Earlier today, I spoke at Marketing Tech around the idea of treating email marketing as a conversation. From the feedback it seemed to go down well 🙂

The conference overall was good – I liked the interactivity of the sessions rather than the more usual presentations delivered usually – it is nothing like the interaction present in tech/web 2.0 conferences though – but then this is a much less tech orientated crowd – it was mostly brand or internet marketers present. In fact, I never even saw an open laptop during any of the sessions.

The session I was looking forward to, and most related to this blog, was the Web 2.0 session presented by Will Mcinnes (I am 99% certain he will visit this site again if he practises what he preaches and tracks his “ego” online!). These sorts of sessions are again completely different to the web 2.0 conferences. I asked a question regarding Twitter and how brands should look to get involved. I don’t think he really answered my question – mainly because not many had even heard of Twitter yet – even my geek savvy Account Manager had not heard of it as (though I sense she will be using it shortly) – I imagine this would almost be sacrilege in a web 2.0 conference these days! In any case, the session lived up to expectations and I thought he got across the concepts of “buzz marketing” and “sentiment analysis” and the idea of having a conversation with your audience which I believe is the way forward. Of couse to have a conversation you have to listen..

So one of the tools he mentioned was Brandwatch which I am assuming are these guys. They look interesting, and seemed to be able to show where conversations involving your brand are taking place. It is certainly a good place to start. Nielsen Buzz Metrics is a similar tool – I have used Nielson’s BlogPulse in the past to track conversations online and found it to be a useful free tool, though Will mentioned that Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics is paid for. Google Alerts is an even easier starting point to track your brand online, though possibly more time consuming.

Anyway, I don’t want to regurgitate the whole session again here – I recommend you head over to either Will’s blog or his company website for more info.