AMA Boston Meetup Summary
2008
I went to the AMA Boston meetup on Wednesday night at Brandy Peete’s which is waay downtown Boston if you’ve never been there. There were about 20 people at the final count when things got underway which I thought was a little surprising considering that this is HQ’d in a major metropolitan area, I thought there would be more. I also thought there would be more because of their excellently maintained blog and website which is frequently updated with good content (good job there!). What was even more surprising was that board members remarked on how weird it was that there were “so many people” at the meetup, several more than they had expected.
I had a chance to meet the upcoming President, Myles Bristowe, who kindly and capably introduced me around, something I’m perennially awkward at, and then we jumped straight into the evening’s topic: The Buzz Around Viral Marketing. I had a problem with this right off the bat due to the fact that there is something called “buzz marketing” and there is something called “viral marketing” – they can be a part of each other but they’re not the same thing. Everyone tossed out what they considered to be a buzzword, I chose “Enterprise 2.0″ and we were off to the races.
Follow up questions were about whether or not we are fully knowledgeable about the buzzwords we might use or if we thought our bosses abused buzzwords in their ignorance, etc. I think we should have talked about what qualifies as buzz vs. what are attempts by corporate to invent buzz (which always inevitably fails).
Then things became confusing with trying to tie this in with viral marketing. Everyone in our group decided that viral marketing is an “old” concept (think Fuller Brush salesman) that is just being leveraged more because there are more technology-driven tools to viral market with (thank you inventor of email). I attempted to bring up Burger King’s Brooke Burke buzz marketing effort from 2006 where pictures of Burke and “the King” were “leaked” to online venues and thus the buzz began. Now, did the Brook Burke campaign tie in with BK’s product offerings? No. It just created brand buzz that came to a sudden crash after the Brook Burke BK Superbowl commercial of 2007. BK’s agency used viral marketing to push a buzz message. I’m not sure if many people got it but at least I felt I made a point.
I met some sharp people there, including the AMA Boston VP of Sponsorship, Cecil Dorman, who turned me on to the Boston-based Web Innovators Group whose next meeting I’m planning on attending (7/15). I’ll definitely be going to another AMA Boston event in the near future but they also mentioned that I am eligible to go to the Albany AMA group as well but their event schedule looks very skimpy. It was great to (finally) meet up with people I would consider peers in my field as there are so few (capable and articulate) people in my immediate locale that I can network with. Boston is a haul though, something to consider as gas gets even more expensive.
