Kelsey: Handicapping the Sessions

This week is The Kelsey Group’s ILM show in LA. It’s probably the best place to do local biz dev around. And the show has a great line-up of speakers (courtesy of Peter Krasilovsky’s efforts). However many of those folks will be saying the same things they’ve said for several years: “Local is important, here’s why.”

People pretty much now get that local is important (although they often don’t understand the full scope of its importance). For this reason, among others, this show and Kelsey’s related Drilling Down show (essentially the same conference) need to change thematically from “why” to “how”:

• Case studies
• How to execute local campaigns
• How to track in-store transactions
• What concrete developments need to happen before X, Y or Z opportunity can be fully realized

But the conference still holds great potential. Based solely on the descriptions, here are the panels/sessions that have the greatest opportunity to be interesting in my opinion:

• The Jake Winebaum keynote: could be lots of PR speak (blue sky) but could also be quite interesting re how a YP company (RHD) is seeking to diversify online. Winebaum is also not from a YP culture, which will make for some interesting tension.
• Investing in Local: immediately following Winebaum this session could be quite interesting — to hear from these investors and former VC types about their perceptions of the market.
• Real Estate in Transition: potentially interesting but from the standpoint of experiences with local agents and how quickly (or not) they’re self-serving and adopting online marketing. Zillow in particular is interesting with what it’s doing with data mining and national advertising (they should have been on national advertisers panel on Thursday). Also Zillow’s newspaper deal is quite provocative.
• Video Apps: is mostly interesting because of Diab and RippleTV, which is representative of a larger phenomenon of digital video displays in stores and public places. mobilePeople will presumably discuss video on mobile devices, which is still quite far off as a mainstream use case.

Thursday:

• The comScore data presentation is likely to reinforce what we already know: people care about and trust user reviews, they spend time on social media sites, etc. “Everybody needs community.”
• The Facebook keynote will get interesting if Booth presses him on privacy issues and the controversy surrounding the company’s recent ad initiatives. If he demos some of the local content/local ad possibilities on Facebook it might also be quite interesting.
• National Advertisers and the Breakout on E-commerce are two panels that could also be interesting. They’re probably both too short however and should be case studies instead.
• Best practices for PPC targeting is another interesting session but out of place because most of the audience is not interested in this tactical panel at this point in the conference.
• Calacanis will be entertaining because he’s a controversial figure who likes to likes to make controversial statements. And Krasilovsky is not afraid to throw out zingers that provoke reactions.

Friday:

• The Weber discussion will be interesting. Most people don’t know him and I would imagine he’ll say some of the most thoughtful things about local at the conference.
• The Intuit keynote might be interesting. This session could be a bunch of claims and broad statements about Intuit’s reach and relationships with SMBs. Execution is the key question. So far, the Intuit-AdWords partnership/interface is not very impressive. Zipingo was a flop and that’s the danger with the company’s other efforts, that they will be tepid and half hearted. Will it truly commit to becoming a B2B marketing provider for SMBs?
• Social media: This panel could be interesting if it moves beyond the “everyone now needs community” discussion that it could fall into. The people on the panel are smart however and doing some interesting things.
• Google’s John Hanke: Maps are Google’s most successful product after search and Hanke is a very smart and thoughtful guy. He probably won’t get into the future (which Google almost never does). But if people can get him to talk about the Local Business Center the local business referral rep program and related issues it will be partcularly interesting. Remember Google said that SMBs in the “low seven figures” have “interacted” with the LBC.
• Nokia: I don’t know Maire but this could be the single most interesting discussion of the show. Nokia is a provocative and very ambitious company. If Maire is entertaining and candid this could be a great discussion.