If you are an avid reader of this blog you will already know that I am fascinated with Virtual Worlds and Virtual Events – but I was never truly enamored with Second Life and was not in favor of it for business from the start (must have been that scary looking penguin that tried to strike up a conversation with me)

All that aside – I encounter a virtual world from the moment I step foot into my house with my two boys being avid RuneScape players. So I can’t help but think there must be something redeeming here for businesses.

One thing I am investigating and heavily considering for 2009 is a Virtual Events Strategy. It’s like a virtual tradeshow but a space all your own for your own business events.

Because of this I decided to speak to Stuart Bowen who has put into place a virtual events strategy a few times now and is currently doing this for ON24. Don’t miss his insights into what you should be doing.

Putting in place a Virtual Events strategy

About Stuart

Stuart Bowen, Senior Director of Virtual Events, ON24

In his current position, Stuart overseas the Sales and Business Development of ON24 Virtual Show, working with Sales, Executive Management and Product Development. ON24 is a global provider of webcasting and virtual events solutions.

Stuart has spent his working life in the B2B media space. Stuart has held a number of positions including VP Sales in which he was responsible for creating the first ‘online-only’ sales team at UBM (formerly CMP Media) and then pioneering the original cross-product (print and online media) sales team. In his last position at UBM Stuart oversaw and evangelized the use of virtual worlds in a business environment to internal and external customers

ON24 Virtual Show. Learn more on http://on24.com/products_virtualshow.html

A live interview with the CEO, Peter Friedman, from LiveWorld at Web 2.0 Expo about the launch of their new product called LiveBar.

If you ever dreamed of adding community to your website without having the hassle of a major integration effort involving your IT department then LiveWorld’s newest product called LiveBar is for you.

LiveBar adds contextually relevant community to your site by adding a single line of Java script to your header tag just to those pages which adds community to those pages in seconds.

If you’ve got a site with lots of content, it probably doesn’t make sense to have community features on every page. But, it does make sense to add real-time conversation to sections with high traffic volume—for example, content areas about a current program, or hot topics. Using LiveBar, you can add conversational elements like comments and “shouts” (which are similar to Tweets) to just those sections, and enhance the experience for those users.

A&E, QVC, Tulane University are already pilot clients for LiveBar and other existing customers include – Neutrogena, P&G, American Express, Kimberly-Clark HSBC, Kraft, Campbells and more …

Listen to Peter Friedman discuss how to do this and the best uses of this for your brand!

LiveBar – Add Community to your Site in Seconds!

About Peter

Peter founded LiveWorld, Inc. in April 1996. With 20 years experience in the executive offices of Fortune 500 companies, he connects strategic and operating strategies, as well as financial metrics, to community strategy. Peter sets the LiveWorld vision and directs overall operations. He is an executive sponsor for several of LiveWorld’s major accounts, working with clients to define how our services will directly support the client’s business objectives, as well as developing creative concepts for the programs. He is one of the few Internet executives to have launched and managed multiple online services on a global scale. His background is an unusual mix of creative, business, entrepreneurial, and corporate, but has always focused on bringing people together in successful collaboration. Prior to founding LiveWorld, Inc., he was the vice president and general manager of Apple Computer’s Internet/Online Services business unit. He oversaw the creation, launch, and growth of Apple’s online services, including AppleLink, Apple’s global online loyalty marketing and customer support community service, and eWorld, a consumer service based on AOL technology and Internet services such as Salon. During his 12-year tenure at Apple, his responsibilities also included managing Business Systems Marketing and product line management in Apple’s Macintosh division.

Peter holds a Bachelors degree in American History from Brown University, and a Master’s in Business Administration from The Harvard Business School.

Two years ago less than half of all consumers used search to find a local business but today that number is upward of 74%!

However, most small businesses today still don’t have a website in fact less than 10% of small business owners are online. For them the problem is not just that they don’t have a website but promoting their website as well.

Enter Yodle

Yodle helps small service based business get a web presence and then help them promote their business by buying lots of niche keywords and syndicating the results to local businesses. (ex Teeth Whitening Union Square NY)

Yodle growth has been outstanding (around 700% year over year) which should come as no surprise since their customers are long tail and so are the keywords they buy for them.

