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.

The afternoon sessions on day 2 were great. I focused on probably the smallest room and it allow for more intimate discussions:

How to Pitch VCs with Rick Segal and Susan Dingwall Williams

I read both Rick and Susan’s blogs regularly and I was excited to see both of them. Rick did a great job of providing an quick overview of how to pitch VCs and the keys to get VC interest. I didn’t there was really anything new in his presentation was but it was great to see everything outline. Some key highlights for me were the time lines for
funding, 6 months to raise, 18 months to provide and the rinse and repeat until exit. And ALL VCs are looking for an exit plan. Rick also spoke briefly about Angels in Canada, and believed their issued approximately $21M last year in capital. Many of the Angel funded projects were not practical for VCs.

Build a Team, Build a Culter with Mark Dowds

I was seriously impressed with the setup and process that Mark went through in this session to start the discussion. The audience was divided into groups of 4-5 people and each group member was given a hidden agenda. In many cases these agenda conflicted and the group was asked to develop different aspects of their companies strategy of
vision. In my group was some members were focused on having fun and others were focused on results, and punishing for bad results, it ended up being a funny corporate vision of ‘Have fun performing, or else…” The process was great and it was interesting to see how each group tried to solve these differences.

Building a community with Kate Trgovac

Kate had the unlucky position of closing off the conference but she did a great job of creating a discussion around building an online community. She used several current examples, like flickr, or facebook and was able to help define what is an online community and what is a platform. It helped that there was also many people in audience that
were actively in the process of trying to build a community.

Day 1 of Mesh 2007 is complete and I think my overall impression is that Mesh continues to be a great conference to network but the sessions were fairly weak.

Many of the sessions are panelist based and lacked diversity. For example the new vs old media lacked anyone from the old media. This made for a fairly repetitive and dull session. I’m not sure the selection of panelists was ideal either, many didn’t have a lot to offer. I felt that many sessions were too long, often running close to a hour. So I’d like to see shorter sessions, maybe even more tracks so the sessions can be smaller and more intimate.

There seems to be a strong shift to professionals from last year. I don’t know if the student numbers were reduced or if less showed up. I haven’t met many students yet and the number of startups, hard core geeks also seems to be down. Many of the people I’ve met have been ad agencies…

The after Mesh social event was kinda disappointing too with the group fragmenting around the distillery district. The speakers were no where to be found ( atleast till 11pm when I left ) and the boiler room was difficult to get seated where service was available.

I’m excited about Day 2, the line-up is much more solid and if all else fails there is lots of breaks for meshing.

For those of you familiar with DemoCamp, CaseCamp may be the polar position with its flashy power point presentations and marketing case studies. For anyone interest in online or interactive campaigns its a great event to see what works and what doesn’t. CaseCamp Toronto at The Fifth Club Wednesday nigth after a summer break and several other CaseCamps around the Canada ( Montreal & Vancouver ). I enjoy CaseCamp because it lets me see how online marketing campaigns are evolving. This months cases included:

1. The Greatest Escapes Viral Campaign by Sulemaan Ahmed from SearsTravel Sulemaan presented a case study about the Sear’s Travel division. I didn’t even know that Sears had a Travel division and the campaign’s goal was to increase aware and let customers know that Sears was willing to be competitive on price with other discount travel providers. The case centered on alot of differences between the first phase and the second phase which allowed for improvements in the overall user experience. I think it would have been good to see the campaign contest live as the power point slides were quite dull. Overall the case centered around user improvements to achieve its goal and the success of the second phase vs first.
2. Branding Botswana by Malcolm Allen from Placebrands Malcom definitely wins the award for the most innovation presentation. His presentation involved no power points or even computers. He ask the audience to close their eyes and them took them through a visualization exercise on visiting Botswana. The presentation was very cool but the content was kind of lacking and Malcom didn’t seem to have a clear goal for the branding project. I suspect its fairly early on the Botswana branding project and he’s still trying to develop a goal himself. It might have been more interesting to review the case for Amsterdam and its results.
3. Aeroplan Activation Sequence by Ian Giles from ThinData
   
