August ADTECH

After taking most of the summer to enjoy life with the kids it was time to get serious about event marketing and networking. So for my birthday I decided to go to chicago and attend ADTech. It is about time to summarize my takeaways from the event. It was actually hotter inChicago than DC over the two days so lugging a backpack around for my48 hour visit was a pain but I brought my new MacBook Air to takenotes. I had a lot of interesting comments, but forgot to save the document so the two pages of commentary are lost, but you probably would want all the nitty gritty details.

The biggest lesson from the event was that search is so 1990s and social media is where the action is at. So we are developing anoffering for "Social Influence Marketing:. For those of you not up onthe social networking crazy I am not talking about the cocktail partiesof 1960 era. This is about electronic networking and connecting with communities online, as well as, creating content for thosecommunities. The business aspects is that your consumers are involved and if you not at least monitoring the buzz on the net you are missing opportunities for sales and improved customer service.

Two examples of the positive and negative impact of social media can have on business. They came from the Conversational Branding session. First a conference attendee told the story of how Comcast actuallymonitors blogs and found an unhappy customer, his mother, and the company reached out to her resolved the problem. While Dell continuesto have customer service issues with the same attendees who asked aquestion he has blogged about the issue and wondered why they don'tproactively resolve issue like comcast. We believe it or not the head of Dell's Digital Media group said we just have to agree to disagreeabout how issues are handled. I think he is an idiot for making that kind of comment infront of an audience of 1000 people at AD Tech.

Our goal will be to show companies how to improve customer service andmake more sales leveraging social media. There is an great article forward to me by our friends up north at R2i which provides several data sources for justification of social media. Check out Aaron Uhrmacher's story on Mashable.



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