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Ever since we held the last (and first) European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back pro­cess on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see covered.

Per­haps pre­dict­ably, it was the day’s agenda and cal­ibre of the speaker line-up that attrac­ted most people to the first event. Not to men­tion it was free to our invit­ees. Of course our speak­ers scored very highly, but com­ing away from the day almost all com­men­ted on how much they’d val­ued the oppor­tun­ity to net­work. I’m sure they found it cath­artic to share some pain and under­stand that oth­ers out there were try­ing to over­come the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feed­back came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in put­ting together the agenda for the forth­com­ing summit:

1. People want more prac­tical con­tent and less of the the­or­et­ical. There’s an appet­ite for stor­ies of blood­ied knuckles, as well as a hun­ger for real learn­ings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very con­scious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side mar­keters telling their stor­ies. This time round we’re try­ing to encour­age our speak­ers to tell their suc­cess stor­ies, and what mis­takes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is com­ing along to tell the story of how he and other mar­keters trans­formed sap.com from a largely bro­chure­ware site to a ‘demand gen­er­a­tion machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more oppor­tun­ity to net­work and learn from their peers. We had some great table con­ver­sa­tions at lunch­time last time round, and we tried to allow gen­er­ous breaks. For the most part people res­isted the lure of their Black­Ber­ries, made con­ver­sa­tion and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit fur­ther and we’ve made the after­noon ses­sions entirely inter­act­ive. Attendees will have the oppor­tun­ity to attend three out of four work­shops on social media, accel­er­at­ing sales, using web­cast­ing and online video, and meas­ur­ing and optim­ising cam­paigns. We’re going to have people cap­tur­ing learn­ings from one group to another so that through the course of the after­noon we gen­er­ate a body of know­ledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the con­tent, there was a lot of call for tips on mak­ing the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and prov­ing a return on mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cas­sidy, is an ex IBM mar­keter now at European com­pany Step­Stone. In his pre­vi­ous life with a budget of mil­lions, his greatest chal­lenge used to be how to spend mar­ket­ing budget fast enough. He’s now in a pos­i­tion where every penny (cent) has to be accoun­ted for. Jim will talk about what he’s pri­or­it­ising, how he’s mak­ing a case for spend with the board, and how he’s mak­ing his mar­ket­ing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Job­bins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hope­fully that gives you some­thing of a taster for what’s to come on the 30^th April. If you need any more encour­age­ment, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stun­ning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remem­ber, we’re only accept­ing regis­tra­tions from client-side mar­keters from the B2B ser­vices, tech­no­logy and tele­coms sec­tors. No offence inten­ded to oth­ers, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hope­fully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twit­ter­ing kind, you can get reg­u­lar updates by fol­low­ing us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or sub­scrib­ing to the RSS feed

From Flickr Cre­at­ive Commons

There’s a com­ment that gets made about mil­it­ary strategy that goes some­thing like: when the war starts the first thing to go out of the win­dow is the plan.

While in mar­ket­ing no one is gen­er­ally in danger of dying (at least not in the kind I do), the prin­ciple is a pretty sound one. If, like me, you’ve sat in any num­ber of plan­ning and strategy ses­sions, you can quickly get the idea that the future is being mapped in front of your eyes. First this will hap­pen, then that, then that… It’s quite seductive.

But, of course, the world doesn’t work that way. As soon as you do X, your com­pet­it­ors will sim­ul­tan­eously do Y and the whole damn mar­ket will do Z. At around this point, all that future-gazing slide­ware doesn’t look quite so cer­tain anymore.

Of course, this is a prob­lem the mil­it­ary had to over­come some time back (primar­ily in the wake of the carnage dur­ing World War I). The res­ult was an approach that spent a long time determ­in­ing the over­all object­ives (the ‘commander’s intent’) and which left pre­cise tac­tics to officers in the field who were empowered to adapt to chan­ging cir­cum­stances as long as they kept mov­ing towards that over­all intent.

The approach was then fur­ther refined (primar­ily by US Air Force Col­onel John Boyd) to focus on the abil­ity to make very fast, very adapt­able decisions (within a ‘decision loop’) that would out­man­oeuvre the opposition.

It’s a prin­ciple that, I believe, is crit­ical for today’s mar­keters. You will never be in pos­ses­sion of per­fect vis­ib­il­ity. Events will never pan out exactly how you envis­age them. That’s just life.

The key is to have a robust, defens­ible ‘commander’s intent’ and to look at strategy more from the per­spect­ive of if X then Y rather than first X then Y. And finally, to never be wed­ded to any one set of tac­tics – if tra­di­tional media isn’t work­ing, shift to social media, if that isn’t work­ing try face-to-face. Bet­ter still try mul­tiple approaches in a low-cost way and let the fit­test sur­vive and thrive. In doing so, you can cre­ate a liv­ing strategy that can react and adapt to chan­ging cir­cum­stances while they are chan­ging and while there is time to make a dif­fer­ence in the market.