Over the last few years, social media has had a huge impact on my life. From discovering blogs to meeting a tremendous amount of very interesting people through social networking (to the extent of quitting my last job to work in social media!). And the two days at the Marketing 2.0 conference were no different to this – it was a chance to meet in real life the people I was already connected to through social media; hence the very late night with @luckthelady, @branislavperic, @digitalizer, @armano and @fredcavazza which Robin kindly pointed out on Wednesday morning…

Photo: Luck the Lady

The second day of the Marketing 2.0 started on with a very interesting talk about Micro Interactions by David Armano. Ever experienced a Micro Interaction? Micro Interactions can take various forms. For example, you say something about a brand online and turns out the brand was listening to you and, even better, they respond, and you’re amazed?! Yes, as you can see, this is one of the things we do with Skype and, as David Armano was pointing out, because people would rather talk to people than brands, Twitter is a way to offer an alternative to annoying automated customer services and interact as a human with individuals. Still according to David, this is where you see the concept of ‘brandividuals’ appearing – take Scott Monty for example: on Twitter, in addition to being ‘a husband, dad and generally a nice guy’, @ScottMonty is the human face of Ford; he’s a brandividual, the individual who enables a direct engagement with the Ford brand.

But back to ‘micro interactions’. In some ways, the following speaker, Stephen Eric from Crispin Porter + Bogusky also touched on the ‘micro interactions’ subject with the concept of small [micro] ideas: ‘start small, experiment, explore multiple ideas, find a momentum’. A very inspiring talk in this area of economic recession: Stephen insisted that ‘small ideas [micro ideas] take the pressure of big ideas’ and he illustrated this with the whole ‘King’ idea for Burger King: it was supposed to be a one off, the client approved it because it was a small idea. Nowadays, the King is a success which has even featured in video games.

Another very interesting talk was the one of Jeremy Dumont, Strategy Planning Manager at Pourquoi Tu Cours, about 2009 trends like the concepts of open identity (your life is public online), co-construction identity (your friends take part in your identity through comments), acting identity (you are what you do – Twitter, Facebook statuses), but also with a new sense of proximity with people like us (they’re not your friends, you might have never met them but you share something, a passion, a subject and you engage with them through online networks).

I have to say I very much like the concept of ‘Acting Identity’: ‘You Are What You Do’ is probably the way I will explain Twitter nowadays!

I have a feeling Sandrine’s report from day 2 of the Marketing 2.0 conference in Paris may be a little late:

Some of us weren’t lucky enough to get a chance to meet ‘la crème de la crème’ of social media at SXSW, but after my first day at the Marketing 2.0 Conference in Paris, I feel that I’ve had the chance to mingle with some of the top social media and marketing people. Shame the WiFi was non-existent once again at a French conference - I guess US folks must think WiFi hasn’t been invented yet in France!

But back to the conference, the impressive list of speakers and what this first day was all about. Much was said about the fact that people trust their peers more than they trust brands or advertising. Scott Monty at Ford, Alex Hunter at Virgin and Georges-Edouard Dias at L’Oreal all insisted on that notion and went into the details on what this meant for their company and the notion of ‘conversation’ was once again on everyone’s mind.  For Scott Monty at Ford, conversation is indeed what it all comes down to: social media is an opportunity to prove to individuals that you’re listening to them; it’s about building a relationship with people and humanising the company. For Charlie Schick, at Nokia,  the web is a conversation channel and brands must participate in conversations.

What’s interesting from our point of view at We Are Social is that the concept of conversation is clearly emerging – when Robin and Nathan set up We Are Social and established it as a ‘conversation agency’, it was in some way ‘groundbreaking’.  It now looks like the Forrester Connected Agency report’s predictions that ‘facilitating conversations for its clients will become the new role of an agency’ is now a reality, which is great for us as a business as more and more brands will understand the importance of being conversational. And clearly when Charlie Schick at Nokia explains that social media is the voice of a brand, this really reflects what we do for Skype: not only do we help them with strategic consultancy and social media monitoring, but we are also the voice of Skype: my colleague Peter is Skype’s blogger and he’s also @PeteratSkype on Twitter, managing their reputation online through conversation. Similarly, the This is Now campaign for the Ford Fiesta we’ve been working on for the last 6 months has all been about the conversations we’ve created.

But back to my favourite word for 2009: ROI… If social media is about building relationships with people and engaging in conversations in social media, how, as a brand, you measure your ROI? As an agency we have a fairly advanced approach, but I guess I was interested to hear about how these brands approached it. I very much like Scott Monty’s answer: ROI is very much a campaign-based approach vs. a long term commitment and an opportunity to build a relationship with people. And he went further and added “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?”, along with a joke about how campaign-based ROI can be measured through HITS: How Idiots Track Success. Nevertheless, in real life, and especially in this period of recession, we know that ROI is important to clients but it’s great to see brands are taking a longer term interest with building relationship with people. Olivier Hascoat at MySpace insisted on that concept again: ‘stop campaigning and make a long term commitment’.