Check out my podcast with their CEO Court Cunningham …

Yodle: Managing the Long Tail for the Long Tail!

About Court

Court Cunningham is the CEO of Yodle, Court oversees all aspects of operations and strategy, including technology, product development and sales and marketing. Prior to joining Yodle, he held the position of COO at Community Connect, a niche social networking company, where he lead consumer marketing, product management and development efforts. Before that, as SVP/GM of the Marketing Automation group at DoubleClick, he was instrumental in establishing DARTmail as the industry leading email marketing solution.

Court received a BA in English from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sometimes I have to admit it is hard to keep up with all the new advances in Social technologies. And when I hear the buzz about certain technologies getting louder and louder it often times prompts me to seek out the help of a trusted source.

Enter Jesse Stay – Facebook developer and guru, a recent author of FBML essentials, blogger of Stay-n-Alive and social media junkie like myself.

I sought Jesse’s help in further understanding how he was using FriendFeed for tracking and commenting on all the conversations that were happening at the recent F8, Facebook developer conference.

Here his thoughts and excuse my ignorance on any of these topics for those of you more social advanced.

Using FriendFeed for Aggregating Conversations – a podcast with Jesse Stay

About Jesse

Jesse is a Social Media technologies expert. He specializes in Facebook and other technologies that enable you as a business to better reach your customers in a viral manner, leading to more targeted ad and marketing positions, leading to faster adaptation of your brand through the social networks.

Through his company, Stay N’ Alive Productions, he has firm experience developing and providing quality applications that have already had strong successes. He has both developed and consulted for successful social networking applications, some of those which currently have over a million users (the top 90 on Facebook!).

Starting up a social network to support any business can be a challenge. These days it seems that there are a variety of new social networks popping up all over. To that end I have heard a new acronym YASN (Yet Another Social Network)!

But to fill this demand many new social network software’s and asp’s are being created to fill the business need. Recently Dotster introduced a new product for not only their clients but of clients beyond their control.

The idea that Social Networking is moving beyond the youth market to business isn’t new but the idea is how and what are people doing to get them to join and what content are they providing to keep them engaged.

Listen to Catherine’s ideas on how to get your own community going as well as keep them coming back for more.

Social Networking: Expanding Beyond the Youth Market and into Business – a podcast with Dotster’s Catherine Brown

About Catherine

Catherine Brown, Director of Enterprise Social Networking, Dotster, Inc., has over 14 years experience in marketing and product promotions and has a successful track record at both large and small firms. At Calista, an IP Telephony start-up, she was part of an executive team that took the company to acquisition by Cisco. While at Cisco, she managed major product launches and million dollar promotional campaigns, worked on a company-wide website redesign and started a web analytics program. She has also been an entrepreneur. Catherine has a BA from Stanford, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has lived in Europe and Latin America (she speaks both French and Spanish).

Why are some Buzz Marketing programs better than others?

What makes one program more Buzz worthy than another?

These questions and more are why I interviewed Jim Calhoun the CEO of Popular Media for his advice on how to really make your Buzz Marketing programs engaging.

So what’s Jim’s advice on how to make good decisions when it comes to Viral or Buzz Marketing?

Two tenets – Make it fun to share and Make it fun to get – this is a base minimum for any Buzz program. To hear more of his advice on how to make your campaigns go viral check out our podcast.

Psychology of Buzz Marketing – a podcast with Jim Calhoun, CEO of Popular Media

About Jim

Jim co-founded PopularMedia and has served as chief executive officer since its inception in 2003. He is responsible for guiding the company’s strategy, growth, operations and customer satisfaction. A true Silicon Valley veteran, Jim has helped a broad range of businesses grow through technology and marketing — from startups such as Glam Media, Inc. to global leaders such as HP and IBM. Prior to founding PopularMedia, Jim founded CustomerClick LLC, a privately held direct marketing services firm based in San Francisco. Previously, Jim served as Vice President of Products at NetObjects, Inc. Jim is a former reviews editor at CNET and holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri.

