The two track conference will offer sessions that appeal to active software developers as well as mobile users including marketers, advertisers and enthusiasts. Attendees can choose a single track of learning and information or pick and choose from either track to maximize their experience.

According to event founder and organizer, Justin Grammens, “There are plenty of meetings focused on mobile development or mobile marketing and use. We wanted to bring the two groups together to better understand the overall mobile platform.” Grammens, President of mobile development firm Recursive Awesome and founder of Mobile Twin Cities noted, “We have assembled an agenda of mobile experts and users that will offer unique perspectives on the opportunities with the local, national and global mobile community.”

The agenda, available online at www.mobilemarchtc.com, includes technical sessions addressing the development of applications for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry mobile devices. These sessions will be presented by local developers Aaron Kardell, Robert Green and Shawn Butler respectively. The technical track also includes Beyond the Code: User Experience, Testing, and Support presented by Breon Nagy.

The non-technical mobile users track includes What Do They Want, providing results from a consumer study presented by Carlson Marketing’s Doug Rozen and On the Air and In the Papers, featuring a panel of representatives from local TV, Radio and Newspaper companies. Other sessions slated are Show Me the Money, discussing the future of mobile commerce with Farhan Muhammed, and Mobile Marketing: Watch That Step presented by a panel of marketers highlighting the process of initiating a mobile strategy.

Other agenda items including a keynote to start the day will be announced in the near future.

Registration is now open for Mobile March, Saturday July 27th at the Hilton Garden Inn in Downtown Minneapolis via the Mobile March website or directly through Eventbrite. The cost is $20 and includes lunch.

Minnov8 is pleased to be a sponsor of this event* and joins other event sponsors including: Verizon Wireless, Fusion Room, Best Buy, The Nerdery, Recursive Awesome, Focus Business Development, and RemainComm Media Strategies.

*Minnov8 contributor Phil Wilson is a Mobile March organizer and is the founder of sponsor RemainComm.

Day-Long Conference Highlights Mobile’s March is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Of course you’re paying attention to the always-on, always connected culture of participation online that is fundamentally shifting how we connect with one another, get our news and alerts, are influenced by people we trust and increasingly making our voices heard when we like or don’t like something a company or organization is delivering to us.

If you’ve read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Wikinomics by Don Tapscott, or even the seminal book on the topic, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, than you know about the acceleration in companies looking to figure out how to embrace their customer base and ecosystem for fun and profit (but mostly the profit).

In a growing number of conversations I’m having with business leaders, virtually all of them are either engaged in some form of outreach to their customers, prospects, partners and employees and learning how to engage them in new and online ways. With enough input and smart decision-making, the ability to build and deliver the right products and services goes up dramatically. I thought it a good idea to visit this topic now, especially as there now signs the economy is growing and we’re beginning to experience growth in our trend forecasting businesses, typically one bellwether pointing the way in the housing sector.

Best Buy is the “poster child” for this sort of engagement on a host of fronts. From the employee-only BlueShirtNation (now “Mix“) to Giftag to the relatively new and well executed IdeaX, they’re highly focused on driving forward and engaging on as many fronts as possible.

Though Best Buy is quite public with their offerings — along with an unusual level of transparency and engagement — General Mills is also going out with initiatives like MyBlogSpark to engage women who blog (dubbed “mommybloggers”) in order to engage the typical decision-maker in a household and are the ones who usually drive the family nutrition.

Back in March, the site ReadWriteWeb had a guest author, Tom Powell from Co-Innovative, who wrote this fabulous post on the topic and categorized leading idea and suggestion management vendors with an extensive writeup. 

Powell pointed out these three categories of idea and suggestion management vendors:

Centralized Aggregators:

• Get Satisfaction
• SuggestionBox
• FeVote
• Featurelist

Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints, which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to this data, more powerful features, and the ability to “claim” pages and register official employee moderators. Like review sites such as Epinions, conversation happens on these sites with or without you.

Tool Providers:

• SalesForce Ideas Management
• UserVoice
• IdeaScale
• Get Satisfaction
• Kindling

These systems provide similar functionality to that of the centralized aggregators listed above but are controlled and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings (or up/down votes), moderation, the ability to limit the number of votes per user or the access of certain groups, time-limited contests, and automatic searching for duplicate idea submissions.

