So I was at Yale the other day.

Yale Club. (NYC for OMMA Social sponsored by Mediapost. I got passes so, yeah, like that.) The full agenda and topics discussed here, panel discussion summaries here, as well as ‘live’ thoughts from their Twitter stream. (Angela at AdRants has pics and more takes.) Following are a few thoughts of my own. (Aka, ‘takeaways’. Brand people in attendance love that word. Oh, and apparently... um, oh yeah ROI?

Yeah, I think that was it.

First though, a little shout out to Catharine Taylor from Adverganza who I met and who pulled the event together in addition to her emcee duties. (She once mentioned she wasn’t comfortable being looked at as some type of social media maven, but for a first event, it ran smooth with panels debating issues surrounding online topics in a way that didn’t suck.)

• Peter Hobolt Jensen, VP/online communications for Lego. One of the best speakers of the day. A brand person who talks like a planner/creative/DOM and broke down Lego’s beehive approach to the brand as a whole. Two things he said that summed up the complete brand experience in a way nobody else had:

“The joy of playing with the toy is the ultimate social media they [people] concentrate on.”

Which I took to mean, if they love what you make, everything else flows from that.

“...how do we get the social to tie to the physical.”

Which means, cool websites and online games aren’t enough if people don’t connect it back to the actual buying/using experience in some way.

• The super cloth napkins in the men’s room have logos.

• Oft-repeated theme of brands can’t control consumers. [Many of the brand people say it but it’s clear few know what it meant.]

• Agencies dropped the ball when it came to incorporating search into their agency offerings, but are not making the same mistake with social media this time around. [I wouldn’t say all are jumping on it, but certainly more than with search.]

• Time spent with the brand is not as important as impressions.

• Oft-repeated hatred of ‘viral’ and how everyone misuses the term. [Duh.] Nice definitions here and there of what it is, such as “Viral is user shared, user endorsed,” and how to distribute/seed them, but nobody answered how to make one. [“Make cool shit people want to watch” is not enough. You need to break down the things people respond to, humor, drama, etc. and mix in some element of cool/surprise. Easy, no?]

• Not enough power outlets.

• When it comes to social media efforts, stop looking at one tactic only. Otherwise, focus on A and you miss what’s happening between B and C, D and A, etc.

• Lotta people jockeying for position with their own proprietary terms for things. [Shock. Awe.]

• Someone mentioned there should be a 'sentiment index' to measure the corellation between the campaign and sales. [I like the concept, but good luck with that. That would mean an agency has to be held accountable for the stuff they propose.]

• Time spent is important—someone disagrees with the previous panel.

• Agencies shouldn’t fear customers’ direct involvement with brands, after all they’re helping with product improvement more than the marketing of it.

• The mouthwash dispenser in the men’s room was too close to the soap. My hands were minty fresh for hours.

• And the metaphors continue: “We're building trees,” not buildings that start to fall apart as soon as they're completed. [Growing forward though, better way of looking at it.]

• Make sure you mention to hotel guests cutting in front of you at the elevator: “Yale before Harvard.”

• MySpace and Plurck. Hmmmm. Okay.

Last thought: why didn’t someone just admit that nobody really knows what works for sure, and that there’s a certain degree of intuition and luck when it comes to why people like one site or brand experience over another. Oh, I know why.

Because then we wouldn’t have seminars.

Tags: OMMA Social