Finally, there's a video excerpt of my keynote speech for Forrester's Marketing Forum in Los Angeles (April 8-9, 2008). The theme of the entire conference was based on my report, Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement. I was the opening keynote on the first day of the conference. The title of my speech was Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers.

It was pretty exciting once I got on stage, but it certainly was stressful in the preparation and rehearsal phase. It's admittedly difficult to find time with all of the other analyst responsibilities on my plate. Regardless, the keynote was a hit.

I opened with a fascinating story about Jen, an IKEA fan from Ohio. I told her story about attempting to encourage IKEA to open a store near her in Cincinnati. She did this using her fan blog, OHIKEA.com.

Then I debunked the marketing funnel (one of my favorite things to do), introduced my Engagement framework, and aligned it with the buying process. Then I told a story of Laura, who is an engaged user of Glaxo Smith Klein Consumer Healthcare's alli weight loss product. My good friends at Communispace were kind enough to connect me with Laura and share the sucesses of their online community for GSK.

I closed by recommending how to measure engagement. I'll follow up with another post including the details of my speech, but overall the experience was fantastic, I received lots of positive feedback, and it was certainly fun. Kerry was the keynote on day two, discussing Designing For Engagement — and she rocked it as well.