Integrated Innovation Management Suites:

• Imaginatik
• BrainBank
• SalesForce Ideas Management
• Brightidea
• Spigit

The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities, such as weighting the contributions of users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise-class security, and customizing captured information. By integrating idea capturing and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the cost of ideas, put ideas through a formal review process, and track their performance from conception to execution.

So which aggregators should you be paying attention to? Which has the greatest reach? The strongest offering?

Read more of Tom Powell’s post here to discover more.

Category to Watch: Idea & Suggestion Management is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

Today’s hosts: Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson. (Photo credit: Lee Odden (TopRankBlog; Flickr).

Joining us on the podcast is a brand new Minnov8 contributor and participant, Gary Koelling, who is Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy Inc. After interactions with Graeme Thickins — who isn’t bashful about promoting Minnov8 — Gary decided he’d like to create for Minnov8 and completed the form (hint: you could too!).

Gary is the founder of BlueShirtNation.com, Giftag.com and leads several social technology projects within Best Buy. He describes himself as a tinkerer, gadfly (and an aspiring iconoclast), reader, tryer (someone who tries), teacher and listener (with a fairly tuned bullshit meter). Due to the success of the efforts he’s involved in, and the high profile of our hometown consumer electronics retailing giant, Gary has been able to talk to lots of people and companies around the country about social media and social technology.

Our favorite quote about his speaking around the country from his LinkedIn profile? “I don’t know if it’s helping, but I enjoy it.” We sure think so since he’s in-the-game, taking risks, experimenting and driving towards high value outcomes for his employer.

LINKS
Here are links to sites, products or other resources discussed during the podcast:

• Good economic news for MN tech firms in Q4 2008: MTS revs up 9%, EPS up 21% (view MTS “Test Suite“) and NVE up 24%, EPS up 44% (view NVE “Fun Facts” page)
• Mashable article on 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them (Scroll down to the “Retail” section)
• Fortune Top 100 Best Places to Work: Mayo (24th) and General Mills (39th) as great places to work (via MNHeadhunter)
• Forbes listing America’s Top Most Wired Cities: Minneapolis is #7 on the list
• The (mostly mythological) “Osborne Effect” but is there some reality to it in an online world?
• Macintosh image editors increasingly used by Tim Elliott: Acorn and Pixelmator
• Gary headed to Etail in Phoenix and a Computerworld event (both he and his cohort and colleague, Steve Bendt)
• EVENTS: Social Media Breakfast 1/30/09; Minnedemo (RSVP if you want to get in!) 2/6/09; Unsummit 3/7/09.

Minnov8 Gang Podcast – Episode 22 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

The agenda is still coming together based upon attendee input but the theme of “Hacking the Recession” sounds timely and a good way to frame social media marketing in these challenging economic times.

If you are unfamiliar with UnSummit, you can check out our coverage here and on our podcast or visit the UnSummit blog. A sign-up list for attendees is on the UnSummit wiki. Without the overlap with the MIMA Summit, it looks to be a much larger event this time. Hope to see you there…

UnSummit Set To Return March 7 is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As we’ve written here before, Best Buy is one of the leaders in the adoption of social media in the retail industry. Their CMO, Barry Judge, has started blogging and has taken to Twitter. He’s very transparent in his exploration of conversational marketing in interviews like this one. But probably the best overview is a video we posted here last month that features an interview with Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson who clearly is behind their use of social tools and techniques.

Target, in contrast, is opaque on all things social and their CMO, Michael Francis, seems from the corporate model of a brilliant planner, not innovator. Although they have been involved in conversational marketing — I recall meeting blogger Robert Scoble some 3 years ago after a day of meetings at Target — their efforts to date have been mixed. A well planned Facebook campaign was marred by controversy. And there was that episode with bloggers who took issue with a billboard in New York. Not the kind of case studies you would want from a company who clearly is a leading force in retail brand advertising.

So I will be tracking each company and their marketing efforts over the next several months and posting highlights here. If past is prologue, my gut tells me we’ll be seeing a lot of innovation from Best Buy, particularly in their use of social media. But the folks at Target might also surprise us. In these difficult times, the most innovative will likely win.

