Shawna Vercher - CEO (VTi-Web)

Five Key Needs that Social Media Serves:

• Sales
• Brand Visability
• Brand Protection
• Customer Service / Client Retention
• Keeping up with the Jones'

People are wanting instant communication.  The first priority should be sales, but the first thing to check out is brand visability.  Do a thorough search (use http://hootsuite.com/ as a tool to search brand protection and visability.)

Facebook is the equivalent of a cup of coffee.  Allows you to bring in new clients on a very casual basis.  Also, allows you to always be in front of the customer in a very non-threatening way.

LinkedIn - you can use it as a sales tool.  LinkedIn has a corporate page in beta and you can link execs.  Use it as a brag page for your company.

How do you report out that this is working?  With Facebook, it's good for an exec to have over 100 friends.  Over 500 is the magic number for fans.  With Twitter, it's 1000.

There was an instance where the creators turned off the comments on the facebook page for the "Where the Wild Things Are".  Within 36 hours, this was a headline in CNN, "Don't go see this movie".  They could of addressed it within facebook and had better opening numbers.

It's not recommended to link Twitter and Facebook with the same messages.  They serve different needs and communication styles. 

Matt Elliott - Director, Client Services (Listrak)

Presentation:  Streamline Your Marketing Budget:  Do More With Less

Email is still the highest ROI of any channel.

• D - data (lists - asks for permission, post your privacy policy) - Use that first 'thank you message for signing up' as an engagement opportunity.  That first email is the most read email.
• I  - inbox (make sure it gets in the inbox and not the spam box)
• R - relevancy (profile your customer base, don't send out "email blasts"); Bad: Email Blasts, Good: Segmentation.
• E - email design (make sure you use alt text for images because email systems block images)
• C - call-to-u action (get people to do the things you want them to do...make sure it's above the fold = 300 pixels high)
• T - test (A/B split tests, measure, adjust)

Susan Delz - Account Development (ion Interactive)

Presentation:  High Performance Landing Pages - Techniques for Improving Landing Page Conversions

Five Easy Steps for Making a High Performing Landing Page:

1. Differentiate between organic & paid search traffic.  Need to optimize your pages related to your paid campaigns.
2. Message match your ads and landing pages.  Mirror your message with your landing page. 
3. Segment your traffic.  All respondents are not the same and have different needs.  Segment them on the landing page.  e.g. - Data capacity of a hard drive;  e.g. Demographics of audience:  Physician, student, resident.  This will cause more than one low level landing pages.
4. Give the gorilla the banana.  Fullfill the promise on your search ad.  E.g. - Click here to get more info on Cat engines.  -- It better be about information on Cat engines.
5. Test, test, and then do more testing.  Do A-B testing, usability testing,

Myths about landing pages:   A landing page is always going to be a single landing page.  You need to segment your audience via pre-conversion segmentation sometimes.  You might want to employ multiple pages when it will build engagement with the user.

Akin Arikan - VP, Product Marketing & Strategy (Unica)

Presentation:  Integrating Online and Offline Data to Increase Revenues

How many people review blogs before going to the dealership to buy a car?  Most.

Useful Web Analytics tool...the funnel report.  Can be used to see if the user did the conversion you wanted them to do.

Bert DuMars - VP eBusiness - Newell Rubbermaid

Keynote Address

1.668 Billion out of 6.76 Billion World Population is on the net (24.7% penetration)

http://www.gigatweet.com/ gives a live feed of the number of tweets in real time.

"Did You Know 4.0" Video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

Strategy behind http://blog.sharpie.com/ - to showcase Sharpies from a creative standpoint to increase the use of Sharpies.

A Couple of Social Media Marketing Takeaways:

• Focus on your Customer Target
• Don't break the FTC rules (e.g. - writing positive reviews about yourself or defaming your competitors)
• Get out and actually meet the people you need to face-to-face

Social Networking Panel Discussion

Blogging is the hub of your social media solution.

Article syndication - look for bloggers that have established readers.  Bloggers who syndicate your content makes for effective marketing.

Chris Baggott - CEO (Compendium Blogware)

Presentation:  What 3rd Generation Blogging Means to You

Corporate Blogging is the fastest growing trend of all the eMarketing trends happening right now.  (reference upcoming presentation graph - good source of all that is happening).

3rd Generation Blogging is using the people who are the experts to keep up the blog.  It's "inbound marketing" - how do you get people to come to you?

8 Word Phrases are the fastest growing search length right now on the internet.

Other facts and options by Chris:  55% more web traffic for corporations that have successful blogs.  Social networking is on a downward path because of the "spam" of emails.  Employee Bloggers are 5 times more credible than CEO Bloggers.

