As an excellent last minute addition, Karl Long wasn’t in the schedule for the summit and delayed the release of attendees to the reception cocktail party, but it was well worth it!  I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, titled “Employing Your Customers for Fun and Profit”, and had the pleasure of having an interesting conversation with him and some other attendees during the reception party.  So, without further ado, the presenter was:

• Karl Long, Product Manager OVI/Games, Nokia

This session was basically about utilizing social media to get your customers involved to the point where they’re even working for you!

Bullet Point Review!

• Social media is an engine in which to create value.
• Modern marketing theory comes from the last 50 years.
• Companies tend to focus on one motivation – to purchase.
• Tool: trendwatching.com
• Telling people to “pass it on” is a bit insulting to your customer’s intelligence.
• Employ your customers – have them help you create value in a very web 2.0 way.
• Make it easy to join and easy to get better.
• Reward the right behaviors.
• Recognize top performers.
• Allow exchanges.
• Provide rich feedback.
• Experiment.  Fail.  Learn.
• Now’s the time to fail – fail fast so you can succeed sooner.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• If a company can’t survive, do they warrant survival?  Some people see this as a threat – people woill eventually accept it and adopt it, like the internet in general.
• Are there companies that shouldn’t participate in social media?  If you can’t handle transparency, don’t do it.
• How do you convince your company to spend money to fail?  You have to foster the culture to experiment, it’s cheap to try anything with social media.
• Any strategy that relies on containment will fail.
• No walled garden will succeed (Blue Shirt Nation-type internal networks aside)

All in all it was a relevant and humorous presentation by Karl that really deserved better billing!  Check out his blogs at ExperienceCurve.com and Tcritic.com.

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