ION Digital

This week’s Inbound Marketing Summit provided a nice display of some of the best thinking on social media on the planet. They were preaching to the choir here, folks who believe the social media movement is long overdue.  So you didn’t get a lot of contention or debate. What you did get was some exhilarating ideas, strategies, tips and techniques.

Many of the sessions were only 20 minutes so speakers had to blaze through their material, but most pulled it off smoothly. It was an interesting mix of consultants, web types, businesspeople, freelancers, former journalists, marketing and PR people and others that I couldn’t quite categorize (I met two people out of work; jobless, well might as well hang out with the social media crowd).
The conference ended the second day as strong as it began, with Louis Gray providing tools to deal with the information overload and Tim O’Reilly giving a spirited speech based on “creating more value than you capture.” Along the way hosts Chris Brogan and Justin Levy kept the trains running on time and the mood upbeat.There were too many great sessions to cover all of them  but here’s a sampling of key takeaways for me.

Mindset (how to think like a social media marketer)
•    Nobody cares about your product but you (David Meerman Scott)
•    Give up control, which you never had anyway. Now is the time to give up even the idea that you ever had control (Charlene Li)
•    Learn from Michelle Obama who says: be relevant, authentic, transparent, responsive.
•    Think “what kind of impact do I want to have on the world. Then focus on creating value, helping others and your business will do well.” (O’Reilly)

Communications/Marketing
•    Speak in the audiences’ language, not corporate babble (Scott)
•    Turn marketing into “business conversations.”
•    Listen to customers,join their communities, ask about your customers, engage by making changes and getting more feedback; finally, build your own community (Aaron Strout)
•    Turn your website from brochure-ware into a tool that attracts people in from other websites, converts them into leads. Think about your website, content, links and keyword ranks as assets and measure the return on those assets (visitors and leads) (Brian Halligan)
•    What the new net customer looks like: they want everything free; no intrusive ads and easy to get to. And if you suck they tell everyone (Loic LeMeur)
•    The new marketing was summed up in a Chris Brogan story, who was flying into New York and tweeted his followers for suggestions of places to stay. Two people tweeted him to stay at XYZ hotel, “they’re running a blogger special, $159/night.” A few minutes later the hotel tweeted him with an invite to stay with them at the blogger special rate. Welcome to the new world of just-in-time, customer-focused marketing.

People/relationships
•    Share, give, engage – before you even think about focusing back on you or your product; these themes ran throughout the conference, it’s the new “inbound” marketing world we live in.
•    Know your audience. Build buyer personas, go beyond what your product does and think about how your audience can use it to solve their problems, and how you want them to think about you (Scott)

Content
•    Several speakers stressed content—we’re all now publishers, so get used to it. The lines of content and everything else are blurring. Fresh, high quality customer centric content IS our marketing.
•    Couple of folks (Scott, Jason Falls) mentioned journalists (I liked Falls’ term: “brand journalists”) in the sense of hiring journalists to tell the story (this will be good news for all the laid off journalists…are we somehow coming full circle, back to the craft of writing?).
•    Before you develop content, study your audience—what do they do for fun, where do they work, play, what interests them, etc? Understand what content interests them before you start (Falls).
•    Tim Street turned my content model on its head, speaking of video. Start with a “spectacle” (ex: Lonely Girl or the dancing ninja guy), add a strong script and interesting characters. Spectacle, story, emotion, conflict and questions. The Susan Boyle video garnered 100mill. Views in a week. We’re talking beyond SuperBowl levels.
•      Become a content driven marketer by launching bite size content pieces- high value, frequent; goal: develop content “when and where it’s needed,” (Rose)

News Media
•    Paul Gillin provided a sobering assessment of the news media:
o    Ave daily newspaper reader demographics in U.S. now 57 yrs (watch the tv ads)
o    Media is no longer in control. Twitter broke the first story (pic) on the Hudson River plane landing, traditional media now following Twitter and bloggers. Media is now controlled by the invididuals.
o    The impact of one person (“bottoms up”) media exploding…Mass reach no longer matters (Time mag).

The BIG Takeaways
•    The world has changed. The old marketing methods (mass reach, outbound, interruption-driven) are fading, replaced by a new type of “inbound” approach. Forget press releases, marketing pitches, stale content. Think sharing, relationships, quality content and providing real value to your customers.
•    The conversations are going on now about your company, providing a huge opportunity—if you can figure out how to mine these, and channel your marketing efforts to capture them.
•    None of this will be easy, or happen overnight, but the tools, knowledge and opportunities are there.  The time to start is now.

Quotations
•    Adult industry and Wall St. Journal/newspapers are in the same predicament, no one wants to pay (Brogan)
•    Social media didn’t invent criticism, it was happening anyway & people ask, “what’s the value of social media?” So, “what’s the value of taking someone out to play golf.” It’s about building relationships (Amber Naslund)
•    We won’t have any large urban newspapers in 10 yrs; replaced by new media organizations that help us make sense of the flood of info (Paul Gillin)
•     “If no one talks about your brand,  then it is dead” Message: take risks, stir it up (LeMeur)
•    “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” (attributed to Peter Drucker)

Recommended Programs:

•    Tweetie (Charlene Li)
•    Brightkite for the iPhone (chris)
•    “CC Betty  and Backtweet (Brian Solis)
•    BackType and Tweetbeep. (Louis Gray) and Friendfeed as a powerful search engine
•    Skimmer (WSJ)- to manage your social media networks
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Presentations:
•    The New Media Consumer Revealed: Edison, great stats http://budurl.com/55zb
•    There is No Information Overload (Louis Gray): http://twurl.nl/co6ap1
•    Convincing the Curmudgeon (Charlene Li) http://twurl.nl/gl25ia