   The Aeroplan case involved the new user activation process and how users interact with it through their email. Ian provided some before and after samples of the email activation and how the emails were improved to achieve Aeroplan’s goals. Overall Aeroplan’s goal seemed to be get the user to use their Aeroplan number as soon as possible. The adjusted email focused on bringing the users temporary electronic card forward up higher in the message and reducing some of the graphic placements.
4. Family Guy vs. American Dad by Ryan Ginsberg from Fuel Industries Fuel really stole the show in terms of interactive presentations. Ryan did a great job of presenting the campaigns goals and integrating into his presentation. He was even able to play the game during his presentation which was great. He presented the traffic to the campaign’s mini-site and other online metrics. He was not able to present the conversion rate to sales as this was controlled by Fox. Overall a great case and I hope others will be able to present the actual interactive matrial like this again.

After the success of Fuel’s presentation, I think the format of Casecamp should be amended to show the actual interactive campaign. I thought the same after the first Casecamp in which Royal Bank did an interactive campaign and didn’t show the actually interactive until after their presentation was completed. I’m looking forward to future CaseCamps with more interactive presentations.

I attended a new marketing event last night, CaseCamp. Based on the popular BarCamp/DemoCamp format its goal is to bring marketing professionals together. It was first event and it consisted of 4 marking case studies. There are a number of rules for the cases including a max of 5 slides, and 5 words per slide. The cases consisted of:

1. Snow-for-Gold The first case was presented by Kate Trgovac on Petro-Canada’s 2006 Winter Olympic micro-site, Snowforthegold.ca. The site allows Canadians to send personalized ‘snow flakes’ to their favourite athlete’s online. Kate’s summary of the good/bad points of the case was great. I thought the 2nd benefits of the program were really strong. While the number of actual snow flakes sent was low they did see an increase in traffic the main Petro-Canada site and a number of users who used to their Petro-Canada points to send premium snow flakes. I would have liked to get more information on the online advertising campaign in particular the decision on which sites to advertise.
2. Getting-Started The next case was presented by Nicole Mondville on a problem only a bank would have. Basically every year banks need to transition teenagers from free or lower-cost bank programs into high fee accounts. Their ability to engage teenagers in this process to get them to start paying has been minimal ( big surprise ). The case focused on a micro-site that RBC had created to teenagers to choose their banking options. Overall the micro-site was impressive ( as seen after the presentation ) but the presentation was fairly dull. I would have liked to hear more about why the bank doesn’t engage third-parties that are aggressively trying to engage the youth marketing. For example sign-up for an adult-bank account and get $1500 off GM Car. It would seem to me that the banks could have lot more success engaging youth if they packaged their adult offering with incentives from third-parties.
3. Blogging at the AGO
   Eli Singer and Susan Bloch-Nevitte presented a very interesting case of the AGO using the Blogphere to promote an event. The AGO is in to process of a massive redesign with the help of Frank Gehry. As part of the launch of project they held a special event for bloggers and then included them as part of the media day. The effect was that bloggers produced better articles than mainstream media, which was focused on the Wayne Gretzky scandal. The AGO also conducted a survey of their visitors and saw an increase in their target audience 19-30. I thought the most interesting part was that a high percentage indicated they heard about the AGO through the blogsphere. Blogs combined with ‘word of mouth’ accounted for approximate 60% of visitors during the exhibit.
4. JBOSS Marketing
   Eloqua presented the last case on behalf of JBOSS ( recently bought by Oracle ) on their marketing automation software. The line between marketing automation and lead tracking was a little grey with this presentation. Basically as I understood the Eloqua/JBOSS deployment it allowed JBOSS to track leads and then rank them based on cross-media exposure. For example if a company calls JBOSS it receives a rank of 1, if the same company visits the webpage it receives a rank of 2, if someone from the company then joins a web conference it gets increased to 3. In this way JBOSS can assign a priority to the leads that are coming in from the various sources and filter the quality leads from the noise.

Overall I was very impressed with CaseCamp. It had a much different feel from DemoCamp ( my only other camp experience ) but was very incite full to anyone interested in marketing. Eli did a great job organizing and I think CaseCamp will only improve as it evolves, for example the the 5 words per slide limit will be removed, and I expect the next CaseCamp to be a similar success.