Inbound Marketing Summit — Day 1 highlights.
Many thoughts from yesterday at the Inbound Marketing Summit, which I’ll come back to later and flesh out more. Meanwhile, bullet points, for the people:
- In his keynote, David Meerman Scott closed by saying we should “stop making excuses” for not creating World Wide Raves around our products.
- Has Twitter obviated the need for Q&A? The talks and panels at IMS come in super rapid fire. Some of the sessions leave time for Q&A, some don’t.
- John Kembel of HiveLive: “Any community takes calories.”
- People WANT to share, IF nothing’s in their way.
- “Systems silo, humans don’t silo.”
- Vis-a-vis the purpose of community platforms: information on its own is just the start of things — the real kicker is when people take action on it.
- Charlene Li says she’s a “binge blogger and binge twitterer.” She’s always had very specific goals for using both of these.
- My good friend Aaron Strout offers five steps for business use of social media: listen, join (existing communities), ask, engage, build (your own community).
- Aaron again: think lifestyle, not product.
- Aaron’s parting thought: building community is not a campaign — it’s a philosophy that takes time to come to fruition.
- Advertising isn’t dying, BAD advertising is dying. The bad stuff has no continuity, no relevance. Thus saith Darren Guarnaccia of SiteCore.
- Marketers beware: People want to segment themSELVES, not just to be labeled as a persona.
- Brian Halligan of HubSpot: The past 50 years of marketing were about interrupting your way into people’s wallets; the next 50 will be about being found (via search, blogs, social networks).
- Halligan again: most Web sites are broken in function. They should (1) attract visitors and (2) convert them to action.
- Common theme through the day: go where your audience already is.
- A good line from from my friend Amber Naslund: “Social media did not invent criticism.”
- I like Phillip Ocampo’s point: social media listening doesn’t have to be a time-suck if you’re getting value from it.
- Another good point from Amber: why wouldn’t you harvest all the information that’s out there in the social media?
- “Meaning is what matters.” (Not sure which speaker said this.) Context is key.
- Mike Troiano: “Listen systematically but engage individually.”
Many thoughts running through my mind — not least because I’m finishing this partway through Day 2 of IMS, after my own presentation (which seemed to go well) and the feedback I’ve gotten on it.
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5 Comments so far
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Tim – great summary. And thanks for the shout out. Looking forward to your day 2 summary (including hot topics covered during your panel).
Best,
Aaron | @aaronstrout
Tim,
Your point that you should “go where your audience already is” makes me wonder: what if your audience isn’t tweeting/blogging/SMSing/podcasting/etc?
My target customer works at a mid- to large-size company that is implementing Lean manufacturing techniques. He’s swamped with work, and doesn’t have a lot of time to muck around with social media. In fact, to the extent he’s aware of it, he probably thinks it’s a waste of time.
I grant that social media is permeating all facets of the world pretty quickly. But my hunch is that investing too much time and energy into building a social network at this point is pure waste: my customers aren’t in this digital world, even though the SXSW, the Inbound Marketing Summit, and all the other hip conferences would have me believe they are.
Thoughts?
Dan, if your target customer isn’t already on a social network or community, then you have an opportunity to attract them to yours! You can start with a free Ning-based community and grow from there.
@LLiu
Dan — Notwithstanding Lawrence’s enthusiastic suggestion, you might *not* be well-served to overpursue social media.
I’ve used this example more than once recently: I of course have a telephone on my desk at work, but potential new vendors *shouldn’t* use it if they want to ask me to do business with them. I don’t particularly like talking on the phone to people I don’t know — especially anyone trying to sell me anything — and I particularly DISlike being interrupted in the middle of my work by a call about something that may not be relevant to me.
Because I don’t want to slam the door on everyone, I make myself easy to reach via e-mail, Twitter, or my blog. So it’s not that I keep myself incommunicado, but that I work within the channels I prefer. If the tables are turned and someone *I* want to talk to prefers the phone, I’ll pick up the phone.
I won’t belabor the analogy any further, except to say that social media (and Twitter in particular) won’t be right for everyone.
[...] blog readers (or followers of our Twitter feed) will recall that I attended the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Thanks to the Summit’s [...]