Back in August we moved from our quaint old office in Sausalito to our beautiful new office here in San Francisco. We’ve been so darn busy ever since, we neglected to get the proper signage up until… today!
Check it out. Oooh… ahh…

Internet Week New York is giving away free tickets to the premier conferences taking place during the festival. Sign up for the Internet Week email newsletter by May 1st to be eligible to win a free pass to one event. Winners will be chosen at random from the email list and contacted May 4th.
In addition to FM’s own CM Summit, Internet Week also includes ContentNext’s EconAffinity, the Mediabistro Circus, Silicon Alley Insider’s Startup 2009, Creativity Magazine’s Creativity and Technology Conference and The Webby Awards.
See here for the full schedule and go sign up for the newsletter. You might just win a free pass to the CM Summit!

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang (and team) today published a report that encapsulates the information gleaned from interviews with experts across the social media and technologies space, including FM. The full report is available for purchase here, but Jerremiah summarized the report for everyone else here.
Of course what concerns us most here at FM is how the future of the social web will affect brands. With the revolution already well under way, how should brands continue to prepare themselves for the next phase of the social Web? First, give us a call. Second, read Jeremiah’s summary on the question:

• Don’t Hesitate: These changes are coming at a rapid pace, and we’re in three of these ears by end of year. Brands should prepare by factoring in these eras into their near term plans. Don’t be left behind and let competitors connect with your community before you do.
• Prepare For Transparency: People will be able to surf the web with their friends, as a result you must have a plan. Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects –even if you choose not to participate.
• Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors. Their opinion is trusted more than yours, and when the power shifts to community, and they start to define what products should be, they become more important than ever.
• Evolve your Enterprise Systems: Your enterprise systems will need to connect to the social web. Social networks and their partners are quickly becoming a source of customer information and lead generation beyond your CRM system. CMS systems will need to inherit social features –pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.
• Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers –rather than them chasing it– prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

It’s Webby Awards time again, and again FM friends and family are all over the place.
Boing Boing Video is the big winner this time around with 3 nomination nods from the Webby folks. The digital video stalwart received nominations in the Tech, Variety-Best Host and Weird-Experimental categories. I’m thinking that last one is the best fit.
Other nominees include:

- 5 Blogs Before Lunch – Business
- Desctructoid – Games Related
- Behance – Portfolio
- Digg – Social Networking

Head on over to the Webby People’s Voice voting site and vote for your favorites.

Best Job Ever, powered by Dice, is a video series that chronicles the people occupying the most sought-after technology and engineering jobs. Check out the latest below. This is the third video out of ten in the series. The video takes you into the daily life of Facebook’s Director of Engineering. As the guy who writes this blog, I’m pretty sure I have the best job ever, but I guess being the lead engineer at Facebook is pretty cool too.

This New Yorker article has a lesson for all those marketers that subscribe to the idea that recessions are for hunkering down, battening the hatches, preserving assets and waiting it out. Two classic CPG brands, Post and Kellogg, did brand battle during the depression via the cutting-edge medium of the day: radio.
Who came out on top and remains there to this day? The brand that advertised their way out of the economic slump.
Via The New Yorker:

In the late nineteen-twenties, two companies—Kellogg and Post—dominated the market for packaged cereal. It was still a relatively new market: ready-to-eat cereal had been around for decades, but Americans didn’t see it as a real alternative to oatmeal or cream of wheat until the twenties. So, when the Depression hit, no one knew what would happen to consumer demand. Post did the predictable thing: it reined in expenses and cut back on advertising. But Kellogg doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies. (Snap, Crackle, and Pop first appeared in the thirties.) By 1933, even as the economy cratered, Kellogg’s profits had risen almost thirty per cent and it had become what it remains today: the industry’s dominant player.

Mid-Market Innovators, brought to you by Sun Microsystems and Intel, is a site for mid-market IT pros that offers advice from leading authors in business and technology on how to align your business and IT strategies to save money, plan for growth and foster innovation.
In addition to great articles from leading authors like Anita Campbell, John Jantsch and more, the site also offers popular webinars for IT pros. The first is entitled “Cloud Computing and Virtualization: Doing More with Less” with Jon Stokes on May 7, 2009 at 9:00 am PDT. Register for the Webcast here.

We’ve just announced the final list of speakers for the CM Summit coming up on June 1-2 at New York’s Hudson Theater.
See here for this morning’s press release. “Early-bird” pricing on tickets ends April 17, so be sure to register right away to take advantage of the discount.
It’ shaping up to be a fascinating couple of days. Speakers include marketing executives from brand behemoths like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and American Express, social media powerhouses like Facebook and Huffington Post, and leading data providers like Comscore. See here for the complete speaker list.
Here’s a highlight reel from last year’s event:

A few weeks ago FM participated in P&G’s Digital Hack Night in which a group of social media geniuses were divided into teams and given the task of selling retro-style Tide t-shirts in support of the brand’s Loads of Hope program. See here and here.
All of the proceeds went to charity. Being simultaneously a great cause and a fascinating case study, John Battelle bought all of us FMers a t-shirt. Here’s most of the SF crew proudly donning our Tide t-shirts.