The main stage was compelling to say the least here at LeWeb day two, but the second stage is no slouch either. Each time I have entered the room from the beginning of the day for Sean’s presentation to the after lunch panel with Chris Brogan and Brian Solis, almost every seat out the 400 available was taken.
Dubbed the “Deep Discussion” Stage – Salle 400, you can find specific tweets about speakers and presentations that happened in this room by using the hashtag #lewebdd.
It would be impossible for me to recap everything that was discussed in the afternoon panel, ”How brands and marketing have to adapt to this new worldwide real-time “word of mouth”, so I thought I would share some of the gems that came out of it.
Panel Participants
Moderator:
Chris Brogan President, New Marketing Labs, Author, Trust Agents
Panelists:
Richard Binhammer – Senior Manager, Involved in Dell’s Social Media efforts
Matthais Lüfkens – Associate Director, Media, World Economic Forum
Steve Rubel – SVP, Director of Insight, Edelman Digital
Brian Solis – founder and President, Future Works
Seth J. Sternberg – Co-Founder and CEO, Meebo
First off I would like to say this panel was outright scrappy. It was definitely not the love fest that some of us are used to seeing. That being said there were many great points of views being shared and each member was respectful of the others opinion while they were disagreeing with what the last one said.
It started off with a few members missing, well one member in particular Mr. Solis. Taking time to be interviewed in the hallway, Brian was late to his own panel and made a grand entrance by walking down the stairway onto the stage only after everyone in the room called out his name.
Here are some of the best quotes that came out of the panel:
Matthais – “Instead of just citizen journalism there should be CEO journalism.”
Steve to Chris – “You are the Owen Wilson of web 2.0″
Richard -”At Dell we are banking revenue because we are connecting with customers. We have gone from a static web to interactive web, that direct connection with customers is what’s important, people connecting with people. Social Media scales relationships in a very real way.”
Seth - “Brands are understanding that they need to be where the conversations are.”
Brian- “Everything we are talking about today will resonate with this crowd but we all have to report to someone who won’t give a shit about authenticity”
Steve – “We have to think about the business cause first not just the puff in the pan”
Matthais – “ROI is return on involvement not investment”
Richard – “People want to connect to the engineers not the CEO at Dell. Social Media scales because our guy can connect to so may more people from his desk than the time it would take on the phone or traveling to conferences”
Seth – “You guys have said Twitter way to many times, let’s talk about another social media tool. Facebook will have a higher click thru rate than Twitter because the people there know you better. Meebos click thru rate is about 1%. How do we do that? Time. How long the ad is in front of the user.”
Richard – “As the web becomes more social these tools (social media tools) are more important because people won’t search they will ask their friends. Social networks will give search a run for their money.”
Question from the audience - How do smaller brands connect in a big way with their customers?
Richard’s answer – “Go where they are.”
Seth’s answer – “If on your website you make it easy for them to share from there through all communication networks, that helps.”
