MarketingProfs

It’s perfectly fitting that Mplanet 2006 is being held at a Walt Disney World. After a full day here, I’m as glassy-eyed and over-stimulated as the toddlers coming back to the resort hotel from a long day at the park….

First off, a few words about the conference. Mplanet, produced by the Chicago-based American Marketing Association, is intended to usher in a new era for the AMA but, in a larger sense, for marketing in general. As AMA CEO Dennis Dunlap, said during his opening remarks yesterday, “This is not your father’s AMA.”
Marketers are facing seismic changes in their industry, Dunlap said, coming at them via:

• Newly empowered consumers who are as much informed by their peer online and offline “communities” as they are by marketing messages
• The ubiquity of new media like blogs that are increasingly eating the lunch of stalwarts like newspapers and television
• More choices and channels, and increasingly fragmented audiences
• Mass customization and more commoditization
• The rise of the global economy
• And still… the eternal pressure to produce ROI.

Given that, you’d think marketers would be feeling a little like the squeamish in the exit line at Space Mountain, a little green and sick, avowing never to submit to that ride again.
Ha–not so! Marketers, in fact, are a plucky bunch with the fortitude to keep their heads up and eyes open, and to hang onto the contents of their stomachs.
The 950-ish attendees at the first Mplanet conference came to the Happiest Place on Earth ready to roll up their sleeves and learn about this new era of marketing, where the consumer has more power and choice than ever before, but also where the opportunities are vast.
My colleagues have done a great job giving the game play-by-play–I offer some suggestions below if you’d like to read the live coverage. Here, I offer you the highlights of Day 1 at Mplanet:
Most Interesting Kick-Off to a Marketing Conference Ever: The performance art group that opened Day 1 sessions. Like Blue Man Group only… well, red.

(Props to Josh Hallet for the photo.)
Best Play-by-Play Coverage: In another era, blogger Josh Hallett would be a hard-nosed beat news reporter, filing dispatches on the road. Instead, he’s a business blog consultant who can live-blog circles around any other blogger I’ve seen. The oddest experience for me was sitting in Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” session and via my laptop popping into Hallett’s blog, where the photo on the screen here mirrored the scene on the stage in front of me. Yeah, freaky.
Note to other conference organizers: You want this guy covering your event. Read all of his thorough Mplanet coverage here.
Best Day 1 Speaker: Wired Editor-in-Chief and Long Tail author Chris Anderson gets points for his note-free, energetic delivery and clean PowerPoint during this talk, “The New Economy: Long Tail vs. 80/20.” But he really shone during the Q&A-style chat he held with Jason Zajac, general manager of social media for Yahoo. As my blog buddy Josh wrote, “Panels like this are great when one of the participants is a journalist, like Chris. You always end up with good, though-provoking discussion.”
Best Panel Moderator: The affable Jim Lenskold, who moderated a panel on Driving B2B Success with Marketing ROI, featuring my pal Eric Kintz, VP of Global Marketing at HP, along with ING CMO Jim Pedrick and Chip Reeves, Director of the marketing and Sales Process at Dow Corning. Lenskold clearly did his homework ahead of time with this group, because, well, he told me.
Nonetheless, it really showed on stage. Each participant stayed on topic and got plenty of (but not too much) air time. Plus, Jim did a great job summarizing the take-aways from the discussion on the fly… and I augmented them slightly here…
When tailoring metrics programs for your organization, remember:

1. Everyone has the ability to affect marketing’s success by improving any area of ROI.
2. Ensure access to key data as early as you can, particularly customer and financial data.
3. Be patient–it takes time to craft an ROI process that delivers.
4. Apply the knowledge you receive–don’t just measure it and live with it.
5. Focus on the customer. Metrics is not about the numbers, it’s about bottom-line success with customers.
6. Test results on a small scale.
7. Identify the right people to get behind your initiatives. Organizational culture can make or break your success.
8. Check your ego at the door. You aren’t competing for credit–you are collaborating for credit. In other words, don’t compete with sales.
9. Don’t seek perfection. Sometimes, good enough is good enough. Don’t let precision paralyze you.

Best Observation from the Stage: Describing the decline of the “hit-driven culture,” Wired’s Chris Anderson points out that the broadcast model is rooted in the church, “and they had only one book.” He adds that media “used to compete with other giants; now we compete with an army of minnows.”
Best Coverage of the Stuff I Didn’t Go To: Mplanet was billed as an “unconference,” but truly it was organized like most of conferences, with a daily keynote and a handful of subject-specific concurrent forum sessions. The so-called Spotlight Sessions, however, forced attendees to toss their hat into one of 12 mini-forums. Luckily for us, a few other writers were roaming the conference with laptops at the ready:

• The very smart Peter Kim of Forrester covers integrated marketing communications, profiting from proliferation with the McKinsey’s Tom French and David Court, and P&G innovations, among other things.
• My flight companion Rob O’Regan covers Chris Anderson, Hershey’s Tom Hernquist, et. al. on customer engagement, and Dana VanDen Heuvel on why new media matters.
• Garrett French produces some live reports at MarketShift, which read like streamed conversations. He does a great job of capturing audience Q&As.

Props go to PR firm Fleishman-Hillard for embracing and legitimizing bloggers.
Best Schwag: The Timbuk2-style Mplanet conference bags, which turned every guy in the hotel into a metrosexual sporting a man-purse (a “murse.”) There’s nothing more smokin’ than a secure man with a murse slung over his shoulder.

Biggest Personal Thrill: Hanging out with Eric Kintz. We’ve emailed, we’ve chatted on the phone. But what a thrill to meet.

(Me, Jim Lenskold, Eric Kintz, Roy Young)