This week has seen lots of interesting conversations on the Ad:tech blog. Would like to thank all of you who have taken the trouble to comment, here is a summary of some of the discussions so far:

There was a few comments around the overall structure and content of Ad:tech Jonathan Kerr observed that it is all too easy for us to fall into the trap of delivering ‘Digital 101′ as many conferances do however he also observed that there could be clients attending these sorts of events and that potentially, shifting focus to integrate more detailed case studies of how success was achieved might make the content more relevant to them. This was a recommendation echoed by many others including James Horne who also suggested we introduce some technical and architectural sessions. Chris Simon pointed out that there are few conferences that successfully combine tech, news, internet, mobile, video, blogging, tagging and twittering environment int a cohesive package… Lets hope we achieve this with your help this year.

In looking at how we achieve this, Ian Lyons had another interesting idea “Go old school, migrate a face to face solution selling approach to online.” I liked his idea of developing some workshops around how digital can help clients solve their customers’ problems and potentially involving some effective salespeople to share their advice.

There was a lot of discussion about the need to develop some content around strategy and provide some direction to organisations on how to plan and implement their digital at a higher level than tactical campaign execution. Within the discussion around strategic development, there a number of people talking about the bigger job to be done: figuring out where and how digital fits into a client organisation. Graham Christie discussed the need to look at how is Mobile starting to take a role in Service, Sales, and Operations areas, however the topic of social media in organisations seemed to stimulate the most interest. Marc Loveridge talked about how corporations need to change the culture of the organisation to be more open and transparent (individual by individual). Scott Drummond discussed the need to take a more detailed look at the options available for where the social media buck stops in a business and figuring out where social media sits within an organisation and Stephen Collins strengthened this thought with suggestions about the need to focus on corporate cultural change, employee engagement and leadership innovation evolving the corporate DNA itself. Rogerio de Paula Assis raised the interesting question as to how you educate people outside of the marketing department about the importance of these initiatives (perhaps you could bring them to ad:tech). It seems like this might be shaping up to be an interesting panel topic on “Implications of Digital on Organisational structures”…any thoughts?

When looking at digital strategy from an agency (or supplier perspective) Aaron Michie asked “ who cares if they’re at a specialist shop, an ad agency, or internal?“ As the space expands it becomes more human driven in every possible way. There was a lot of interesting discussion around this in response to Julian Coles post on “Are Australian bloggers cannibalizing the role of Social Media Marketers?”. While Laurel Papworth said “Freenomics is eventually gonna do us ALL out of a job.”, Lee Hopkins commented that the ability to harvest that advice is a world and a ton of brain cells away from being able to actually develop a strategy. Gavin Heaton talked about the emergence of a multidisciplinary role of “business designer”. Perhaps yet another job title to talk about. I think Scott Drummond summed it up nicely when he said “Ideas are for free. It’s not like that many of them are genuinely original anyway. The devil is always in the detail”.

To this end, there seems to be a definite appetite for more meaty examples and case studies in Social media. Heather Albrecht suggested a session focused on the challenges facing brands of ‘policing and releasing’ their brands in 2.0 environments. A session looking at a spectrum of brand experiences with open and not so open communities. Perhaps a good commentator on this type of experience is Mike Hickinbotham from BigPond who talked about the importance behind implementation. Meraj Huda also made the recommendation that we gather case studies where 2.0/Social Media has been shown to be monitisable.

In addition to looking at social media, there was also some discussion around focusing on user experience design. Nathan Swift commented that it would be good to have a session about the basic principles of user-centered design which is interesting since I will be speaking on a panel at ad:tech New York in a few weeks about similar topic and talking with my fellow panelists, it seems that there is still no clear definition for what this really means. Patrick Kennedy expanded on this when he said that to be truely effective, you need to take into account usefulness and usability from an end-users point of view. Perhaps we should get some real users on this panel, give them some sites that are winning awards then evaluate how well they really work in front of the audience?

The whole topic of data portability also stimulated some interest. Ian Lyons first introduced the discussion supported by Scott Drummond and Stephen Collins who commented that data portability will be key in the next few years. Potentially this would be an interesting topic to discuss in the context of Web3.0 and Mobile. Graham Christie introduced some of these ideas in his comments around the role of mobile, Apple versus Android versus Symbian, Cross Network connectivity and standards adoption.

Well thats a quick round up of were we are heading. I am sure everyone has some more interesting topics to discuss so keep it coming. Would be great to get the perspectives of some more of you clients out there too :-)