Switch

Tips from the Digital Marketing Mixer

Last week I had the opportunity to head to Chicago (technically Rosemont, IL) for the Marketing Profs Digital Mixer (#mpdm for the Twitter folks).

It was a 2 day conference, and the sessions ranged from monitoring & using social media to SEO to email marketing to blogging. So basically, it was perfect for me since I seem to have my paws in all of those things here at Switch.

I brought back some really great ideas to integrate into my day-to-day activities, and learned a lot of things I may not use right away, but that I imagine will come in handy at some point.

A favorite part: the keynote speakers were really fantastic. On day 1, Scott Rosenberg (co-founder of Salon & author of Say Everything) moderated a panel with Peter Shankman (founder of HARO, help a reporter out) and Andy Sernovitz (author of Work of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking). Totally entertaining. I believe I even blushed a few times courtesy of Peter Shankman and his practice of basically just saying everything that popped into his head.

Day 2 was Dr BJ Fogg (Stanford University) who used psychology to explain why Facebook was “winning”. For the past few years, Facebook has kind of gotten the brush-off as something kids use to ruin their futures, so it was nice that Dr Fogg gave it a legitimate leg to stand on as a successful idea/program/business. Why is Facebook winning though? He explained that Facebook uses “hot triggers” extensively to draw users back in. Hot triggers, in this case, are those emails you get that tell you you’ve been tagged in photos, invited to a group, received gave you a cow/horse/tree on Farmville, etc. And let’s be honest, who hasn’t immediately logged in to see just what photos you managed to end up in over the weekend? Exactly. Hot triggers.

I won’t walk through all the other sessions, but here are some of the other nuggets of info that were discussed:

• Social media works best with a face attached rather than a logo. Same goes for using “I” instead of “we”. It’s just more personal.
• Use your fun, casual, “cool-guy” voice when writing. No need to sound all stuffy and boring.
• Youtube is great, but if you want total control of your media, host it yourself!
• Social media is not free. At all. Invest in it.
• Gauge your effectiveness using “share of conversation”: In the midst of the conversation going on, how many of those people are talking about me/my brand/my company.
• The ultimate metric is $$$. It doesn’t matter how many fans/friends/followers/comments/mentions you have if it doesn’t help the bottom-line.
• Don’t forget to benchmark. If you don’t know where you started, you’ll never know if you’re making a difference.
• Don’t try to measure more than 3 or 4 things at a time. You’ll hurt your brain.
• Humility and honestly go a really long way.
• Think one level above your brand. Not just about YOU and your company, but about conversations happening in your industry as well.

I could go on all day, but these were the points that really stuck out to me, and the ones that I thought might be most helpful and shareable.

So enjoy, and Happy Halloween!