This year’s Business Marketing Association (BMA) Conference was very enjoyable. This was The Marketing Consigliere’s second time, so he was able to reconnect with people he had met with the previous year. While The Venetian was a great place to visit in 2007, he thought that Loews Lake Las Vegas Resort was an amazing venue and made it a much more relaxing atmosphere in which to network with other B2B marketers. He met a lot of great folks from agencies and leadership in the B2B marketing world, including Ellis Booker from BtoB Magazine, Jeff Hayzlett, BMA Vice Chairman and Chief Business Development Officer for Eastman Kodak Company, and Alan Scott, the SVP & CMO of Dow Jones.

There was a particular breakout session that he found very useful entitled “Optimizing Marketing Spend Through Influence Networks.” On the panel were Myra Norton of Community Analytics, Matt Goddard of R2Integrated, Tom Michael of Jack Morton Worldwide, and Steve Patrizi of LinkedIn, (It was really cool to meet someone from LinkedIn, which finally really took off last year although he had been a member 3 years prior to that.) The basic walkaway he got from the session was that networks and communities are complex and don’t have to be online to be useful, and it takes a disciplined methodology to determine who the true influencers in a community are. Likewise, it takes a great deal of thought on how to reach out to those influencers in a way that will encourage them to engage in a dialogue with your community.

The keynote speakers were absolutely stellar. On Wednesday, Eduardo Conrado, the Corporate Vice President of Global Business & Technology Marketing and Communications for Motorola, described how his company is bringing public sector customers into an “immersive digital experience” which facilitates good lead generation.

On Thursday, Judith Sim, the Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer of Oracle, gave the audience a talk entitled “From Marketing Communications to Participation Marketing – Data is the Driver.” First of all, Judith, THANK YOU. Data is the driver. It always has been ; only now it’s finally in digital format in a way that helps marketers. Your presentation was one of the most amazing I have ever seen and underscores why Oracle is a top notch marketing organization. Your tenure there of 20 years is equally impressive and clearly you deserve a lot of credit for such a compreshensive, well executed plan. Print publishers, however, were probably not happy to see that you dropped all print advertisements except for the Wall Street Journal. Just another bad day for those who don’t get Oracle’s embrace of network centric marketing

The best perk for attending the BMA Annual Conference wasn’t’ the beautiful venue and world class speakers from Fortune 500 companies. It was from Aaron Kahlow’s consultancy, Business OnLine. BMA Conference attendees received a complimentary website SEO assessment or usability audit. By signing up for a half-hour session, you could get a clear, understandable and constructive critique of your site.

Now The Marketing Consigliere has been involved with sales and marketing over the Internet since before most people knew how to spell “www,” and  he has met a lot of people who claim to be SEO mavens. Most of them are just snake oil salesmen. Not Ray “Catfish” Comstock - he is awesome. He can quickly guide you through the pitfalls of SEO like no other. If your company needs the real SEO deal, call the pros at Business Online.

The Marketing Consigliere hopes to see everyone again next year.