All in all, a very promising first day! As I’m publishing this, Day 2 has started and it’s already looking as exciting…

That’s it, the 5th edition of LeWeb, the largest web 2.0 conference in the world, is now over; much has already been said by the likes of The Guardian, about the nonexistent wifi at the event or about how the place was so freezing cold they had a sauna installed at the back. What you probably don’t know yet though is that on the basis LeWeb’08 was taking place at the newly refurbished 39,000 sq meter artistic hub Le 104, which used to be a Parisian mortuary, an historic place where you could find more than 600 coffins and 150 hearses on the move, it’s not such a surprise the place was so cold…

But LeWeb was so much more though than a cold place and it’s no wonder that for the past five years more and more entrepreneurs, web 2.0 people and brands alike have registered to attend the conference…

Recession was pretty much on everyone’s mind during this 2008 edition of LeWeb, as was the search for investment from young entrepreneurs wishing to launch their new big ideas. What’s interesting is that all speakers actually seemed to agree on the fact that the economic downturn will ignite many new ideas and that it is very likely that those companies that will be the most known in 10 years or so will most likely have been created during this recession.

Take Viewdle, for example. A couple of hours before Viewdle were announced as the Gold Winner of LeWeb’08 the start-up competition, Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products and User Experience was talking about video face recognition and explaining how recognizing a human face as a person on a video was still a few years away. Marissa mentioned that technically it was possible but because of the sheer volume of videos now available on the Internet, and how many people look alike, it was proving difficult. Viewdle won the start-up competition with their facial recognition digital platform which allows you to easily index and search video assets. A pretty amazing technology and a proof that it is still possible to come up with great ideas and technology.

Marissa Mayer also covered the notion of social search: when you go to a conference for example, you ask like-minded people about where is the best place to have diner, which hotel to stay at. Those are ‘social searches’, they happen all the time in real life but right now there isn’t a simple way of doing this online and it seems that this is going to be a focus for Google.

Social searches, using Twitter to talk about the conference, L’Oreal mentioning that brands are part of the conversation,  Paolo Coehlo explaining how he uses his social media to interact with his fans and how he even invites some of them to have diner with him; it’s interesting to see how technology is enabling us all to refocus on the most human thing: conversations. And I guess this is the strength of LeWeb: it’s all about being able to meet a network of over 1,500 people from 30 countries, being able to share our vision of the Internet, the Web 2.0 and the future alike with those people.

LeWeb’08 is over and I’m already looking forward to the 2009 edition!

ps: check out Loic’s blog post about the organizational issues encountered at LeWeb.

As I’m attending LeWeb’08 in Paris, I thought I’d share some interesting things I’ve been hearing at the conference. To begin with, an interesting quote from Georges-Edouard Dias, SVP, E-Business at L’Oréal: “brands are part of the conversation”.

Let’s rewind and go back to 2005 when L’Oréal set up a blog for Vichy, one of their brands, to promote an anti-wrinkle cream.

As I mentioned last week, blogging in France is big. So big that France leads the world when it comes to the number of blogs per internet user and it was therefore only natural for brands to identify blogs as business opportunities.

L’Oréal was probably one of the first brands in France to get involved with blogs. The Vichy blog featured Claire, a consumer who was reporting on a daily basis on how great the Vichy treatment was – very quickly though, Claire was identified as a fake blogger, paid by Vichy and it backfired on them. Since then, the “Vichy case” is referred to as a ‘what not to do’ in social media case study, in the same way as the Wal-Marting Across America and All I Want for Christmas Is a PSP examples from the English speaking world.

It didn’t work at the time, but listening to Georges-Edouard yesterday though, it is clear that L’Oréal have learned a lot over the past few years and it’s actually quite refreshing to hear brands such as L’Oréal talking about online conversations and saying that brands have to be sensitive enough to listen to their customers.

Interestingly he mentioned that “we no longer learn marketing in books” but rather by being sensitive, by listening to people online and becoming part of the conversation.

At a time when conversational marketing is still so new, a very inspiring story.

Last Wednesday in Stockholm I spoke at the third Disruptive Media conference.

My talk is a (hopefully) reasonably glued-together set of my own thoughts about the challenges faced by people in large organisations who feel they should be doing good stuff on the web. In fact, a lot of what I talk about – the need to ‘empower’ individuals to ‘communicate’, the need to rethink approaches to customer interaction and, above all, the need to put customer happiness (rather than maintenance of organisational status quo) first – can be applied to all aspects of outward-facing organisational behaviour. And, come to think of it, internal behaviour too – just replace ‘customer’ with ‘employee’. In the words of Budd, ‘how do we stop doing dumb things to customers and people’?

While I share Jan Chipchase’s views on conference videos, in the spirit of openness I’ve embedded the recording of my talk below.

For some more audience context, it’s worth taking a look at the Jaiku backchannel, which ran throughout the event — it’s mostly in Swedish, but with a bit of help from Google it should be mostly intelligible to non-speakers.

I also spoke on a panel to conclude the day alongside Brit Stakson of JMW, Anna Eriksson of Keybroker and Paul Walker of Cohne & Wolfe, discussing the future of media at large.

All in all a fantastic day – so thanks to Annika for the kind invitation to speak, and to the other presenters and attendees for their questions, feedback and ideas.