Forrester Marketing Forum 2008

How fitting that engagement is the theme.  For my first time at Forrester’s Marketing Forum, I’ve decided to take a different tact on my own personal engagement if nothing else than for the learning experience. 

Ever go to a large conference and just sit at the back, taking those 8 second vacations, checking your email, paying attention only to the most dynamic speakers and humorous presentations?  That was me.  Sometimes I’d wonder why I was even at the conference that was what I was going to get out of it.  Here is a great tip on how to avoid that – use Twitter to take notes.  Jeremiah Owyang, one of Forrester’s well known analysts covering social media, mentioned over Twitter that he would be live blogging during the keynote presentations and offered to have folks sit up front.  Forrester went beyond that with a meebo chat room on the Forrester blog site and ustreaming the keynote with live video.  I decided to take him up on the offer and spent much of the first day of the conference laptop open on Twitter (Twhirl to be precise).  A very interesting thing happened – I paid attention more than I had before, looking for the key points in each speaker’s presentation.  Another side effect happened – I was able to quickly share that knowledge and interact with many who were not at the conference.  To be honest, I was in this to be better engaged, but glad to hear (via twitter responses) a few people got something out of it.

There is a group of folks doing the same here – some experienced social media folks and others relatively new like yours truly.  Here is a list – all talented folks who are deep into marketing in various ways.  I’d recommend following each of them:

@jowyang – Jeremiah Owyang, Senior Analyst for Social Computing
@jspepper – Jeremy Pepper, PR manager for Boingo
@worleygirl – Amy Worley, Director of Digital Marketing for H&R Block
@Rumford – Rodney Rumford, CEO of Gravitational Media and FaceReviews.com
@MichelleBB – Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, VP of Marketing for Harte-Hanks (also fellow member of Forrester’s Technology Marketing Council)
@weave – Eric Weaver, VP, Edelman Digital

I’m sure there are others out there I haven’t met yet who were doing the same.  I had an enjoyable day today keeping up with the speakers and ‘tweeting’ along the way even through the smaller track sessions.  You can find all of our tweets at http://tweetscan.com/index.php?s=forrmarketing08 …

Sessions I attended and covered on Twitter during the day today:

• Engagement: A New Approach to Understanding Your Customers – Brian Haven, Sr. Analyst, Forrester Research
• Tapping Agencies’ Evolving Marketing Capabilities – Casey C. Jones, VP, Global Marketing, Dell
• Moving Beyond Marketing to Engagement – Gary Skidmore, President, Harte-Hanks
• Creating Brand Advocates at Nike’s Jordan Brand – Emmanuel Brown, Director of Digital and Content, Nike’s Jordan Brand
• The Interactive Marketing Maturity Model – Shar VanBoskirk, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Making Word of Mouth Work – Peter Kim, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research; Janet Eden-Harris, CEO, Umbria; Dave Balter, Founder/CEO, BzzAgent
• Community: Engaging 130 Million Customers – Cathy Halligan, CMO, Walmart.com
• The Four Pleasures: A Framework For Customer Engagement – Dr. Patrick Jordan, CEO, Patrick W. Jordan, Ltd.

My day 2 includes conducting a usability test for Forrester’s new website (a project led by a former Accenture colleague), meeting 1:1 with Forrester analysts, following a host of what looks like more great content, and an awful flight home.  Did I miss anything?  I have lots of notes to share back with team Brulant and have some great content for future posts… Thank you Forrester.