Having questioned whether live blogging is a good thing or not... I'm here this morning at The Colonnade in Boston to bring you a few tips from the Society for New Communications Research Inaugural Research Symposium.

First, a word of thanks to SNCR executive director Jennifer McClure who has worked incredibly hard to produce this event. (Thanks Jen!) Second, in the spirit of full disclosure, I am an SNCR Fellow (oops, looks like I need to add my bio).

You won't find anything, er, snarky in what I write today, given that I'm not a totally impartial observer.

The New Influencers

Tech jurnalist and consultant Paul Gillin offers a few highlights from his new book: The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media (to be published in spring 2007).

Tidbits from Paul:

- Used to be that a happy customer tells 3 people about your company; an unhappy customer tells 10 people. Now, via blogs, an unhappy customer tells 10,000 people. He shows as an example the by now iconic video clip of customer Vincent Ferrari trying to cancel his AOL account. (Yes, the AOL customer service rep was ultimately fired.)

- "Marketing has become a spread-sheet driven discipline."  But that's not working anymore, says Gillin. He's referring, presumably, to impressions, click-throughs and other Web metrics that online marketers live and die by.

- Refers to P&G CEO A.G. Lafley's keynote speech to the ANA's annual conference and his key point: marketers are most likely to succeed when they let customers be in control.

More later... maybe. I'm gonna just listen for a while.

Useful Links

AOL said, 'If you leave me, I'll do something crazy' - Randall Stross's Digital Domain column in The New York Times (requires subscription).

Backbone Media and Northeastern University's Blogging Success Study (published Nov. 2, 2006)

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