Marketing Conferences Usually Suck

Partial agenda for a CMO event that was sent to me. This one topic seemed like it would be good, but experience tells me that they panelists would never actually make these points during the session.

Integrating Social Media in to the Marketing Mix:

• Successful strategies to implement and pitfalls to avoid.
• Balance in the marketing mix- avoiding too heavy a reliance on any one medium <--- as companies found out that FB axed
• Crowdsourcing: Understanding that the true owners of a brand are the consumers <-- excellent point which most brands don't know what to do with.
• Integrating mobile loyalty programs<-- What would you do with that?

Partial speaker list:

Speakers include: - Cam Balzer, Vice President Marketing, Threadless <-- cool company, but not big - Dennis Cary, SVP& CMO, Bally Total Fitness <--- bankrupt twice (2007 and 2008) - Kendall Collins, Chief Marketing Officer, salesforce.com <--- cool, 1st billion dollar SAAS - Tom O'Toole, Chief Marketing Officer, United Airlines <--- an airline presenting on marketing, really?