Jocelyn McDowell - Digital & Marketing Research (Turner Entertainment & Turner Sports)

Presentation:  Best Practices - Case Histories from a Leading Company

Page Views can differ from company to company, or even internally within companies.  This is because they may be pulled from different sources (not comparing apples-to-apples).

Abe Mezrich - Didit.com Communications Manager

Presentation:  Search Engine Optimization (Paid Search)

Have to be focused on how people misrepresent your brand (misspellings, typos, etc.).  There are paid searches that take advantage of these typos.

People are searching within seconds of something they see on a TV spot.  Laptops are often in the same room as TVs.  You have to be prepared for these several days or weeks beforehand so search engines pick up the content.

Jeff hilimire - Engauge

Presentation:  Twitter: Beyond 140 Characters

An interesting thing happened with @jeffhilimire on this Twitter presentation.  Everyone in the audience started posting updates about his presentation using Twitter using the #eMATLANTA hash tag (thus, creating a community of sharing information).

We also created a social experiment of writing a "shout out" to Kevin Spacey on Twitter after seeing a video of him talking about Twitter to David Letterman.

Bill Nussey - President of Silverpop (based out of Atlanta)

Presentation:  Social Marketing

Marketers are confused with the RSS & SMS channel.  Social marketing becomes even more confusing because it add complexity.

Engagement Marketing:  the new term used in relationship marketing.

Marketing 1.0              Marketing 2.0
Interuption                     Engagement
One-way                       Two-way
Segments                       Individuals
Attention                        Participation
Customer Response       Customer Advocacy

Four tactics for engagement marketing:

1. Be social.  Listen to your customers.  Respond.  The old-style marketing tone is out and is happening less & less.  E.g. - "Comcastcares" - a twitter account that answers questions.  This changed the reputation of Comcast.  It is now a team of 11 people answering those questions.
2. Tags, not buckets.   Think about tags for each customer rather than buckets.  More complex data but necessary for truly engagement customers.
3. Ask & Listen.  Get the pulse of the marketplace.  Focus on what's interesting to your customers rather than what you want to say.  Blogs, social networks, community sites.
4. Automate.  Necessary because there are very few marketers compared to thousands or millions of customers.  Optimization 1.0:  Automatically test and improve pages.  Optimization 2.0:  Learn what combinations work the best for each individual.  "Same Time Optimization" is one of the best examples.

Doug Rollins - Group Director for CRM Measurement (Coca-Cola Company)

Presentation:  Consumer Relationship Management and Loyality Marketing Programs.

Doug Rollins showed a cool little trick using Microsoft PowerPoint 2007.  It's called "Motion Paths".  Allows images to move along a pre-defined line.

The PIN Code Program is a loyality program (it's the numbers underneath the bottle caps of Coke products).  It's their most successful CRM program ever.

Coca-Cola hasn't really taken advantage of WAP 2.0 for mobile...they use texting more often.

Jeff Mirman - VP of Marketing NBA

Jeff talked about interactive media in the NBA space.  He brought up the following concepts with marketing:

• Social Networking - most of the room is on facebook - NBA has 1.8 MIL on facebook...the NBA does not currently know how to effectively integrate with these people and the marketing stategy....possibilities include adding tabs to the facebook page (apps).  They will be pushing their twitter and facebook posts onto their website.
• Tweets - most are on Twitter, but only a small fraction actually use it.
• Real Time Search - fairly new technology - searches facebook status updates and tweets to use for search immediately - Google & Microsoft are partnering with OneRiot.  This will be the wave of the future.  Yahoo is on board too (posted just 16 hours ago):  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/27/AR2009102702364.html
• Mobility - most people have a functional smart phone ... how do you utilize mobility from a marketing perspective?

He also talked about the concept of True Interactivity:

• Social media has made it easier for companies to be grass roots.
• Allows the company AND the customers to be brand champions.
• Things usually work out if you are transparent as possible.  When Jeff worked for Starwood Hotels, they had a comments field for their hotels and many brand managers were very reluctant to have the comments, but it worked out fine.  Allowed problems to surface and be addressed. 

Video

• Any major media site is all video (or a major section of it).  Sports sites...all video; CNN - video.
• It's getting closer and closer to what TV is (with interuption marketing technology built in - commercials).

The Future of Media Online:

• It's about us / me, where I am, when I want it.  It's about providing assistance using real time search (e.g. - Orbitz allowing you to post how long lines are at JFK).

NBA is doing a cross platform strategy (using the .com, TV, mobile, facebook, twitter, video).

eMA Conference

I'm at the eMarketing Association Conference in Atlanta Georgia.  This blog will be used to document that experience.