CaseCamp was back in action last night at the Century Room. As always Eli Singer and the Casecamp team had a great line up of marketing cases and the place was
packed. I really impressed with the turn out, my estimate was there was close to 200 people there. The presentation area and seating were well setup so that you could see and hear the speakers from almost anywhere. The four cases for the night were:

1/ Yamaha Motors Sled Talk Blog by Maggie Fox

Yamaha has created a blog for the snowmobiles written Chris Reid, one of its long time product planners and avid readers. Like most large corporation the thought of blogging was initially kinda of scary and initial concerns were around controlling the feedback/comments and messaging. The blog opened with alot of readers and minimal promotion
was done initially the attract readership while the program was monitored. I thought the tracking of user comments was fairly interesting with 43% positive, 48% neutral and only 8% negative.  Through the blog Yamaha was also able to track interaction with a key snowmobile influencer and who his experience on the Yamaha blog led him to represent the Yamaha snowmobiles on other forums. Overall a great case, with a fair bit of meat about how Yamaha used their blog, monitored it and saw benefit from it.

2/ Freshdaily and Blogto by Tim Shore

Freshdaily is one of Canada’s leading blog networks with blog’s covering the Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Most of the presentation was focused Blogto.com ( being that Toronto is the center of the universe, this was all good ) and how the blog has evolved to become a major media source. The content is focused on cultural events and has
expanded to cover major events like the film festival and popular restaurants. The site has also started publishing to other media sources like the National post. The presentation was interested but I would have like to hear more about how Blogto is using social media.

Their Facebook group was only mentioned briefly and they have a huge Flickr following as well. It would have to be great to understand how
their using these media.

3/ BMW Canada by John Capella and Paul Curtin

This was probably the weakest presentation of the night. I think there was probably too much information trying to be covering in the little time allowed. I think it would have been good to pick a component of the BMW online strategy and go deep on it. Major online sites like the BMW M Owners club were glossed mainly as a result of time. I think BMW has been pretty innovating in getting its brand out their with BMW Films and some of their loyalty programs. I thought one of the most interesting aspects was hearing that 80% of BMW lease their vehicle so the customer satisfaction and retention programs are so important. The other key take away was that BMW seems 90% of their
buyers using the internet to research their vehicles.

4/ Specialized Riding Club by Chris Mathews

Chris did a great job of setting the scene for why Specialized wanted to create a riders club and the decision to create a paid program rather than exclusively free one. As part of the riders club subscribers get stickers, shirts and all sort of Specialized crap but the biggest feature they get is the ability to create content. This was a conscience decision to only allow paid subscribers to create content in the form of rides, a journal/blog and other interaction. Free subscribers can participate in existing rides and events but
cannot create their own. I thought this was interesting process to monetize the site and create some clear definition around paid and free programs. Chris also provide alot of insight into what went well and what didn’t, talking about how the initial target was only high-end biker purchasers and believing that stores would not want to participate.

Another great nite for the CaseCamp team, I think my final thoughts were that its hard its probably best to present a single smaller more focused case than try to present too much.  Everything was well organized and a great environment to network and see what other companies are up working on.

I missed most of the Mesh07 Wrap but it didn’t seem like a lot of people stayed for it either. It was a muggy day and most of us had been out late the night before. The socializing moved over to thePoque Mahones and it seemed pretty quiet there too.

Overall I thought Mesh07 was again a great place to network but still lacking as conference. I really found the bigger panel like discussions to be a complete waste of time and lacked any meaningful content or discussion. The smaller sessions were a lot more insightful so I’d suggest there probably needs to be more of these and less of the big
full session keynotes.

I’d also suggest that Mesh needs to start eating its own cookies ( as Mike McDermett puts it ). The wiki was missing from last year and it would have been great for people to be able to add to the schedule. Specifically the rooms weren’t displayed on the online scheduled and the speaker bios were not available in the paper version.

It was also very hard to track the online activity around the conference without searching Technorati or Google directly. I’d suggest there should be a process for each session to allow people to submit blog links, photos, videos etc.. It should be really easy for me to see what is happening in other sessions. This would also help to
promote mesh for more people who might be on the fence for next year.

I’d also like to see more start-ups and more students participate. I’m not sure the conference can survive otherwise.

Mesh07 Day 2 kicked off with a bit a little weak with the PR session with Richard Eldeman. Unless you were really into PR this one was difficult to handle.

The 2nd keynote was a big hit with Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of Craigslist. Working at Trader Corporation I’ve followed Craigslist for awhile so it was great to hear more information about their business. The most interesting aspect was their business philosophy. Craigslist is a unique position of many alot of money and not really needing to
create huge profits for its investors. I really admire them for them for this approach and their view Craigslist almost like a utility/service for people in many aspects of their life, from dating to finding a home, or getting a job.

Jim handled most of the questions directly but really didn’t have much information to reveal. The company still has 24 employees, with 2/3 focus on the technology and 1/3 focused on customer service. They have no sales or marketing people. Their office is in a small victorian house in San Francisco. I’d love to visit their office at some point.

In Canada they receive over 500,000 classified ads per month and the site ranks 7th in overall site traffic. Toronto is the 2nd largest Canadian Craigslist city, after Vancouver and both cities are the top 25 overall Craigslist cities. Craigslist revenue was not disclosed but Jim did mention that they are charging for job postings in 7 cities and real estate brokers in NYC. They began charging after discussing with their users in these cities and found that charging would provide a good barrier for spam or too much content. Before charging in any category they discuss the concept on the user forum for that category/region.

The singular strategy that Jim talked about was listening to users and providing services that users want. I love the concept of this but I think it might be a little mis-representative. For example Jim mentioned that users do not want video. I’m not certain this is entirely true and providing video would substancially increase the
complexity and traffic requirements of the Craigslist experience.

As a fan of Green technology I was excited to hear Jim discussing page views per kilowatt hour. Craigslist can achieve 175K per kilowatt hour, which he believed was industry leading. Craigslist currently runs on approximately 200 servers hosted at multiple locations. Overall I really found Jim’s discussion/interview to be very entertaining and it did provide alot of incite into the Craigslist business.