MarketingProfs Digital Mixer 2009 Takeaways

MarketingProfs Digital Mixer 2009 just wrapped up. Great event overall, some sessions more insightful than others, no vendor pitches in the presentations, lots of powerful taglines (see #mpdm on Twitter), very good insights. Here’s my set of bulleted notes (note: B2B focus).

Oktoberfest dinner reception.

Effective Lead Generation with Webinars
Todd Davison, Bulldog Solutions | Michael Hickey, Hoovers (Dun & Bradstreet) | Jen Moeller, Human

• Webinars are a powerful tool for both thought leadership marketing and lead generation: they are trackable, measurable, scalable, and actionable.
• Segment your audience based on buyer personas for more targeted and engaged webinar events.
• Plan webinars along your yearly marketing events and plan for other marketing activities to keep up the conversation in-between webinars.
• Provide calls to action for the different buying cycle stages: Research (calls to action to gain permission to attract prospects) -> Evaluate (calls to action to overcome objections with “learn more” type of materials) -> Decide (calls to action to support decisions with testimonials, success stories, etc.)
• Apply lead scores to your registered leads (based on roles/personas/activity etc.) before passing them to sales (including leads from webinars).
• Are webinars more effective for new lead generation or for retention?

Using Video to Effectively Increase Marketing ROI
Ron Ploof, New Media Coach/Consultant | Michael Maxin, Divi Tree Media

• Do your videos in FLV.
• Video streaming service is important for end user experience.
• Closed captioning is not just for the hearing impaired, it also makes videos searchable.
• Educational videos can enable a company to reach more audiences than just the intended target one.
• Don’t make one-off videos, better make a series of videos in a dedicated video library.
• Video topic development? Email your sales rep for suggestions!
• Integrate videos to all marketing activities (online & offline, e.g. DVDs).
• Syndicate a few videos, but maintain links back to your video library.
• Make the videos easy to share, rate, forward (viral).
• How important is video quality for sharability?
• Social media is fully measurable, but are you willing to put in the effort to do it?
• “United breaks guitar” video: 5.7mn views and 22.6K comments in 4 months.
  Bob Taylor response video: 191K views and 311 comments in 3 months.
• How do people find your videos? Include text (search engines love text), use description fields, tag well & tag often, put a URL in a frame somewhere.

Social Media & Blogging: What’s Next?
Scott Rosenberg, author of Say Everything | Peter Shankman, HARO | Andy Sernovitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing

• The two biggest mistakes companies make with social media: i) they broadcast, they don’t listen, and ii) they assign social media communications to their most junior employees.
• Our job is to create such great products and provide such great service that our customers do our PR for us.
• New media almost never kills old media; new media redefines old media.
• We are responsible for our own level of Twitter/blog mediocrity. The art of Twitter lies in the retweets, that is provide information that is worth forwarding.
• Determine what to tweet by asking yourself “Is this valuable to someone other than me?”
• If you are a better writer in social media than your competitor, you will win.

Social Media Measurement
Amber Naslund, Radian6

• It doesn’t matter what tool you use; there is no silver bullet in social media measurement. It needs hard work.
• Measurement is like laundry; it piles up the longer you wait to do it.
• Match your social media community to your salesforce database and see what the differences are. People in social media community but not in salesforce database = new opportunities to sell. People in salesforce database but not in social media community = new opportunities to engage.
• Social media provide great context to engage, so listen at the point of need to be relevant and useful!

Using Facebook to Increase Brand Recognition
Mari Smith, Relationship Marketing Specialist | Amy Porterfield, Social Media Strategy Consultant

• Set up vanity URLs.
• Successful Social Media Relationships = Quality Network + Quality Content + Consistency + Genuine, Authentic, Passionate Caring.
• Check out http://www.engagementdb.com that measures social media engagement by the Altimeter team.
• The POST method: What PEOPLE to target -> What is the primary OBJECTIVE -> What STRATEGIES to implement -> What TECHNOLOGIES to use (in that order).
• Use FBML to customize Facebook page look & feel and develop new apps/widgets.
• The Vin Diesel page on Facebook has more than 6.5mn fans! Interesting case story.

Integrating Social Media into your Marketing Strategy
Debra Ellis, Wilson & Ellis Consulting | Pam O’Neal, BreakingPoint Systems | Glenda Ervin, Lehman’s

• Market Intelligence -> Thought Leadership -> Demand Generation -> Sales Enablement.
• Listen first, then get noticed, then build relationships (transparency, quid pro quo, online & face-to-face), then cash in.
• Separate web visitors to new visitors vs. recurring visitors.
• Quality + Consistency = Loyalty.
• Social Media is not about you, it’s about your customers.

The State of Social Media Marketing
Roy Young, MarketingProfs | Tim McAtee, MarketingProfs

• Earned media (= social media) vs. paid media.
• Percent of companies using social media marketing similar for B2C vs. B2B companies.
• Main goal of Facebook marketing is to drive traffic to web site.
• Facebook applications work best for B2C, fan surveys work best for B2B.
• Free web measurement services (e.g. Googla Analytics) still most commonly used (75%) than paid tools. But they also score very high on effectiveness.
• Steady trend towards greater restriction in social media policies as company size increases.

Design for Behavior Change: Why Facebook & Twitter are Winning
Dr. BJ Fogg, Stanford University

• Motivation: pleasure/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection.
• Ability: facilitate by simplifying (not training) based on: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.
• Trigger: hot vs cold.
• Behavior change as ritual: routine or reflex.

Advanced SEO Tips
Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts

• SEO = architecture + content + link building.
• http://www.seo-browser.com -> shows your page the way spiders see it.
• http://www.seomoz.org/linkscape -> approximates PageRank (mozRank) for your page.
• http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp -> checks redirect status (301 is good = passes PageRank).

More Stuff …
Also, check out Aneta Hall’s post with the best tweets from the event.

Technorati Tags: B2B marketing, Digital Mixer, lead generation, marketing ROI, MarketingProfs, social media marketing, Social Media Monitoring

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