File Sharing is very binary – either you share a file online or you don’t.

Well not anymore! – enter Drop.io.

Drop.io allows consumers to create their own private online spaces where they can easily and privately share photos, videos, documents, and other types of media with others. By default, drops are “private” – consumers control how and with whom drops are shared. Drop.io never requires any type of account registration, and all drops can be password-protected and set to expire after a period of time. Drop.io provides multiple methods of sharing content – by uploading through the Web site, sending email or MMS messages to the drop email address, faxing assets in and out, or by calling the drop voicemail number to leave a voice notes.

Hear what Chad Stoller has to say about how marketers’ should be using Drop.io externally as well as internally.

Drop.io – a podcast with Chad Stoller

About Chad

Prior to joining drop.io, Stoller was Executive Director of Emerging Platforms at Organic, a marketing and communications company, where he led Organic’s strategy for new communication platforms, including social networking, mobile, gaming, meta-verse, geo-data applications and location-based services. In addition to developing strategies for Organic, Chad worked directly on emerging platform programs for leading brands like Chrysler Corporation, Bank of America, Fox Entertainment, NBC and Sprint.

Stoller began his career as a media planner and developer for fashion experience at Arnell Group, where he worked on such brands as Ray-Ban, Banana Republic, Donna Karen and Samsung. Subsequently, he co-founded Surge Interactive, the interactive division of Arnell Group, where he led interactive brand strategies for Universal Music Group, Tommy Hilfiger, Clear Channel, among others. Stoller returned to Arnell Group five years later in the newly created role of Director, Communications Solutions and was responsible for such brands as McDonalds, Siemens, Reebok, DaimlerChrysler and others.

Twing.com, a property of Accoona Corp., is a free service that aims to help users search for opinions, information, and conversations that match their particular interest—however obscure that particular interest may be. The site encourages users to get in on the conversation by enabling them to find communities relevant to their interests.

While blogs and social media have become increasingly common – discussions occurring on message boards and within forums aren’t usually surfaced by traditional search engines. This kind of web content is multiplying rapidly and you are going to need something dedicated to getting to the content underneath.

So I interviewed Scott Germaise the director of product management for Twing to find out how we should be using this great new tool for your reputation monitoring efforts.

Searching Communities and Forums – a podcast with Twing

About Scott

Scott is currently the Director of Product Management at Twing.com, a vertical search engine for searching and discovering communities. I’ve been in the online biz since the early days at Prodigy, was a co-founder and VP, Information Architecture at About.com, worked for or on other community sites such as ClubMom.com.

Does Sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation software provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many marketers ignore the equally valid perspective of their sales counterparts. This can lead to diminished success for many marketing-led efforts around lead management.

This is just one of the many disconnects between sales and marketing that we’ve been exploring in the series Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. This is my 3rd such podcast with Marketo in this area. First we started with a CEO’s perspective then we did a VP of Marketing perspective and now we have the VP of Sales perspective. Getting the Sales viewpoint is critical for marketers since lead management initiatives always require buy-in and support from Sales to be successful.

Special thanks to my friends at Marketo for allowing me to interview their VP of sales for this podcast. They use what they sell to create opportunities for themselves, so there is no better place to look for ideas on how to optimize your own demand generation efforts than by talking with the guys who sell and deliver that for a living. I always learn something I can incorporate into my lead nurturing platform every time I talk with them! I hope you learn something too…

What Sales Really Thinks About Marketing?

About Bill

Bill brings 16 years of best practice sales, leadership, and operations experience to his role leading all of Marketo’s sales and customer success activities. Prior to joining Marketo, Binch was VP and General Manager, Distribution, at AVOLENT, where he managed the team focused on the distribution market, small & medium businesses, and install base customers. Prior to AVOLENT, Binch developed his sales and operational experience at Oracle, PeopleSoft, and BEA Systems, where he built and managed direct, inside, and channel organizations and ran business units ranging from mid-market business customers to strategic accounts. Bill graduated from Arizona State University with a BS in Marketing.

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage – its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly – what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

The Big Switch – a podcast with Nicholas Carr

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of “cloud computing” and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.