Wednesday, March 3 (Day 2)
The day started early – breakfast at 7:30am (I didn’t arrive until 8am). I took the time to go visit vendors in the Partner Showcase and get “stamped” (if you get a card stamped from each vendor and turn it in, you have a chance to win prizes – a great incentive to get more folks to chat with the vendors who pay good money to be there).
Keynote Session in the Grand Ballroom
Morning General Session: It was impressive as always with Josh James (former CEO of Omniture, now Senior Vice President of the Omniture Division) and Shantanu Narayen the CEO of Adobe both sharing insights and introducing speakers. Let me share some of the best nuggets I got from this session.
Josh James, SVP of the Omniture Division at Adobe and Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe
- The coming decade is the Decade of the CMO
- Successful CMOs will:
- Create an engaging experience with customers
- Unify and personalize consumer interactions across channels
- Social media is a new driving force in marketing.
- One of Omniture’s customers makes $10 million / year in sales just from Twitter!
- Currently 40% of all offline sales are driven by online marketing.
- Omniture announced the launch of Marking Suite 2.0
- New features will include the ability to target customers who visited your site and did not purchase anything.
- Omniture announced a parternship with Facebook
- The new Facebook integration will allow businesses advertising on Facebook to get the data directly in Omniture, including the demographic data of folks who opted to click on ads.
Alan Rimmer – Senior VP from RIM
Alan discussed the importance of mobile in marketing campaigns, as well as announcing a partnership with Adobe (hmm a little “in-your-face” to Apple and their refusal to support Flash?).
- In 2014 smart phone sales will overtake PC/Notebooks.
- 35% of smart phone users surf the web daily.
- 25% of all Facebook traffic is from mobile.
- Twitter is accessed 2x as much via mobile than via the web.
- Mobile advertising projected to exceed $20 billion this year.
Dan Rose, VP of Business Development at Facebook
Dan came out to give more detail on the collaboration between Facebook and Omniture and to talk about social media in general.
- Real-time communication (like texting) is replacing email.
- Facebook currently has 400 million users worldwide.
- Facebook users have an average of 130 friends, and 50% log in every day.
- Fastest growing demographic on Facebook are folks 35 and older.
His primary message regarding adding your business to a social network, like Facebook:
- Go Real – don’t be fake or full of marketing slang in your social networks. Be real about your company and who you are with your customers.
- Go Fast – use social media to market in order to leverage the viral potential of social media.
- Go Small – target your ads to your individual customers as much as possible. For example, with Facebook you can specifically target wedding dress ads at women, age 25-30, who were recently engaged.
- Go Big – leverage word of mouth-to-really get your messaging out to a wide audience.
Break-out Session 1: I wanted to attend “Killer Analysis: Best Practices for Making Analytics Strategic” but when I got there the session was full (they wouldn’t let more people in). So instead I sat in on the session “Leveraging Analytics to Build Strategies and Tactics for your SEO Program”. The nuggets of insights I found valuable in this session:
- 95% of all organic search visits come from 1st page results
- What’s next for SEO?
- Canonical tags – code you add into the header of pages that have the exact same content, but different URLs (pertains to dynamically generated sites).
- Video SEO – using XML sitemaps and other techniques to get better search results for videos on your site.
Break-out Session 2: “Organizational Readiness for Optimizing Conversion.” Bill Gassman from the Gartner Group presented at this session and had some great little nuggets:
- Best practice for organizational success in optimization:
- Put 1 person in charge of the effort to ensure consistency
- Make use of tech support and IT whenever possible
- User Experience (UX) optimization is always a continuous process
- When designing the UX you need to understand:
- Who your users are
- Demographics
- Psychographics
- Connectivity
- What your users want
- Polls and Surveys
- What your users really do on your site
- Metrics and analytics
- Try and match user actions with your business goals
- Who your users are
- Taking your organization to the next level requires:
- A strong C-level executive partner
- A governance team
- Use expert consultants during new initiatives
- Iterative testing, so you can build on what you learned from previous tests
- Use an optimization maturity model
Break-out Session 3: “Creating Social Media Advocates for your Brand.”
Social Media Myths:
- It’s free (not if you pay people to help manage your social media strategy – Intel has 40 people dedicated to monitoring and managing their social media presence online.)
- It can’t be measured (it can with the right tools – there are many tools both free and paid that help you measure every aspect of social media these days).
Social Media is like an “unpaid army” that can:
- Recruit new customers
- Provide customer support
- Give advice
- Create and share content
When analyzing your social media presence it’s good to keep a record of:
- Who is talking about you?
- Who are your evangelists and detractors?
- Who are potential influencers for your brand? Who do they trust?
- Continue to build your following and encourage interaction
- Don’t forget to update regularly! Don’t let your social media presence go stale.
Afternoon General Session: Keynote by John Battele
The Conversation Economy
- Fastest growing web sites today are ones that allow you to have a conversation with the site and with other customers
- Many brands are already having conversations with their customers – conversational media is real
- What’s important? Scale + Safety + Quality + Engagement + Measurement
Main Talking Points:
- Database of Intentions
- Every search result is saved forever in databases
- Search is getting muddy – too much data and sites than ever before
- The Social Graph
- Who are you?
- Who is connected to you?
- Privacy will continue to be a front burner
- The Status Update
- What’s happening?
- Where Are You?
- MOLRS
- Mobile=Local=Realtime=Social
- Mobile is a social, real-time strategy
- War for the Web
- Open vs. Closed
- iPad vs. myPad
- Google Buzz vs. Facebook
- Data portability
- If we allow closed systems to take over the web, it will begin to fracture
- All marketers are now also publishers
- All consumers are now both
Evening reception was in the Partner Pavillion was nice with more drinks to be had, but this time no food. Ended up leaving early and going back to my room to relax and change into more casual clothes for the party/dinner. Headed out on the bus to the event venue around 8pm for dinner and to see “The Killers” perform in concert.
I wrapped up my day by 1am – it was a long but fun and productive day!
To be continued …
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