We are in the midst of a media revolution, and that revolution is taking place at warp speed. For most of us, just trying to keep pace with what we need to know about social media, search, email and analytics to successfully participate can become a full-time job. As soon as we begin to feel a bit secure in one area, we realize we’re falling behind in another. But, as we heard at last week’s Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego, “online is where your audience is,” and if you aren’t in the game, your competitors are. 

What’s great about OMS is that it’s a learning, not a selling, environment, and it’s filled with thought leaders from all online marketing disciplines. From the roster of pre-conference sessions through the final day focused on SEM, corporate and agency marketers flocked to learn from industry heavyweights. Each day featured standing-room-only, parallel tracks featuring a dizzying array of compelling topics. Do I attend “Social Media Inside the Brand: DuPont Case Study,” or “Twitter, Tweeting Fundamentals”? How do I decide between “How User Centered Design Can Increase Your Bottom Line” or “Landing Page Optimization Best Practices”?

We took our best stabs at which sessions we felt would give us the greatest ROI –from both business and personal standpoints. Without going into detail about what we learned (because this post would never end), here are a few gems – some of which we already knew and some that were “aha!” moments. Each deserves repeating:

• Marketing is now about conversation, and the consumer is in control. So creating brand advocates is just as important as creating brand awareness.
• One in five emails never sees their target inboxes, and most folks in-the-know say deliverability is only getting worse. Part of the reason is that the definition of spam has changed. People are not opening “boring” emails – plus, you simply may be sending too many of them. Consequently, ISPs have started labeling these emails as spam. Relevance matters.
• Don’t just use Google to see what keywords and phrases people are using to locate your online presence. To maximize your online “findability,” look at hot keyword terms and topics used to search for your business and industry in places such as Digg, YouTube (the second-largest search engine), Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, and then infuse your communications with those terms.
• To get the greatest mileage and ROI out of your landing pages, here are some tips:
  • Install crazyegg or clicktale on critical landing pages to watch browsing behavior – you can see where people are clicking and where they are not
  • Check to see how those pages work on popular browsers and operating systems using CrossBrowserTesting
  • Have five users in your target demographic test your landing pages and get their verbal and visual response via UserTesting.com
  • Redesign your page and double-check “attention leaks” with AttentionWizard.com – used with live pages or design mock-ups, you can identify landing-page problems and increase your conversion rates
• Increase the “viral power” of Twitter by getting retweeted. Here are a few good ideas:
  • Make it easy to retweet – keep your tweets short so you leave room for a comment
  • Tweet around 1 pm Eastern Time to increase your odds for West Coast and East Coast tweets
  • Think only short words work? Longer words and novelty/less common words are actually retweeted more often
  • Use links to more information to get retweeted more frequently – URL shortener bit.ly is the most retweetable; tinyurl.com the least

With a multitude of great ideas swimming in our heads, we hit the road for home. What’s exciting is that control of the message is no longer in the hands of the issuing company. Yes, this concept is a bit scary at first, but once we embrace it the possibilities are endless. By bringing our customers’ voices inside our company, we can interact, engage and stay connected with them like never before.

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Tags: online marketing summit, search engine marketing, viral campaigns

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 10:09 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.