This week I attended the IAB Social Media Marketing and Web 2.0 Intensive One-Day Course, here in Toronto. The day-long event was hosted by Mitch Joel, a digital media rockstar, principal of the Twist Image agency based in Montreal, and host of the Six Pixels Of Separation podcast.

The course was very thorough, very informative and it was presented in a very engaging and inspiring way by a man who not only "gets it", he lives and breathes it! The course covered the following main areas of the online landscape:

• RSS and Syndication (Google Reader, feeds)
• Tags and Tagging (Flikr, Del.icio.us, YouTube)
• Online Social Networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
• Blogs and blogging (including Twitter)
• Podcasts
• User Generated Content (or Consumer Generated Content)
• Wikis (Wikipedia, PodCamp, etc.)
• Virtual Worlds (Second Life, Webkinz, Habo Hotel, etc.)

A big focus of the material was skewed towards determining ROI and identifying the metrics that can be used to gauge the effectiveness of these new media outlets. Obviously this is something that advertisers and agencies need to have in place before they they green-light any new project on one of these platforms, because the methods used in "traditional" online media (display media) don't necessarily apply. There was much discussion around how to accurately or more importantly effectively track the "performance" of a non-traditional campaign that may not be easy to quantify. This dilemma was particularly evident for the people in the crowd who were trying to sell the idea of doing a cutting-edge campaign to their client or management. The old rules are good for some things, but don't always work. For example, how do you measure the effectiveness or impact of having a Podcast or a Blog on your brand's value? Well, there are ways, but they may not all fall under the category of "scientific data". And sometimes the effects are not directly related to the cause. 

What may seem like a great idea at the time doesn't always work out. There were quite a few humerous examples of companies that tried to be "hip" by adopting the latest platform for their new marketing campaign, only to end up on the wrong end of the PR-backlash stick. These examples were not only amusing, but also very telling and served as great cautionary tales to those who might not otherwise do the research and think their ideas through to the potentially disastrous outcome. Case in point: the Walmart flog (fake blog). Mitch actually opened his presentation with a cartoon that lampooned the account executive who came up with that not-so brilliant idea.

The other message that was repeated over and over again, was that a lot of these things are so new that the long-term viability and marketing potential have not yet been proven, so there's quite a bit of "let's just put it out there and see what happens" going on. Ultimately, as with many technological innovations, the expression "only time will tell" is the closest we can come to predicting what will work and what won't. To be sure there will be winners and losers, and as with so many other things in life, the more you play, the more chances you have to win. The point to take home (or back to the office) was that these are pioneering times, and there will be casualties along the way, but these are also very exciting times full of opportunity and ripe for savvy and selective advertisers and marketers who are willing to take a chance.