We will be blogging and tweeting from this year’s national Business Marketing Association Conference being held in Chicago this year starting June 10. Probably more tweeting than blogging, but we’ll see how the week goes.

I have been to many national BMA conferences, especially within the last 10 years. It was always exciting when we heard the buzz about more than 100 people attending. But this year it looks like there will be more than 300 people in attendance representing 200+ companies from more than 25 states nationwide. As national conference chair Gary Slack has stated in his e-mails, we are definitely “defying economic trends” and I think it is exciting for not only the BMA and b-to-b marketing, but also for marketing in general. It is proof that there are great things happening by smart people and that we are still willing to invest in idea sharing and networking to improve upon what we are doing in our day-to-day work environments.

Ralph Oliva from Penn State’s Institute for the Study of Business Markets will be setting the stage for the conference starting at noon on Wednesday, June 10.

Keynote and general-session speakers will include:

• Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, Salesforce.com
• Patrick Crane, vice president of marketing and advertising, LinkedIn
• Scott Davis, general manager, Chicago office, Prophet, and author of The Shift (to be published in June 2009)
• Tom Haas, chief marketing officer, Siemens Corporation
• Mark Mitten, chief brand officer, Chicago 2016
• Ralph Oliva, executive director, Institute for the Study of Business Markets
• Joe Pine, author of The Experience Economy and Authenticity
• Matt Preschern, vice president of marketing, IBM
• Al and Laura Ries, co-authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing and War in the Boardroom
• David Meerman Scott, author of the recently updated The New Rules of Marketing & PR and the just-published World Wide Rave
• Al Saltiel, vice president of marketing, Navistar
• Sam Sebastian, director, local and b2b markets, Google
• Andy Sernovitz, CEO of The Blog Council, founder of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association and author of the just-revised Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking

I will do my best to spread the word to people not in attendance, but check marketing.org for other blogging and tweeting going on this week. If you want me to keep my eye on anything of particular interest, please let me know. Follow me here or at twitter.com/bluesilverinc.

Thanks,
George Rafeedie

P.S. Join the Chicago BMA! (I am the local membership chair.)