Day 1 at Conversational Marketing Summit

Today I attended Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit, which was focused on how brand marketers can leverage social or conversation media. It was interesting because it was not about the usual direct response or sales ROI-measured discussions. It was more about trying to find a way for more brand marketing dollars to flow online and for marketers to feel comfortable with new measurement techniques.

Some of the interesting points from the morning sessions:

• If you compare the CPM for traditional offline advertising (e.g., print ad) to online media (e.g., banner ad), online advertising is much cheaper. And yet, most brand marketers still allocate most of their budgets to offline channels.
• Gian Fulgoni, Chariman of comScore, claimed that 30% of online users delete their cookies in a given month. Not surprising, given how easy browsers like Firefox make it for users to clear all private data. Also, security products, such as Norton Internet Security, flag cookies as a low threat as part of its regular PC scans each month. What this means is if you rely on cookies to count unique site visitors (UV), you’re probably overstating UV. This problem is further exacerbated for social media sites, given the increased frequencies users tend to return to the site for updates. Now you’re talking about the UV possibly being off by 3-4X! No wonder there is always a big discrepancy between different online measurement companies. The problem is that cookies do not equal people.
• Another measurement factoid - up to 30% of Internet traffic comes from bots. Wow!
• Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman announced Meetup will soon open itself up to advertisers. It sounded like a sponsorship model, where Pampers could sponsor a mommy playgroup.

John Battelle has assembled a great set of speakers. I’m looking forward to seeing what Day 2 brings.