The Conversation @ Ad Age Goes Digital

A funny thing happened on the way to way to the Ad Age Digital Marketing conference.  In the midst of Madison Avenue types discussing the impact of digital on the relationship between brands and customers—a small handful of audience members including myself, Steve Rubel and David Polinchock instinctively fired up Twitter and before you knew it,  a couple of thousand people who could not be at the event were following along and even chiming in on what was going down at the event.  To be clear, though this was no SXSW and many of my "tweets" were a bit silly it still managed to get the attention of Ad Age itself.

"Not too far from the twittering crowd
Ad Age's digital editor, Abbey Klaassen, passed this along: "While this is no SXSW by twitter-level standards, there is some isolated twittering going on in the audience. (Yes, this is a digital conference but, unlike South By Southwest, there are clearly a lot of brand folks and general marketers in the audience and they're not necessarily as steeped in interactive as the web developers who attended the Texas event last week.) I did, however, catch up with Critical Mass's David Armano (twitter.com/armano) and Edelman's Steve Rubel (twitter.com/steverubel), both Day Two speakers, who are filing updates.

My first thought? Yikes! Please don't let anything here turn out like Sarah Lacy. As you may recall, Business Week's Lacy interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a SXSW session that was panned in real time by the twittering audience. So I warned them: Be nice, or people will pay you back with snarky Twitter posts while you're on stage. No they won't, they replied, confidently -- because everyone who twitters will be on stage. Damn. So true."

It was an interesting day for me.  I'm definitely more comfortable with user experience Web types, but hey—every experience is an adventure right?  I definitely had fun Twittering.  More coverage below and my panel is tomorrow!

Additional Coverage
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Comments

[Tim Walker]

I've been enjoying your tweets from the conference, David. The block quote above is interesting, particularly for this language: "Please don't let anything here turn out like Sarah Lacy."

Possibly this is nitpicking, but the predatory writer in me perked up its ears with the word "let". In Twitterland -- in the social media generally -- there is no "let". You don't get to "let" things take this course or that course; the audience is in charge of that. The best thing one can do is to avoid acting clueless.

Keep tweeting!

[Kelly Shaw]

Totally agree with Tim.

Can we expect consumers to be nice?

Twitter did not cause the SXSW fiasco, it revealed it. Get used to it, quickly.

[Sam Paye]

Typo in first sentence.

[Leigh]

Just wanted to say thank you for coverage of the conference ... almost better than being there!

[Homebizseo.com]

I have to agree.

[David Cushman]

Hi David, I was following while at the Digital Marketing Briefing in London (with Joe Jaffe). Even took what you witnessed with me to use as material in the second part of the day.
Wrote about it here:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2008/03/jaffe-in-person-turning-social-networks.html

btw: During Jaffe's keynote in london I could see only one person with a laptop open. Thought perhaps some were joining me in twittering on mobile phones... perhaps

[John Schneider]

Great to experience the conference, and your take on presenters and panelists, via your Tweets. It was almost like being there, but not really.

I especially appreciated the point made by Rick Clancy of Sony that there are huge opportunities to help employees within companies connect more meaningfully, and then "any opportunity where people can make a meaningful connection and have a dialog is social media." That's about perfect.

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