As new marketing channels emerge how can you take advantage of them, which are the ones you should be paying attention to and how can you start to leverage them in your marketing programs? Mike Lewis of the BMA Boston will answer the question on the forefront of everyone's mind: "What is New Marketing?" and more importantly, why you should be paying attention to it. The session will feature interviews with some of the Boston area's top marketers as they provide their insight into where the industry of marketing is headed and what tools you need to be aware of. Learn how to track and measure success with your new marketing campaigns and how to identify influencers you didn't know existed. From Facebook to Twitter, YouTube to MySpace, this session will (1) teach you how to leverage new social media vehicles and tactics to increase your ROI and (2) make you rethink how you market your products and services in the new social economy.

A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. It's when communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It's when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. It's when tons of folks visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there. For decades, the only way to spread ideas was to buy expensive advertising or beg the media to write (or broadcast) about your products and services. But now there is a tremendous opportunity to reach buyers in a better way: by publishing great content online, content they want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

One of the coolest things about the Web is that when an idea takes off, it can propel a brand or company to seemingly instant fame and fortune. For free. Whatever you call this powerful strategy?viral marketing, buzz, or word-of-mouse?creating a World Wide Rave in which other people help to tell your story for you is a way to drive action. One person sends it to another, then that person sends it to yet another, and on and on. Each link in the chain exposes your story to someone new, someone you never had to contact yourself.

The World Wide Rave is one of the most exciting and powerful ways to reach your audience. Anyone with thoughtful ideas to share?and clever ways to create interest in them?can become famous and find success on the Web.

Marketers have been forever concerned with controlling their company's brand: staying vigilant to the way a brand is positioned, worrying about perception, and attempting to manage misrepresentation. We might say no one ever controlled the brand. But let's go even deeper: your brand is ALL OVER the web, and harder to track than ever before.

Learn how the concept of "brand" has changed. Learn about the new ways of listening. Plan your next moves on building a communications/relationship experience around your brand.

Explore the current state of commercial social networks: where are your customers? How are they using social networks? What's the best way to start a marketing relationship with people on social networks?

Look over the shoulder of Chris Brogan to answer the perennial question, "How do you keep up with it all?" See his flow, and see what you can glean for your own social media and new marketing practices.

What are the hot new products and services you need as a marketing professional? Learn from the experts in these fast-paced, five minute live presentations, and discover what you need for your business.

Social media has shaped more than just advertising, marketing, and PR - it's changed the way we communicate inside our organization. This session will explore how Web 2.0 has fundamentally altered the way employees share ideas and obtain information at work. Learn best practices for tapping into the social minds of Gen Y employees as well as how to leverage the collective creativity of your team.

Why worry about banners ads and click rates when you can deliver pure quality content to your potential customers? Learn how using a content management system, creating quality targeted information, and determining a conversion strategy can result in leads, customer retention, and several other business values.

You've advocated that your clients use Facebook and MySpace and they're even starting to embrace the new relationship they can have with consumers in building their brands.

So what now? Is this "it" for social media apps and Web 2.0 in the online marketing realm?

As these social networks gain even more momentum and continue more integrated in a consumer's daily life how will interactive designers and marketers influence the next generation of Social Media destinations and applications such as Google's game-changing FriendConnect technology?

You're reading blogs, have an account on Facebook, and believe there's actually something to this Twitter thing. The problem is, how do you explain to the powers that be that you're ahead of the curve, and that the company needs to move in this direction? What if you're an agency and your customer comes to you asking for a YouTube video because "that blender guy got millions of views?" There's a big difference between "getting it" and convincing the senior team that they need to build out a strategy.

We'll give you advice, case studies, and some selling points to help you build your social media case.

Imagine asking your customers what they want from your online presence. Instead of a focus group, or a few internal project meetings, imagine going to the people who will actually use your website, will interact with your business, and asking them what they want. That's what Project Dogfood is all about.

Learn what happens when you ask some open questions, build a community platform to capture the conversation, and then implement what your stakeholders actually want.

