I recently had the opportunity to attend two conferences: Web 2.0 Expo in New York and the DMA Conference in Las Vegas. The unintended backdrop of both of these conferences was the unstable economy. Outside of the expo, New York was in mourning as the first major layoffs from Wall Street had just started. Las Vegas was as slow as I have ever seen it, with mammoth real estate projects half built. I asked the most knowledgeable citizens in Vegas (the cab drivers) what the chances were of those projects finishing, and they said they hadn’t seen progress on some of the buildings in months. Nonetheless, both of these conferences attracted an international crowd eager to talk about their experiences, challenges and successes in various aspects of traditional and new marketing channels.

The Web 2.0 Expo was like a blast from the late ‘90s when the Internet, CRM and database marketing were going through radical strategic and technical challenges. Every session was packed, the average age of the attendees could not have been more than 30 and the energy was bouncing off of the walls. Though the economy is impacting all businesses, the general attendees in New York were entrepreneurs, people starting new businesses within established organizations or mavericks starting new services for their customers. These people were already struggling with how to generate new audiences and repeat visitors, as well as how to monetize social media, social networking, user-generated content and the rest of the interactive Web. The economy made life a little harder for this group, but their challenges were already enormous so this extra burden didn’t seem to faze many of them.

The conference was mainly devoted to a few tracks: platforms, new business challenges, marketing and user interfaces. As always, there were some valuable nuggets to be gleaned:

• The growth of Web 2.0 is too fast. For every well designed site and well planned business, there could be tens if not a hundred failed businesses and sites. The industry will be forced to consolidate quickly as people will only join so many communities, so many networks and have so many “friends.” This is evidenced by all of the LinkedIn copycats. I know I personally don’t accept invites from other business contact sites as I barely have time to understand what is going on in my LinkedIn network.
  
  
• Design for the social web is even harder than e-commerce. With e-commerce, you were really focusing on helping the customer get to an endpoint as quickly, intuitively and accurately as possible. The social web (Web 2.0) is really helping people become better at “what they do.” This could be an IT professional, a recruiter, a mom or a baseball coach. Web 2.0 becomes an assistant and an advisor.
  
  
• The community manager is a role that is becoming increasingly important. The community manager is the user’s representative to fight for new features, keep peace in the community, handle complaints, watch for new trends in discussion or usage, and evangelize the site through promotion and blogs. The community manager is a live connection from the user base to the organization and makes the interactions more intimate.
  
  
• Several different categories are emerging as ways to keep users engaged. Each community needs to discover what works best for them. In general, you have competitive sites like Amazon that count the number of book reviews you wrote, but not necessarily how helpful they were. In contrast, Yelp provides labels to its super users as a reward of reputation, instead of instilling competition.
  
  
• And finally, if you swear during your presentation you will get laughs.

But the main gist I picked up from Web 2.0 is that there really aren’t many answers on how to effectively market or use Web 2.0 for marketing and how to measure it effectively. Most of the sessions provided obvious ideas or pointed to the same sites that are doing a good job (i.e., TripAdvisor, Yelp and Shutterfly). In general, other than saying, “If you have a great idea, people will probably find you,” there was very little content to the sessions. People are still trying to feel their way through this, and it will probably be some time until we have the critical mass of case studies to really derive best practices. Nonetheless, Web 2.0 was one of the most vibrant and passionate conferences I have been to in years.

The DMA conference, in contrast, was attended by suits and ties, average age probably well over 40. The tone of the conference was thoughtful, wary and concerned with a dash of party atmosphere thrown in. The DMA had two great keynote speakers (who didn’t swear very much, but it was oddly still entertaining) with two very different messages. Christie Heffner from Playboy spoke and was extremely impressive as she explained how Playboy has flourished in a multichannel world with a larger circulation than it has ever had while other magazines and publications struggle. Through TV, Web, mobile, print, and brick and mortar, Playboy has built an enormous brand and connection with its customers. Craig, from Craig’s List also spoke. Though his self-deprecating humor was appreciated (I am a bad engineer, bad business man, bad manager and bad speaker), I am not sure that his message that he gets more than 512 million unique visitors a month and 12 billion page views with no marketing budget whatsoever is what we wanted hear.

But Craig was topical. Web 2.0 sessions at the conference were the most widely attended. It seems like people may not be as interested in “Segmenting Your Customers 101” and “Learn How to Select a List” as much as they used to be. The message was very much the same as I heard in New York: It is really unknown how social media and Web 2.0 can help your business, but it is a phenomenon that can’t be ignored; first movers will be rewarded; and those sitting on the sidelines may save some money in the long run at the cost of customers in the short run.

The DMA hit a home run with their focused exhibit section on mobile. This subsection of the exhibit hall gathered together many of the entrepreneurial companies tackling the mobile marketing challenges; and, for the first time, I felt like I came away enlightened on the opportunity, technology and marketing around mobile. I will most likely dedicate several articles in the upcoming year to mobile marketing and measurement.

I believe that social media and the idea of “helping people be better” is a phenomenon; that people do want to hear what their colleagues, peers, friends and people like them have to say more than they do Ebert and Roeper; and that some people want to actively participate and be rewarded and recognized for it. The energy around the Web 2.0 conference confirms that we are on the brink of the next wave of development. The next step is now figuring out one of the more difficult channels to date and how it impacts the financials of the organization.

Recent articles by Larry Goldman

• Sales and Marketing: Web 2.0 New York
• Sales and Marketing: Feeling Frugal
• Sales and Marketing Trends in Social Media, Engagement, Enterprise Marketing Management and Business Intelligence
• Sales and Marketing: New Face of Web Analytics