EVENT: Digital Media Conference 2008

I’m heading to Washington, DC, for the Digital Media Conference on Thursday. I’ll be on a panel entitled Social Media: What’s Next?

If the key to reaching the new generation of youth is to go to where they are, then online communities and social networks are sure to become central to marketing strategies and brand-building in the 21st century. What is the opportunity for brands and marketers to target and reach potential consumers through social networks? How are networks like MySpace, Facebook, imeem and YouTube evolving to incorporate advertising programs and licensed content while addressing privacy and piracy concerns? This panel of experts will get under the hood and provide answers to the questions people are asking about the future of social media.

Panelists
Greg Johnson, CMO, GGL
Michael Chin, SVP, Marketing, KickApps
Terry Farrell, Senior Product Manager, Zune, Microsoft Corp.
Craig Stoltz, Blogger & Web Strategy Consultant, 2.Oh….really?
Nick O’Neill, Founder, The Social Times & AllFacebook
Moderator: Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Digital Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

Working at KickApps and as a marketer this topic is of great interest to me. I’ll share highlights of the session on this blog post conference. Let me know if you’re attending the conference and want to get together. Hit me up on Twitter @sirmichael.

UPDATE: Today’s panel on the future of social media at the Digital Media Conference was a very lively discussion which touched on a number of different topics including strategy, advertising, Facebook, MySpace, widgets and context. Ned Sherman did a good job of pulling together a group of panelists who come from a variety of different backgrounds, making the discussion extremely interesting. Here’s a quick recap of topics which we covered:

What is the future of social media?
Everyone agreed that social media is here to stay. We talked about how social media, in all its forms, is making its way across the web and that almost every website will have some social elements to them. Several of the panelists talked about how the web is increasingly social outside of destination sites like Facebook and MySpace. KickApps affiliates know this better than anyone. Quite simply, social media is a feature as much as it is the purpose.

Advertising and business models
The social media panel followed a session on online advertising where this topic was addressed directly. We talked about how advertising and business models will vary in effectiveness and type between destination sites like Facebook and those that serve niches or mega-niches. Here we discussed the power of context in combination with the social media’s ability to drive engagement and growth. Again, another point which KickApps affiliates are all too familiar with. For a bit of historical context, read Eric’s blog about this topic here (her wrote it way back in 2006!)

Data portability
Here we addressed the issues of ‘too many’ networks out there and people simply getting fatigued. The analogy we use a lot at KickApps when talking about this is, just as you might subscribe to a newspaper for your general news, you’re also likely to subscribe to magazines that focus on a given topic. That handful of magazines. Those various publications fulfill different needs in your life. Similarly, you’ll join a handful of different communities to fulfill different needs. Maybe it’s Facebook for your social connections, Linked In for your professional connections, Budget Travel’s community because you have a passion for seeing the world, the Phoenix Suns’ Planet Orange for your sports fix and Bonnaroo because you love live music and comedy. Yes, there are limits to how many communities people will join (let’s be real, there are only 24 hours in a day and you can only do so much).

The panel then turned to MySpace’s Data Availability announcement today. Here I brought up what we believe is the key point about these approaches to data portability from a web publisher’s point of view. It all comes down to the control of the social graph. While Data Availability, Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect wax lyrical about how they’re making the web more social, the big question web publisher’s need to ask is how important is it to them to have control of their social graph which results from making their site ’social.’ TechCrunch points this out in today’s post about MySpace’s announcement: Since actual data is being streamed out of MySpace, they have a strict terms of use policy that forbids third party sites from storing or caching the data, other than the unique MySpace user id of the user.

We talk about how KickApps is a Social Graph Engine(TM) for web publishers where our applications and operating system enables publishers to create and use their website’s social graph to help achieve improved user experiences, more intelligent ad serving, more informed editorial programming and marketing. See Alex’s post on this topic here.

All told it was a fun panel with some very insightful points raised by everyone. Thanks to Rohit Bhargava for moderating and guiding the discussion (check out Rohit’s blog and his new book: Personality Not Included.

UPDATE: Here’s fellow panelist Craig Stoltz’s take on yesterday’s panel. Craig is a web strategist, blogger and former journalist. We talked about some of the work he’s doing with PBS at the moment–sounded very interesting.