Ever wonder what the future of marketing holds? Well now, the future will be sitting in front of you. Millenials will outnumber Baby Boomers by 2010, so the rules are changing, the consumers are changing, and so are the marketers. Hear straight from the up-and-coming Millenial Marketers that know what's hot, what's not, and are done with yesterday's rules (okay, we might keep a few of them). Each panelist will give a quickfire talk and case study that demonstrates a unique and groundbreaking sensibility they are bringing to the workforce.

Your customers don't want messaging: they want belonging. They don't want you to sell to them all the time, only when they need it. How do you build a vibrant online community? Where are the appropriate points for conversion from conversation into sale? How do you manage negative opinions?

One of the hottest spaces in social media and its impact on marketing was invented by your grandmother. You've heard the old expression, "You have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion?" Welcome to the world of social media monitoring.

Learn what tools are out there. Explore how to build this into your business processes. Build a new aspect to your marketing that will deliver results immediately.

The venerable profession of public relations has been shaken to its core by the arrival of social media. PR professionals are now learning to live in a world with millions of new media influencers and rapidly changing expectations about how to relate to them. Pitches and press releases are giving way to conversations and resource centers. These trends can be intimidating, but for PR pros who learn to speak the language of Web 2.0, the results are gratifying. In this panel, successful practitioners share the secrets of a radical new approach to public relations.

The "word of mouth" references customers share with each other have always been more important to a business than any amount of advertising or sales effort. But with the personal mobile technology (PMT) available today, and even richer connectivity tomorrow, word-of-mouth will eventually be the dominant means by which market knowledge (and perhaps most knowledge) is disseminated among people. The video and photo capabilities of PMT will help people connect to each other, while at the same time threatening personal privacy in unprecedented ways.

From posted reviews to online user groups to social networks, customers can use PMT to "co-create" their own products and specify their own service levels. They will use PMT to band together and submit collective bids to sellers. They will use it to confirm "presence" in a physical location, such as a stadium, or a shopping mall. They will use it to track individual people, whether friends and loved ones or spouses suspected of infidelity. And even though networks of consumers will act rationally most of the time, occasional episodes of irrationality and unpredictability can still turn your business into an overnight success or ruin it in a flash, for no apparent reason.

In this keynote presentation, best-selling business author and consultant Don Peppers mixes humor, inspiration and analysis to paint an irresistibly compelling picture of business competition in the 21st Century, when pervasive and inexpensive PMT empowers consumers to connect at will:

The language of business-customer interaction has changed forever. Today, customers are empowered with electronic tools that deflect nearly every kind of marketing message. Armed with blogs, Facebook groups, recommendation engines and social shopping sites, they now eagerly share their good and bad experiences without the permission and involvement of businesses or the media. Customers control the brand and image of the companies they do business with.

This is a little scary, but also exhilarating. For the last two centuries, businesses have been prisoners of media gatekeepers who controlled the channel to the customer. Media was limited and expensive, which meant that messages had to be delivered in 30-second sound bites. Marketers used that precious time to sell because time was so scarce.

Today, the rules have all changed. While marketers can no longer control what customers say about them, they can become welcome participants in these conversations, and they can do it for small money. Marketers no longer need the media; they ARE the media. The 30-second spot has been obliterated. By using the same tools as their customers, marketers can shape and refine their messages in collaboration with their constituents over a long period of time. All they need to do is think like publishers.

The new marketing discipline demands speed, transparency and a willingness to listen. The payoff is vastly better feedback, improved competitive intelligence and innovative customer ideas for new products and services. Marketing organizations today have the power to enhance their value to the business and pave the way toward a new kind of seller/buyer partnership, one in which interaction and shared value define the rules of engagement.

What is SEO? Why is it important? The Internet has profoundly transformed the way people learn about and shop for products. Ten years ago, companies reached their consumers through trade shows, print advertising, and other traditional marketing methods. Today, consumers start their shopping experience by looking on the Internet, particularly in the search engines. In order to remain competitive, businesses' websites need to be found online by the consumers already searching for the products and services that they sell. SEO is not rocket science or black magic - this session will cover all the basics you need to know to optimize your website yourself and what to look for when hiring an SEO consultant.

