosophy, the more success he'll have. Coors certainly demonstrated this thinking.

7. Social Media can be used to target brand new audiences. A lot of the discussions about social media focus on how to have a conversation with your customers. What's forgotten often is that it can be effectively used to target whole new customer segment. That's what Levi's did with the Levi's 501 Challenge. They were able to reach women in the 18-25 demographic and significantly increase sales to them. Those women were an customer segment that they had really struggled with in the past.

8. Moderating panels can be challenging but fun. I had great fun moderating a social influence marketing which included senior leaders from Kraft, Starwood, Facebook and Forrester. And the panel appears to have been a success. But having spent a lot more time sitting on panels versus moderating them, I can say that moderating is definitely harder! My moderation skills will be put to test again soon as I'll be moderating a session at Graphing Social Patterns East on June 9th, 2008.

Don't miss some of the other coverage of the summit -