As we often do at Spredfast, a small group of us grabbed a coffee together this morning and had a “what did we learn this month” discussion.  One of my personal anecdotes (which I will share here) focused on my trip to CES a few weeks ago.  Given that Spredfast is a social software company, my expectations for CES were relatively modest from a business perspective, though not necessarily from a backdrop perspective (Vegas, baby!).  Admittedly, I initially considered the trip a bit of a boondoggle stop en route to a real business trip in San Francisco.  However, a few things surprised me about the conference that I’ll share here…    

1.    The attendees – From the moment Ken Cho (Spredfast Co-Founder) and I posted that we were heading to CES, we started getting notes from customers, agencies, and friends at other social software companies.  As it turns out, the crowd is not just consumer electronics folks and their fan boys (and girls).  We went from a relatively open game plan to a full schedule of meetings, demos, and, of course… parties.  As first-timers, Ken and I were impressed with both the pure scale of CES and the general social DNA of the attendees.

2.    Social on the showroom floor – A couple of interesting observations from a full day on the showroom floor… First, the booths of most big brands were visually leveraging social content.  At the very least, almost every Fortune 1000 brand presenting had visual prompts promoting their Facebook or Twitter presences.  I would estimate that an additional 30 big brands were curating and displaying social content regarding their brand, CES (in general), or both together.  Most of this content was displayed on flat screens using a Mass Relevance, FeedMagnet, or homegrown curation tool.  Second, a lot of booths had members from their social marketing team (or social agency of record) on the showroom floor interacting with guests and contributing social content via cell phones or iPads.  Third, booth representatives in general were just plain socially informed.  Imagine my surprise when I asked the person at the Panasonic booth (by “booth” I mean megaplex larger than my house) if they had a CES social media campaign, and he replied, “Yes, Karen and Jim from our internal social team are walking around over there with iPads, and Julie and Steve from Cohn & Wolfe – our social media agency of record – are over there.”  The times… they are a changin’.

3.    The agency Super Bowl – I’m not sure I fully appreciated how big CES is for the agency world.  Every agency was not only present, but taking the opportunity to pitch their clients on “what’s next.”  Lucky for us, “what’s next” almost always includes leveraging social media.  We took the opportunity to share our vision of 2012 and beyond with agencies and some of their higher profile clients.  In fact, some of our most productive conversations came at agency events (read “parties”), where we shared our future perspectives on customer engagement, actionable analytics, and complex enterprise-wide deployments.  These conversations and introductions were extremely insightful and fruitful.  So… a big “thank you” to our agency partners for the invitations to participate.  We appreciate it!

4.     The social players – Despite being a consumer electronics show, the cool kids were definitely present.  It wasn’t quite SXSW, but the Facebooks, Twitters, Googles, Mashables, etc. were doing their thing.  Some had smaller tiger teams observing and holding meetings.  Several were briefing big brands and agencies on new advertising opportunities, and revealing roadmap sneak peaks.  And a couple just threw exclusive parties and, like sheep, the masses lined up to get in… ok, so that part was pretty SXSW-esque.   

After letting the CES dust settle for a few weeks, I can definitely say that it was worth the boondoggle.  I will certainly head back out next year despite the inescapable Las Vegas mayhem… but I definitely won’t plan any real business trips on the back end next time.