(Aaron Brazell & Maurisa Turner Potts)
AMA-DC hosted a panel discussion, last week, on Innovation & Technology — How it Affects the Marketing Mix. About 35 people gathered at John Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences to hear experts including Aaron Brazell, CEO, Emmense Technologies and founder of Technosailor.com; Gray Brooks, new media ombudsman at Obama for America; Shana Glickfield, communications consultant and founder of DC Concierge; Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, COO, PointAbout and co-founder of DC Mobile Mondays; and Patricia Mejia, VP/marketing for Siteworx. The panel discussion was moderated by marketing consultant Maurisa Turner Potts.
The discussion centered around social media tools, does it work and how do you get many of the companies that have not embraced social media to recognize this is good for their business. The session was one of the better ones Capitol Communicator has attended. Here's just a few of the many interesting comments and take-aways:
Aaron: Answering a question from the audience about why spend your time blogging instead of using Facebook, Linked-in e-mail or other marketing tools. Geek to Live don’t live to Geek, a plagiarism of Benjamin Franklin a website called lifehacker used to have up. The point is no technology is good or bad.
Daniel: Henry Ford would have loved blogs because when you get a question you have answered 20 times already by e-mail, instead of spending 15 minutes to compose the answer via e-mail, spend three hours writing a blog about it, a really researched answer. Then when you get the question again send the person to the blog. You are making an assembly line of expertise. Social media is a tool not a medium. Blogging is a very powerful tool. You also get great Google SEO, which means that when people search for key words, you are the one that comes up as a subject matter expert.
Patricia: Blogging is very important. People see through trying to sell something or position yourself. People want authenticity.
Shana: The way Google ranks you is dependent upon how frequently your website is updated, in addition to how many times you use key words. I encourage all of you to get with your web team or whoever manages your analytics and find out what words people are using to find your site and really optimize round those. A lot of people start their experience with Search. 90% of people come to a site via search.
When the audience was asked the reason companies where not using social media, the number-one reason mentioned was security and, second, ROI. Security was the issue for several government contractors in the audience. Others mentioned ROI. Shana recommended Pew Internet as a resource for executives to access to see the demographic research of who is using social media and also commented about the fastest growing segment of Facebook users are women 50 and older. Patricia recommended a recent report by Forrester Research, a social techno graphics report that tested different demographics and mapped social behavior among the demographics. Daniel added that Pew Internet just recently did a talk at the Web Managers Roundtable event and they talked about the nine tribes of the Internet. They researched nine demographic groups and reported on the growth trends. Content from the discussion can be found on Daniels blog at PointAbout. Just search for Pew.
(Gray Brooks)
Gray is a big believer in test marketing and he recommended a targeted ad campaign to convince executives of the ROI benefit. Google allows you to target by domain, geography and time of day. You can a small test without blowing your ad budget to see what kind of traffic you are drawing to your site.
Daniel provided a helpful tip to those not using Twitter Search. He recommended you definitely use this tool. Go to Search.Twitter.com and enter your search criteria and see what you get. You can set up an RSS feed by clicking on the RSS link.
The group was asked what was their favorite social media tool. Twitter was the overwhelming preferred tool especially Twitter Search. When asked their opinion on the next big thing in social media they all agreed on mobile.