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For those who attended my seminar on “Creating WOM-Worthy Online Destinations,” you can download the presentation here.

Conference kicks off today with a keynote address by Chip Heath, co-author of “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” Terrific content – wish Chip would have had a little more coffee prior to speech (but I digress). His rules to make things stick: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Stories (SUCCESS).

He also said something that reminds me of what Steve Jobs of Apple (are there other Steve Jobs out there?) once said. (Paraphrasing) Great ideas will never come from a committee or focus group. No focus group would have created the iPod. Amen. (He didn’t say amen. That’s my comment.)

I do disagree with one point. Chip suggested that being unexpected is not critical. Hmm. I’ll have to read his book.

Wednesday’s keynote speaker was David Weinberger whose topic was “Markets are conversations.” David starts off by asking if a business’s involvement in the conversation helps? And if marketing should be a conversation?

Key theme #1: There are no markets for messages. People hate marketing messages. Traditional marketers try to force marketing messages on customers. He calls it a war against customers, where marketers use war-like language, e.g., “targeting,” “penetration”. Customers try their best to avoid ads and being marketed to.

Key theme #2: People will trust other people’s opinion before marketing messages. (Not worth asking about all the conflicting research on this point. I guess no one really knows. Or as David would say, “no one fucking knows.” True conversations, David said, with real people provide positives and negatives as well as things you’ve never thought of. People like that and are more likely to believe what’s said.

Theme #3: What’s a real conversation? Real voices, open ended, voluntary, about what we’re interested in. Fallible. Fallible is key. If it’s not, it’s marketing or lecturing.

Trends:

* Control by the market is increasing, People to People
* New principles for organizing things (this was really interesting): owners of the information or data no longer owns the order of things. Think about libraries. They own the information/books, and they own how they are organized (card files). Not any more. Now the customers own the order of things and how things are organized through things like tagging.

* OK. Now he’s going over the obvious: tags (he asked this audience if we ever heard of del.icio.us or Digg)

* Inability to admit fallibility kills conversation

Can marketers stop being dicks? Well, he says, clients want to sell “shit” (his word). Customers respond to bright shiny stuff, like jingles. Marketers delude themselves by thinking they are helping the conversation.

Can marketing enter into the conversation? Suggests to make a straightforward, transparent case based on facts. And stay away from the fluff, which isn’t helpful for the conversation. Uses a great example of crappy, fluffy copywriting.