Friday, May 29, 2009

Inbound Marketing Summit 2009

I attended the Inbound Marketing Summit conference in Dallas this week. It was a rapid fire conference, with each speaker getting 20-40 minutes to talk on their topic. About 11-12 speakers a day. My head is about to implode from all of the information I took in!

The bulk of the speakers were talking about all of the new Social Media tools like twitter and Facebook and what they mean to traditional advertising.

Here are some of the highlights and a few of my thoughts from the conference:
Governor Perry opens the conference via a YouTube video (amusing enough) and says "Welcome to tweeter!" (For those of you who haven't heard yet... it's twitter)
The web is the new dial tone. It has created a 2-way conversation between the customer and the proprietor.
It's not about you or your product. it's about what people are saying about you and your products.
Advocacy is the new way to market.
Be relevant, transparent, authentic and responsive.
If you try to be everything to everybody, you'll be nothing to nobody.
At the Dallas Convention Center, you pay $3 for a Coke in their machines. Yowza!
Facebook is growing by 700,000 users every day.
Quit focusing on the numbers. It's not about the mass numbers, it's about relationships. It's better to have 100 who will speak positively about your business or respond when you give a call to action, than to have 10,000 followers who aren't paying attention.

Chris Brogan/New Marketing Labs (@chrisbrogan) with Cynthia (@OhSoCynthia)

Justin Levy/New Marketing Labs (@justinlevy), Me and Paula Berg/Southwest Airlines Emerging Media Director (@paulaberg)