April 2009

There’s still time to register to hear Grant Thornton’s Ed Russ this Wednesday. Already, 220 people have registered. Go here to see the 105 companies attending!

Next, go here to see what BMA’s 2009 national conference has in store for you. As host chapter for this June 10-12 event, we hope you will attend. Register by April 26 for big savings!

BMA 2009 National Conference Details

Built around the theme, “UNlearn: Reprogramming marketers when it’s business as unusual,” BMA’s 2009 national conference will focus on what b-to-b marketers and communicators have learned, what we need to relearn and what we need unlearn to get the job done in these challenging times.

Keynote and general-session speakers will include:

• Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, Salesforce.com
• Patrick Crane, vice president of marketing and advertising, LinkedIn
• Scott Davis, general manager, Chicago office, Prophet, and author of The Shift (to be published in June 2009)
• Tom Haas, chief marketing officer, Siemens Corporation
• Mark Mitten, chief brand officer, Chicago 2016
• Ralph Oliva, executive director, Institute for the Study of Business Markets
• Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and Authenticity
• Matt Preschern, vice president of marketing, IBM
• Al and Laura Ries, co-authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and War in the Boardroom
• David Meerman Scott, author of the recently updated The New Rules of Marketing & PR and the just-published World Wide Rave
• Al Saltiel, vice president of marketing, Navistar
• Sam Sebastian, director, local and b2b markets, Google
• Andy Sernovitz, CEO of The Blog Council, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and author of the just-revised Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

The conference also will have four sets of three breakout sessions, for 12 sessions in all, on these highly relevant b-to-b marketing topics:

 

• Best practices in b-to-b market and customer intelligence
• Business process improvement for corporate marketing departments
• Building online b-to-b communities
• Best practices in corporate and b-to-b blogging
• Best practices in b-to-b email marketing
• How b-to-b marketers can use LinkedIn
• Incorporating sustainability into b-to-b marketing
• Managing b-to-b marketing and pricing in a down economy
• Measuring b-to-b marketing ROI
• Creating online and virtual b-to-b events
• Social media applications for b-to-b marketers
• Building better b-to-b Web presences

These breakout sessions will include moderators and panelists from these companies and organizations:

• Aon
• B2P
• Bizo.com
• Dresser
• ESPEC
• ExactTarget
• GE
• Genworth Financial
• GlobalSpec
• IBM
• Indium
• Insight Direction
• JPMorgan Chase
• LinkedIn Research Network
• Maritz
• National Instruments
• Newark
• Obama for America
• PennWell
• Real Results Marketing
• SAP
• Schneider Electric/Square D
• Siemens Building Technologies
• Social Media Today LLC
• Thomson CompuMark

To learn about new speaker additions and/or changes to the agenda, go here.

We’re going to start a new tradition at this year’s annual conference—numerous private dinners for 10 hosted Thursday evening, June 11 (after the Windy City BizBash), by top Chicago and national b-to-b marketing leaders—and, we hope, many of our speakers—at top Chicago restaurants and private clubs.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about the national conference in the coming weeks, and you can save a lot of $$$ by registering before the April 26 early-bird registration deadline. If you can’t attend the entire conference, you can register for single days at lower daily rates.

2009 Tower Awards

I am very excited—and I hope you have been, too—with the innovations our BMA Tower Awards Chair Jeanine Gaffke has cooked up for the Tower Awards.

Thanks to Jeanine’s leadership, we've moved to an all-electronic awards-management system, using the same entry and judging software the Effies use.

Marketers and agencies entering their work did so entirely electronically—thereby saving on material and time costs.

And our judges no longer have to travel to Chicago, saving them and BMA time and money, but will judge (and collaborate with other judges) at their convenience from home or work 24/7. Yet another innovation is BMA’s decision to recruit ONLY corporate marketers to serve as judges—and very senior, nationally known and respected marketers, including:

BMA/Chicago LinkedIn Group

Just six months old, our BMA/Chicago LinkedIn Group is becoming an interesting place to spend time.

It is attracting 50 new members a week and has grown to nearly 1,100 members, making it the largest BMA LinkedIn Group nationally and one of the largest LinkedIn Groups nationwide for discussing all things b-to-b.

Now that we've reached critical mass, I'd like to invite more of you to more regularly visit and engage in the discussions. We have dropped the requirement that you have to be a BMA member to initiate discussions.

Go here to join the BMA/Chicago LinkedIn Group

For those of you in transition, our Jobs board is getting more active, too. Soon, we hope, LinkedIn will add an Events tab.

Subscribe to the BMAIL

Subscribe to the BMAIL, our award-winning e-newsletter, to stay abreast of the latest news about all BMA/Chicago activities and events.

We produce two versions: one for BMA members, which goes to our 500+ members, and one for prospective members, which goes to a list of 5,000 prospective members.

The main difference is that the very first issue of the BMA-member version includes links to the presentation decks, audiocasts, Flickr photo galleries of the previous month’s MarketingMasters Luncheon and Breakfast Roundtable speakers.

Non-members eventually get access to these links in later BMAILs in each promotional cycle, but not as early as do BMA members.

Join BMA

If you are not already a member of BMA, please consider joining today. You can join, register for BMA programs and subscribe to the BMAIL through the BMA Web site.
I hope to see you at our April 8 luncheon, the June 10-12 BMA national conference and future BMA and BMA/Chicago events.