DETROIT – A conference at the speed of App – Future Midwest took a healthy sized, energized crowd of social and new media entrepreneurs on an ADHD speed tour of techniques and strategies that are defining this new space.

The two-day conference, spanning Thursday and Friday, kicked off with a social gathering Wednesday night, ran through educational programming Thursday, an evening extreme startup contest for $100,000 in funding courtesy of Funded By Night, and another full day of content on Friday.

The agenda was fast paced, with most topics covered in 25 minutes, forcing all presenters to distill their message to just the essentials, and to deliver it at a break neck pace. The notable exception was the three-member panel discussion ?The Creatives? on day two that began with a five-minute, thinly disguised Adobe promotional advertorial. Of course, this was the audience to target if you want to sell multi-media software products, and has Morgan Spurlock done better? It all worked, and as with the previous two years of the event (held last year in Royal Oak), the meat was Midwest, but the seasoning was Detroit.

Dan Gilbert, apologizing for suit and tie versus hoody and jeans like everyone else in the crowd, having just come from a very different audience, proved that while big business, he still ?gets it? and had a message to deliver. Other big name notables, such as ePrize founder Josh Linkner, joined heavy hitters in the new media space including David Leider, GSTV and David Norris, bluecava. Topics ranged from more traditional strategic planning to promotional tests such as 24X7 happy hour.

Buick was evident throughout as a major sponsor at the event, providing new vehicles for attendee test drives, and adding some eye candy to the promotional tote. Adding local flavor, lemonadedetroit.com aired their video short, promoted their unique feature project and provided lots of positive Detroit mojo.

For those interested in the meat, strategy topics morphing from last generation ideas were highlighted by Joey Fitts in a presentation titled, ?Democratizing Competitive Insight?. Last generation scorecard and measurement strategies have most businesses too focused inwardly, leading to myopic strategies.

?We grew at 5 percent – good right? Market increased by 15 percent – we lost market share – not so good.?

Instead of the ever inward focus, Fitts coined the term ?Outelligence? to replace what we should do when collecting business knowledge. He had several historical sound bites to share with the digital crowd – ?Don?t drive while looking in the rear view mirror?, ?Avoid watermelon metrics – green outside, red inside?, ?Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.?

Fitts recommended taking a pointillist view of business, where the proper distance (or perspective) from the data points can provide a clear picture of what is happening. The important thing is to identify predictive indicators for your market and understand what is happening before your competition.

Topics that were more unique to modern media were those like Gas Station TV and their ability to deliver more 18-to-49 year old eyeballs than traditional media. Some of their unique challenges included the campaigns they had to undertake to gain traction in a new market, like their ?over deliver five times? guarantee. CEO David Leider spoke about personal clouds and losing mediocrity – your audience should either love you or hate you, but lukewarm is failure – take a stand.

On the technical side, Roque Versace of Mashable covered API?s, the secret sauce of digital media and the plethora of devices it is consumed on today. Architecting your technology solution and the strategy you develop with your technology can make all the difference. He noted the place three years ago where Netflix determined that they wanted to put an API in developers hands instead of creating and controlling the delivery of their product to the end user. Three years later, Netflix is supported on 400 apps and almost as many platforms, and Blockbuster is filing chapter 11.

Lots of networking opportunities and energy rounded out two days of value add for attendees. Social media, online privacy, alternative media delivery, mobile and many more topics were covered.

More details at FutureMidwest.Com

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