Today I’m heading down to the Interactivity Digital Conference in Miami. Topics for the conference include SEO, PPC, content marketing, analytics, email marketing and social media. Speakers include Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz, Peter Shankaman from Geek Factory, John Doherty from Distilled, Scott Brinker from ION Interactive and Marty Weintraub from aimClear. Click here to see the complete speaker list.
I’m really looking forward to the conference. The world of digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. These types of conferences are really critical for marketers who want to stay ahead of the curve. I’ll be live tweeting from the event and I’ll post a summary here later this week. Check back soon.
If you’re at the event and you want to catch up, just ping me on Twitter @jeffperkins8. See you in Miami. Word to your mother.
Anti-Social Media
There’s a lot written about how you have to be so careful about what you post online because it might hurt you with your current employer or in the job-search process.
You can also be too careful. You might chose to have no online identity at all, to be virtually invisible. But being anonymous online can actually hurt you more than it can help you.
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Today you can do a quantitative survey very easily. You don’t have to do them by mail or phone anymore. It’s all online. You can easily get thousands of respondents and deliver a statistically significant research study back to your executive team in just a few weeks.
But even the best online survey can’t replace the old-fashioned way of getting customer insights—the focus group. In this digital age the focus group might seem like an antiquated way of doing research. Many focus groups are done using online meeting tools like iMeet or Skype (I don’t have an issue with that because I work for the company that created iMeet and I think it is a great tool for research).
But, I have to say that nothing beats sitting there and hearing directly from your customer. That is where the real insights come from. Read More
For b2b marketers, there are a few certainties in life: death, taxes and sales collateral.
Every company needs brochures, sales sheets, product slicks, tri-folds, bi-folds and more. When worked in marketing at AutoTrader.com, we had an 800-person sales force all over the country, so as you can imagine we had to create a ton of collateral. It got pretty expensive to print and ship those materials to our reps, but we always thought it was the cost of doing business. You just gotta have your collateral.
Then one day, our world was rocked.
We were in a meeting and one of our top sales reps, a guy named John Ellis from Mississippi, said, “We’re an online company. Why are we showing our products with printed materials?”
When he said that, it was like we were at a nightclub and the music abruptly stopped. What? No printed collateral? Are you kidding? John obviously didn’t know what he was talking about.
But wait. John was the guy we built the collateral for. And if he didn’t want it, why were we spending the time and money creating it?
As we thought about what John was saying, we realized he was right. We were an online company. It was very hard to show dynamic online products on paper. Even high-gloss, heavy stock paper. But, we weren’t going to just shut down the b2b marketing team. After all, we needed our jobs. We had bills to pay.
We thought a lot about it, and we realized that John was not telling us to get rid of all collateral. He still needed collateral. He just wanted a different kind of collateral. Read More
single-minded proposition 
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