Marketing Innovation: Best Buy vs. Target is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.

As you can see from Phil Wilson’s Unsummit post, there were those who ignored the hype and chose to do their own (free) concurrent event at a nearby pub, thank you very much. (Okay, many of them were too cheap to pay the big MIMA fee.) And the MIMA folks actually cheered them on (even from the stage the day of the two events), since they felt bad they couldn’t have accommodated more people. But the venue — the very nice Depot downtown — could literally take no more. (MIMA has vowed to find a bigger site next year though that won’t be easy — maybe the Convention Center?) This year’s attendance, I believe, was something north of 700. MIMA’s membership is now about 950, but the Summit’s attendees also included some non-members and invited speakers, of course.

So, how did the event go?  This was my first year attending (they have not given press passes to us lowly bloggers in the past), so I went courtesy of my employer, to do some serious working of the crowd.  My assessment: the hype didn’t quite meet the reality as far as the overall content, as quality conferences go. But this is an association, after all, not a professional conference producer. And don’t we all kinda forgive a certain percentage of marketing build-up most of the time?  Nonetheless, the logistics were handled quite well, and my hat’s off to the MIMA officers and their band of volunteers who pulled this thing off. (I’m sure they’ve worked out a lot of bugs over the several years they’ve sponsored this event.)

As with any event like this, I attend much more for the people, the networking, the connections, and that part was excellent. The chance to exchange notes and news with your peers, meet new folks in our amazing marketing and advertising community, and meet out-of-town speakers as well made the event very worthwhile. As they say, it’s what goes on in the hallways that matters, not in the meeting rooms. In the age of Conversational Marketing, this was indeed a blab fest of the highest order.

The highlight of the day for most everyone was surely the lunch speaker, Ze Frank. This guy is a polished, well coached and practiced speaker to large audiences (including the likes of the TED conference and other high-brow affairs), and he did not disappoint. The man is flat-out funny and entertaining. He’s a bona fide Internet celebrity since launching his first video (him dancing) several years ago, a video that went viral beyond all viral to that date. (He talked about getting a $30,000 bandwidth bill from his ISP after that experience.)  See more about the Ze Frank Show at this page of his archived links or visit his blog at www.ZeFrank.com. (By the way, if you want to be cool, you pronounce his first name “zay.”)

It’s a good thing Ze was so well received, because the earlier keynote, to open the event, was horrid. Note to planners: one hour is too long, and editors may write well, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to speak. (I live-Twittered the event: here’s my archive page, which is six screen shots of my tweets, starting with the beginning of the event on top.)

So, what else did I pick up about the event, what was the overall buzz?  Well, there were those who said it wasn’t “interactive enough,” which is an interesting take for a gathering of interactive marketers. But it can be hard to have participatory discussions with such a large group (impossible?), even in the breakout sessions — some of which easily drew 150+ in packed rooms with many standing.  Choosing breakout sessions is always a challenge, and I missed some very good ones because, well, I had to make one choice each session. I’m sure many went away feeling the same.  There were just too many not-to-miss talks scheduled concurrently (not good planning on the part of MIMA) — six each in two particular sessions! Way too difficult to choose, and jumping from one to another, to catch two concurrent sessions you like, just never really works.

Funny thing was, two other breakout sessions had four choices each and were largely duds — none of the choices had much appeal to me at all.  So, I left feeling I missed what could have been some really good content.  Example: I just had to attend “Mobile…2009 and Beyond” (which was good), but missed the concurrent session with the Zappos guy talking about “Making the Customer Connection in 140 Characters or Less” (that would be Twitter). But I made up for it by chatting with him at the cocktail reception later.

I was only able to catch two other breakout sessions: one on ad exchanges vs. networks (by Google), which was only mildly interesting to anyone except a media buyer, and another called “Marketing Mix Challenge,” which had four panelists describe how they would spend “only” $500k on a fictitious consumer product launch. I heard criticism later from people on that one who just don’t relate to the large agency world, which thinks $500k is a small budget.

But, all in all, it was as successful an event as each individual made it to be. And I made it a good one — lots of great new connections with whom I look forward to following up.

MIMA Summit Packs The Depot is a post from: Minnov8 and published under a Creative Commons license.