My slides below from my presentation at one of Australia’s industries leading advertising conferences yesterday which I had previously blogged about “The Advertising and Marketing Summit” It was a jam packed room with around 400 attendees of marketing movers and shakers. I closed the second day with the talk on ‘engaging in virtual communities’ followed by a great talk on Word of Mouth Marketing from Piers Hogarth-Scott, CEO, Yooster & Trustee.

The general tone of the two days seemed to be the usual big broadcast ‘dry-up’, mobile is not quite here and the ramp up of ‘online’ marketing. Sadly online, as a platform, which to me is a multi-faceted beast (basically it is everything that has been before and much more) is still seen by this particular segment of the industry as only about search and web 1.0 push. Laurel Papworth at least raised some questions at the end about making sure companies seriously consider Social Media Marketing at executive level and my key points at the end were get in there, spend time and really understand the culture in the vast range of virtual worlds before making a decision to do any R&D or full blown campaigns.