How To Be a Great Moderator

I am moderating a panel at Silverpop’s 2009 Marketing Masterclass next week on Engagement Email Marketing Problems Solved and thought I’d take a look around the web to see what were the best practices for moderating a  panel.

I came up with a couple of gems from two highly respected gentlemen:

• How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel
  A Comprehensive Guide by Jeremiah Owyang looking at each stage of moderating a panel. It was recommended reading for all moderators at Ad:Tech 2008 and Web 2.0 Expo in 2008.

• How To Be a Great Moderator
  By Guy Kawasaki – though shorter, it gives ten great points on making a panel entertaining and informative.

It was suprisingly hard using Google to find video examples of panels online so if anyone knows of any send them my way, I would be interested to watch

(Image source: Olivander)

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The last few months have been busy ones on the blogging front. I am now also posting on the DMA Email Marketing blog (albeit sporadically right now which I need to do better on!) and have also launched Silverpop’s EMEA Engagement Marketing blog in both English and German and so am posting there as well. The EMEA blogs bring a local perspective to Engagement Marketing talking about the latest topics from around the web and providing best practice advice and thought leadership on this new marketing paradigm.

Wow, what a week. That is the only way to sum up last week. Monday kicked off with the launch of Silverpop’s new brand and website around the theme of Engagement Marketing. More on that in another post and almost certainly many more as this idea of actually communicating with your customers rather than shouting is the basis of successful marketing within web 2.0 type websites.

The rest of the week was of course, The Technology for Marketing show which was timed perfectly for Silverpop’s new message. The seminars were buzzing, with all the theatres tightly packed and even more people peering in from outside trying to catch the latest and greatest. There was plenty of presentations around engagement marketing and unsurprisingly the recession. Apart from Silverpop’s own session on using email in tandem with social networks; one in particular stood out for me; Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy had a great session on the opportunities to grow your brand in a downturn and I heard Google’s session on marketing in a recession was also interesting, though I missed this. Thankfully, all the presentations are due to be released online – you can see them all here.

Overall, there did seem to be more people attending the show this year over previous years and I therefore spent more time networking than usual. It was great to catch up with Tamara Gielen and Denise Cox who were over from Belgium and Ireland respectively for a few days and talk email marketing. Tamara has just launched her own email marketing consultancy having left Ogily at the end of last year and was sporting some new and very funky business cards courtesy of moo.com. I’ll leave it to her to provide samples

With all the people attending, the Tweetups each morning were a quick and easy way to organise  meeting up with people. Of course, from the stats I posted the other week, marketers are one of the largest groups on Twitter today. I made use of the Tweetup meeting point throughout both days as a result. There were plenty of interesting conversations at the Tweetups themselves and it has given me a whole host of things to follow up on. I am waiting to check out a new new service called Gist. They somehow manage your social network and hopefully solve a problem that is especially acute for me: information overload. Here is hoping they fulfill on that! Given the email marketing crowd, there was plenty of debate on the future of email usage, given the reduction in usage by teenagers and their increased use of social networks. Needless to say I had plenty to say on that given Silverpop’s new message and the seminar we did on combining email and social networks

Overall it was a good week – now for CeBIT this week!

It is not often that I write about Silverpop – a company that provides enterprise class email marketing solutions and one that I have worked at for 9 months now. This has not been because I have nothing to say, but more because I have been afraid of turning this blog into a marketing website for email marketing and Silverpop’s products (I am a fan so I choose instead to leave this blog for talking about the Internet, where I want it to go and what other companies are doing to move the medium forward). I think in hindsight this is a mistake and I should talk more about email marketing, especially as I am a huge proponent for it (I will try and avoid turning this blog into a marketing page though!).

So, what has caused me to look at this? RSS. IRSS (Individualised RSS) to be precise. It is an evolution of the RSS standard which will allow content to be published in a way that can be targeted, measured and personalised. This means that every subscriber to an RSS feed can receive unique content meant only to him or her or a specific group.

Silverpop have released a product called RSS Direct, which takes advantage of IRSS and combines it with an enterprise class email marketing solution. This means that marketers can start using RSS in the same way they already do with email such as tracking, content personalisation, segmentation, event triggered posts, enterprise level security etc.

More than that though, you can put an end to phishing emails by only communicating through an IRSS feed. This is one benefit I think will certainly change the way companies communicate with their customers. A bank for example can use IRSS to guarantee delivery and the authenticity of its messages. Right now there is a chance that a message cannot get through or that the customer will think it is a fake. IRSS means that not only will the specific individual see the message but also the individual will know that there is no danger of it being faked by those pesky phishers.

There are plenty of other scenarios I can think of but they will have to wait till another day!