With its advertised ticket price of $790, the motivation for covering an Interactive Marketing Conference was similar to the desire to taste a $120 hamburger, a $40 bottle of water, or a chocolate sundae priced at $25,000. That the headlining speaker was Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, discussing his cover story "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business", made the potential irony delicious.

But it’s becoming clear that the only thing made to stick online is total anarchy.

For the time being, anyhow, these big-ticket conferences will keep perpetuating otherwise. How, with the right strategies, social media can be leveraged to make big bucks. That is the message sold by Paul Gillin, author of The New Influences, who was the morning keynote speaker on Thursday morning deep inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

The event was assembled by Montreal-based Infopresse, now making a foray into English Canada with their new media industry outlet, In:fluencia Digital.

Catching the tail end of Gillin’s sermon, the 200 attendees were being debriefed on "The Power of Friending." And how "self-appointed celebrities" are able to leverage their web presence to make money. "Listen to the conversation," he said. And the opportunity to harness the sqwawk is "like shooting fish in a barrel."

Gillin appears to have been successful at comforting the status quo, corner-office inhabitants soothed by this confidently graying ex-editor of TechTarget and Computerworld. But the examples he cites of successful heeding of unexpected consumer feedback all seem to be about kitsch: Petitions that led Cadbury to bring back the Wispa candy bar; owners of the Roomba that gave their vacuum cleaner a name; anti-corporate T-shirt designs submitted and sold by Threadless.

"Everybody’s just making it up as they go along," Gillin confidently exclaimed.

Why bother, then? Well, because all marketers must market themselves first.

"How can Advertisers Cash in on Social Media?" was the panel that followed. The four panelists weren’t getting paid – the audience was prospective clients. Like Canadian Idol, only the judges become the judged.

Jesse Hirsh was only looking to represent himself, though. While he’s spent the last few years as a commentator and consultant, his background includes setting up a web network dedicated to Taoist politics, countering the initial wave of new media materialism. More than a decade later, with a utility like Facebook on the scene, he figures it’s only a matter of time before all this latest lunacy implodes.

"Social media is not about cash," said Hirsh. "It’s actually about social capital.

"You can invest all you like, but you can’t show it as a return on investment to your shareholders or clients. Forget trying to engage your customers via social media. Just shut up and listen. Social media requires both defense and offense. Protect your neck – that’s the defense. But don’t interfere — because once you try and engage, that’s offense. And you’d better be prepared for potential blowback."

The other panelists weren’t going to argue with this position. Their stance is all about making companies comfortable with potential criticism. Yet, if they can’t engender online enthusiasm for the client’s product, they have no business case.

For a web marketing type, it seems like even a long weekend doesn’t provide a respite from constantly prowling around Facebook groups and Twitter messages to see if their brand names are being dropped. Plus, doing their own blogs – and perhaps a podcast – to articulate their boundless enthusiasm for this shell game.

Hirsh, by contrast, thinks the better way to nurture actual ideas is by meeting in person – just like a recovery meeting – while the internet is about telling truths.

"There’s joy in being negative," he said. "There’s a thrill in getting out that righteous rage." Last year, Hirsh’s blog post "The Globe and Mail Sucks" expressed his feelings about their redesign – and it was widely read. "It’s not so much that I felt power. But I felt a rush that came from that negative energy."

While the computer company Dell learning to navigate their well-orchestrated bad PR is held up a shining example for others to follow, it’s not always so Darwinist. Hirsh cites the example of Rogers Communications: "If they did start to listen, they’d have a killer headache," he said. "Who’s going to be the one to tell the emperor that he’s naked? And not only is he naked – he doesn’t look that good, either."

The latest wave, though, involves companies setting up online communities dedicated to fostering conversations – where corporate logos are relegated to the bottom corner of the web page, if at all, and "conversation" prevails. McDonald’s even runs one aimed at parents in the UK. Make Up Your Own Mind.

But what happens when a company like Molson just wants to engage their customer base in some Facebook frivolity by seeking photos of the "No. 1 Party School in Canada", only to have the whistle blown by an on-campus activist?

Dawna Henderson, head of the agency that set up that promotion, figures it an inconvenience that was blown out of proportion. Hirsh begged to differ, though.

"At a university, you’re not supposed to be going into the students’ common room or start going out for smokes with them," he said. "These spaces are not yours."

Earlier in the week, Hirsh spoke about the impact of social media at a salon attended by former Liberal MP-turned-executive advisor Pierre Pettigrew, who made the observation that the anti-globalization activists seem to have vanished.

Hirsh’s response: "They’re still out there. It’s only that ever since this jihadist thing, they’ve just gone online. It’s safer to be an anti-corporate activist now."

THE DEVIL IS A WEBSITE THAT WEARS TENNIS SHOES
Chris Anderson’s great-grandfather helped found the American anarchist movement, it’s revealed in the introduction to his after-lunch keynote speech. The author of The Long Tail revealed his follow-up book with a Wired cover story.

Like its predecessor, FREE is basically being written in public, and won’t be published for another year. Anderson has enough public profile to feel assured that no one will steal his latest schtick. Yet, despite the Lex Luthor image projected by his headshot, he’s just a regular dude who rolls his own luggage.

Anderson’s top billing makes the sessions that preceded him look like a seventh-rate tribute act. But he’s also liberated of having to ramble on about SEOs, IPOs, CMOs and other huckster acronyms that make the conference world go ‘round. Rather, he expands on his March article about how market price invariably falls to the marginal cost in a competitive market – and passions prevail in the end. If you’ve locked the loyal audience down, it gets even easier to upsell from there.

Wired, by virtue of being a print publication, is chock full of paradoxes – publisher Condé Nast didn’t even own the domain name until a couple years ago, having it tied up in a Web 1.0 deal. Also, it may turn out to be the last magazine standing that often puts celebrities on the cover for no particular reason but to sell issues.

He talked for about an hour about how money can be made in the face of emerging Marxism — even when his kids would rather watch Lego re-enactments of Star Wars on YouTube than Star Wars itself. (Anderson speculated that George Lucas might be "too highbrow" – a hitherto unprecedented theory.)

But the most interesting subtext of his talk related to Wired's own corporate structure.

"You’ve seen The Devil Wears Prada?," said Anderson "That’s my office." Projected as evidence is the blindingly ostentatious homepage of sister magazine Vogue.

Then, another site: lipstick.com, where users are urged to vote on "celebrity news that matters to you" – a no-frills site owned by Condé Nast, semi-surreptitiously.

Click. "Here we have paternalism." Double click. "Here we have egalitarianism."

The bottom line: Don’t altogether yield your vacuous audience to sleazier gossip blogs. Link to them, instead, and then you can still be a broker of perfume strips.

"Get your metabolic rate up so that you can engage on the same level," said Anderson. "We’re going to change our corporate structure – God willing – so that we can do more of the same."

And no keynote speaker can close an Interactive Marketing Conference without a product pitch: FREE is due to be sold in bookstores. But complimentary e-book and audio versions online, and an ad-supported edition.

Not even God has yet offered clarity on how to widely distribute FREE for free, though.

Previously on the Scroll: Clicking With Jane

Send news, tips, links about arts, culture, media to scroll@eyeweekly.com