Budgets are changing for 2009, and they're changing now. After this conference, your senior team - you? - will have to make some serious decisions. Get some ideas on what technologies, practices, and next steps might change the way you do business in 2009. Should you be shifting some of your spend into new media and new marketing? Absolutely, but how will you tie it back? What processes will change? Join Chris Brogan in a lively discussion, and bring your tough questions.

Dow Jones is a brand with a hundred year heritage in providing great information to business leaders. They are as classic as a 1973 Mercedes. People know the brand, know what it does, and know what to expect. How do you merge that kind of heritage with the new tools of marketing? How do you deliver more genuine conversations, more two-way interaction, and the other hallmarks of the Web 2.0 generation when working with a classic corporation like Dow Jones? Join Alan Scott, Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones for an engaging conversation on what worked, what didn't, and what you can do to bring some of the same magic to your company.

As more companies investigate building a community platform around their products or services, how does the marketing professional evaluate a system that is both robust yet simple, easy to manage and flexible? Learn from the experts who live and breath navigate these choices everyday , and come away with an understanding of what your company needs to host a successful community.

Podcasts have become one of the most effective ways for companies to educate and reinforce brand messaging. In this session, Glenn will identify the mechanisms that you can use to:

Harley-Davidson is one of the world's most revered brands - their products create passion and loyalty in customers like no other company. Harley-Davidson is not just a motorcycle manufacturer - it is lifestyle. Recognizing this, Harley-Davidson was quick to realize the need to participate with the social web and help their current and future customers incorporate Harley into their online identities as they have done with their real world identities. They also recognized the need make real connections with people through the social web to join and influence the customer conversation.

See a 10 minute case study of how Overdrive Interactive helped Harley-Davidson to launch a robust, interconnected social media channel that allows them to launch high quality brand compliant content, profiles and channels into the social space, make lasting connections with current and future customers, socialize and listen to those consumers and measure the impact on their business.

It's about using a timeless martial arts concept to power your new media and new marketing successes.

"I don't have time to play with everything!" is heard over and over by brands big and small when asked what they are doing in social media. This session will focus on the quick, easy and safe things you can do today on a lunch break to get started in social media. Come on in, the water is fine!

Social networks have killed email? Not at all. No matter how many "friends" you have on Facebook, you can't message them simply. With all the Twitter followers or YouTube viewers, you still need an effective way to share information, deliver value, and build relationships.

Email marketing can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing strategy, but there are best practices. You've got an opportunity to convert some of your community into customers with every email. We'll talk about how.

Media saturation is rampant so superior customer relationships require dynamic, tailored dialog with individuals on a near real-time basis. Yet marketing directly to an audience of one requires not only correctly understanding the prospect, but timing the communication to coincide with recent behaviors and preferences, whether on the Internet or in the "real world." This sort of integrated, online/offline coordination means collecting, evaluating, and responding to customer data from a variety of touchpoints across a variety of channels, and sending the correct messages, in the correct form, at the correct time. The end result is deeper customer relationships and increased cross-selling over the customer lifecycle. This presentation draws upon real-world case studies to demonstrate how leading customer centric companies have established this kind of customer-specific marketing on a large scale, and how enterprise-wide coordination is necessary to make it a reality.

Times are tough all over. When marketers are called on to cut budgets, or else, some hard decisions need to be made about how to achieve objectives on a shoestring. This decision-making process is complicated by the fact that Social Media concepts had most marketers on fire with curiosity and ambition just a few months ago. So, what are the "bare essentials" of Social Media Marketing? What's the right mix of internal and external resources? Is it time for a strategy do-over? Should marketers re-trench to old-style marketing approaches? Can marketers still have it all?

In this session you will learn how to dominate press headlines without sending out a single press release, hosting a traditional press conference or sending any story pitches to the media. You'll learn how communicating smartly to a group of loyal fans online is the surest way to guarantee powerful widespread coverage in the mainstream press, and maybe even create a media frenzy. Gordon will give examples of how she has used bloggers, websites and the sheer power of the internet to attract small groups of loyal fans and ultimately create big BUZZ among millions of people for new attractions and events.