I spend the last two days at the congress Marketing!Online organized by the Deutsche Kongress here in Munich. Like last year, the two days were packed with lots of mostly good presentations. The event is a good mixture of real live case studies and some (not too) academic speeches. Here you get a little overview about some of the presented and discussed topics.
- Targeting – especially behavioural targeting – was part of many different presentations. It’s a big thing which was discussed with controversial views.
- The usage of music as a powerful element for transporting emotions via a website was shown by Christian Knopp from BigFM. He suggests playing music on websites because of the positive effect it has on conversions (Cost per Lead, Cost per Order). He bets on the same effect backgroundmusic has in warehouses. Despite I believe that music can be a powerful tool I’m not really convinced because of the different environments people visiting the internet. If it’s the workplace or at home, where most of us hear their own music while surfing around, I’m pretty sure that the music played via the visited website can be annoying.
- Very interesting case studies of online marketing activies were shown by Coca Cola (Germany), the BMW Group and Adidas. They presented campaigns I only can dream of in my own company.
- The workshop about Internet TV and IPTV together with Bavaria Film Interactive was a little disappointing because for my taste they stuck too much on viral video clips. I think that there are a lot more interesting use cases for using video and TV than spreading funny clips via the internet. The mentioned presentation by BMW for example and their new, award winning BMW-Web.TV platform.
- Very useful information about the target group of the silver surfer was provided by Kai Hudetz from the E-Commerce Center Handel. He demanded a more fine grained segmentation of the 50plus-generation, a group of people so different like the people younger than 50 years.
- Another academic speech was held by Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut about the myths and facts of typical web 2.0 users. He had some very suprising results for us. By the way: he is one of the co-authors together with Ansgar Zerfa? of the announced book “Kommunikation, Partizipation und Wirkungen im Social Web: Von der Gesellschaft zum Individuum” which is planned to publish in March 2008. Zerfa? held a speech about corporate communications I reported last week: Corporate Communication in Times of Web 2.0.
- Another highlight was the entertaining speech from Prof. Mario Fischer, author of the Book Website Boosting. He showed with a few examples how bad usability can harm your business objectives you may pursue with your activities in the internet.
- Web 2.0 was more or less a topic of every presentation: Kinkaa.de – a search engine specialized on travelling – reported about their corporate blog and Coca Cola (Germany) showed us some campaigns where the users are actively involved in. Web 2.0 is defintively part of a succesful online marketing strategy.