The Kellogg Graduate School of Management puts on a great Technology Conference every spring. It’s so good that it actually sold out in two days this year. Impressive! As one of the lucky attendees last week, I decided to really get in to the swing of things by tweeting tidbits from the conference.
This was the first time that I have actively tweeted from an event, and while there was the downside of missing some of what was said while I typed, there was the corresponding upside of 1) Focusing for a longer moment on especially interesting facts 2) Sharing with people who weren’t able to attend and 3) Creating some digital notes.
For those of you who aren’t active on Twitter, I thought it might be interesting to provide a quick snapshot of the conference by reiterating my slightly edited and enhanced Tweets from the conference here:
Keynote Speaker – Chris Dean from Skype:
– Love the word “freemuim.” This is how Skype describes its business model
Panel: Social Networking and Platform Monetization:
– Using social networking as a CRM springboard for small businesses. It’s thought-provoking to think about how would you follow through with what you learned about your customers!
– The Evolution of Social Media in Four Stages:
1) Distraction/entertainment
2) Ego/Status/Achievmnt
3) Connection
4) Genuine Utility (hopefully!)
– General Market ads shoot in dark, relatively speaking. Whereas Google ads hit at the “moment of intent.” Social Networking ads can make up for the lack of intent by suggesting choices based on past observed behaviors
– Love the idea of location-based technologies like FourSquare bringing social networking users out from the isolation of sitting at a computer and into the real world
– Did you know that 90% of Groupon offers tip? I always wondered about that!
Keynote Speaker – Jeff Russakow from Yahoo!
– 95 million new Flickr photos are uploaded each month
– Yahoo! has 600M users – who knew?
– Media spending is still very disproportionate to where media is actually consumed. Online is still quite under-utilized. It accounts for 28% of media usage but only 13% of the advertising spend
– Problem: Online ads are great, but they are really complex to buy, especially when compared to calling up the classified department at a newspaper