Business Insight Zone

It’s been a great two days at the Dallas edition of the Inbound Marketing Summit. Here are some bullet points on things that have caught my attention.

• The audience presents an interesting split. As I type this, I’m sitting next to Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory. His firm does amazing things integrating e-mail and social media in ways that boost e-mail marketing performance. So, in sum, he knows a little about using social media for business. By contrast, during my panel session yesterday, an audience member asked me “What’s RSS?” So there are a lot of opportunities for novices to learn from veterans, and for veterans to understand what the level of knowledge is among newcomers to social media.
• My friend Aaron Strout of Powered made many good points in his talk, but two stood out: (1) Some companies are actually making more money by using social media intelligently. Radical thought, huh? (2) If you’re trying to sell better social-media use within your organization, be ready to convince your CEO and CFO of the business case for it. In other words, show them the money.
• Chris Kieff of Ripple6 gave a well-received talk (and later picked up the tab for my dinner — thanks, Chris!). One key point: “Beware the creepiness factor.” He and I talked about this more at dinner; I gave him the example of a Blackberry app that broadcast my GPS location even though I had (tried to) turn off that function.
• Whole Foods has been a gold-standard example of the corporate use of Twitter for a while. Now they’re upping the ante by building their Twitter presence in geographic locales, e.g. with their account for Whole Foods in Houston.
• In their panel, Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies and Amber Naslund of Radian6 made great recommendations for convincing senior executives of the value of social-media monitoring. Blake suggested that you show an exec how monitoring works on some non-business passion of theirs (cooking, motorcycles, whatever), then show them the parallel to business. Amber suggested that you could reinforce this by showing the monitoring results for a competitor.
• A good lesson from Greg Matthews of Humana, who has the challenge of getting people interested in a health-insurance provider: he says that instead of taking healthy stuff and trying to make it fun — which doesn’t work — “We’re trying to take fun stuff and make it healthy.”

There’s a lot more I could say — this conference has given me plenty of ideas for follow-up posts. But for now, I’m still learning as much as I can while the IMS sessions are still running.