Let the conference come to you

October 2nd, 2008

It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what aGolden Nugget Las VegasImage via Wikipediabout the rest of the people interested in these topics that frankly don’t have the travel budget and don’t live within driving distance?

Well, Bryan Eisenberg has done all of us a favor, and posted an online virtual conference mashup of recorded presentations from conferences he’s been to recently. At the very least, its a great place to start.

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Following on from Social Media 101

September 26th, 2008

Yesterday morning, I conducted a roundtable for the Colorado Business Marketing Association titled Social Media 101. Now, certainly, that’s a broad topic, so to get a better handle on what to cover, I surveyed those people who were planning on attending. Here are the questions and answers:

What tools do you want to learn about (check all that apply)?

Are you interested in learning how to measure/analyze social media activity?

  • Yes: 86%
  • No:  14%

My last question was free-form, asking people what else they wanted to know about. The questions revolved around these issues:

  • What tactics work best in my industry?
  • How does this apply to B2B companies?
  • How do you use social media for a cleaning product?
  • How can you use social media to generate leads?
  • What are best practices?

I had time to scratch the surface on a small number of all the requests, and, we’re already planning for more workshops on specifics, but, we truly had an interesting discussion. The point I brought home is that the best way to think about social media (at least, from a marketing perspective) is to understand that it is a great opportunity to connect with small, niche groups of people online. The key to discovering those groups is by doing research using monitoring, search and research tools. I showed them these:

I also want to invite those of you who were at the roundtable to connect with the Denver/ Boulder Social Media Club. We had our first meeting on September 23, and are planning another meeting in late October.

Were you there? Anything I forgot to mention that you want to remember? Leave a comment.

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Good links to discussion on marketing and social media

September 19th, 2008

Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:

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Denver/Boulder Social Media Club 1st meeting on Sept 23

September 16th, 2008

A couple of us decided that it was about time the Boulder/Denver area had regular social media meetups, so we’re taking the plunge and setting up a first gathering. This is happening on September 23rd, at 5:30pm upstairs at the Wynkoop Brewery in Lodo in Denver. We’ll probably start off with some low-key shmoozing and drinking, so, feel free to come even if you can’t make it until 6 or 6:30pm.

So what’s a social media club? Really a chance for marketers, bloggers, business people and general fans of social media to gather, share knowledge and ideas and commune away from the computer. Come join us!
Here’s the link to RSVP on Facebook or if you’re not a Facebook fan, you can use this link instead. Interested in finding out more about Social Media Club? Visit the SMC web site.

Online Marketing Summits and Conferences

September 16th, 2008


Though there seem to be two a week that are “must be there” conferences — this week, for example, the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas and Web 2.0 in NYC — I was glad to come across this helpful list today, from Paul O’Brien:

  1. Search Engine Strategies (SES)
  2. Pubcon (WebmasterWorld)
  3. ad:tech
  4. eTail
  5. Search Insider Summit
  6. Affiliate Summit
  7. Shop.org
  8. Online Market World
  9. Direct Marketing Association
  10. eMetrics Summit
  11. Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
  12. OMMA Expo
  13. Internet Marketing Conference
  14. SXSW - which you should attend just because
  15. iMedia Agency Summit & iMedia Summits
  16. PPC Summit
  17. MarketingProfs
  18. American Marketing Association (AMA)
  19. Online Marketing Summit
  20. MIXX Expo
  21. Media Relations Summit
  22. ACCM (DMA)
  23. DM Days (DMA)
  24. Searchnomics
  25. ClickZ Specifics
  26. Internet Retailer
  27. Web Analytics Association Base Camp
  28. Next Generation Marketing
  29. eRetailer Summit
  30. New Marketing Summit
  31. IAB Events
  32. MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit
  33. Apartment Internet Marketing - really!
  34. Frost & Sullivan Marketing World
  35. T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
  36. Catalog & ECommerce Club
  37. Blog World Expo
  38. eComXpo

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Speaking of online and social computing sites and tools…

August 6th, 2008

Just as I was thinking about my follow-up post to my own social applications use post, Chris Brogan published an extensive list of social computing apps on his blog - and there are more in the comments, too. You could do nothing but waste time using all these apps.

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Online marketing and social media marketing links o’ the week

July 17th, 2008

Interesting posts I read this week, so far:

  • Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
  • WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
  • Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
  • Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.