Recently, some members of our Spring Creek Group team went down to San Francisco to mix and mingle with other like-minded social media pros, gain some insight into emerging social media trends, and learn more about what the future of this industry entails.
OMMA Social, a one day conference designed to help guide marketing and media professionals through the social media field, had an attendance of roughly 300 people. In a time when budgets tend to be tight, this impressive turnout shows the huge interest businesses and clients are taking in social media tools and new media channels.
The conference was emceed by Cathy Taylor from MediaPost, and included top name speakers in the online advertising and social media industry such as keynotes Angela Courtin, SVP Marketing, Entertainment & Content, MySpace and Chris Curtin, Vice President, Digital Strategy, Corporate Marketing, Hewlett-Packard Company.
Some interesting topics covered at the conference discussed what happens when social media agencies and ad agencies hook up, how major businesses use social media to reach customers, and the personal CPM - the idea that in a social networking context, people with different levels of influence among their peers will be accorded CPMs, based on their influence-ability.
We heard some things we already knew and learned some things we didn’t. We met new and interesting people and caught up with some old friends. We also enjoyed the fact that all the presentations were all crammed in on the same day, making it a short (but definitely sweet) event. Hey, we’re all social media folks, so we like having our information delivered in a quick and efficient fashion.
“We used to send one long letter to everyone once a year at Christmas,” said Angela Courtin. “Now we send constant personal two sentence sound bites.” The OMMA Social conference was full of those "sound bites," all of them providing insight into what's new (and what's coming next) in the world of social media.
If you weren’t able to attend the conference, or were there and want to refresh your memory, check out the OMMA Social Twitter feed (come on, you knew there’d be one) to get better caught up on what went down.