Nearly a month has passed since CW Consulting Group project manager Amy Rosenfield and I attended the BIMA sponsored Cross Media Forum, held at the Taj Hotel in Boston. That week seems nearly a light year in how it has impacted our organization. The event has instilled us with excitement for the opportunity and challenge that all marketers and their clients face with new technology platforms.
While I have toyed with starting a blog, we are long overdue, and now we have a lot to talk about. This blog is for our clients, our colleagues and or anyone interested in Social Media (a.k.a. Web 2.0) and Conversational Marketing, which are in full throttle all around us.
The top take-ways from the event, which included a keynote by Peter Hirshberg from Technorati, panelists from ESPN, Scripps, Mullen, Time Warner, PARTNERS+Simons, Hill Holiday, Digitas and others, are surprisingly not technical.

• Understand your objectives before you start
• Have a big idea that starts with the customer (it doesn’t matter from whom)
• An integrated teams is crucial for efficient and effective cross media implementation
• Test, test, test!
• Metrics are still hard to pin down (in fact, they just get more complicated)

Okay, so you are saying, “what has this got to do with Web 2.0 anyway?” Well, the bottom line is, the more things change, the more they stay the same, if not getting more complicated.

So this blog is intended to open the conversation with our network of professionals in the B2B, B2C and not-for-profit world about how technologies like blogs, wikis, podcasting, widgets and all social media tools can be added to your marketing tool box, and how the ever important elements of communication and collaboration are crucial, more than ever before.

Catherine