IMS 2009 Day 2: New Lingo and General Awesomeness

Day #2 of the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 (IMS 09), Boston, brought another fully-loaded agenda of presentations, panels, and networking.

Some notables follow.

By the Numbers

Since a significant portion of today's sessions focused on metrics, I'll start this post with some data points from IMS 09:

- If Facebook was a country, it would be the world's 5th largest (thanks to Paul Gillin for this stat)
- Ranking algorithm for search according to Hubspot: F(n) = context + authority
- Number of Presentations with Susan Boyle References: 2
- Number of Presentations with Seinfeld References: 2
- Number of Presentations with World of Warcraft References: 2
- Number of Books Recommended: I lost count

Talk the Talk

Favorite New Social Media Buzzword: Twestimonial - a positive comment about your brand on Twitter.

Most overused, albeit accurate catch phrase: Content is King

Walk the Walk

With so many excellent speakers--representing companies such as Southwest Airlines, Weber Shandwick, CodeBaby, dna 13, Paul Gillen Communications, IDC, Awareness, Razorfish, and Edvisors, to name a few--learnings cannot be summarized in a single blog post alone. I encourage you to join the #IMS09 discussion on http://twitter.com/ to engage with presenters and participants.

- The two elements of successful search: recency and inbound links
- Listen first. Follow the discussion about your brand and about your competitors
- Loyalty is an emotional response. It is not made from satisfaction alone, but rather stems from willingness to recommend
- Advice from Greg Matthews, Humana, for getting started on Social Media: Be a vacuum, be a padawan, try stuff, and be 2.0
- Employees who love your brand can make excellent public representatives. An example of this is Jim Long, NBC News cameraman who became the unlikely brand ambassador
- Vary your content objects (such as video, documents, podcasts, etc). Mix it up
- Customer service is marketing
- Own the process

The most resonating theme of the day was passion for community. And the vendor sponsors and exhibitors didn't disappoint. Most memorable was the PerkettPR booth at which visitors took a quick quiz that identified the Social Media Gurus they most resemble (social media behavior, not necessarily appearance). As it turns out, I'm a CC.

Empower Your Brand with a Microsite

Do you have a product or service offering that requires awareness aside from that of your corporate brand?

Could you easily bring this product or service into the broader context of an interactive, topical conversation with customers and prospects?

If the answer to both of these questions is yes, your offering may be a good candidate for a microsite.

Separate from your corporate website, a microsite:

• Lets you focus a conversation on a specific product, service, promotion, or topic
• Can strengthen brand awareness and help build brand affinity
• Costs about the same as setting up a traditional website $2,500-over $50,000*
  
• May be used to create brand equity and to foster customer community interaction about a particular area of your business
• Should not be used solely to increase traffic to your corporate website

Remember that you’ll need to keep content fresh and relevant on the microsite as well as on the main site. Be sure it fits into your marketing, branding, and search engine optimization strategy, and that you clearly identify the intended call-to-action for your audience.

*source: Melissa Campanelli, Entrepreneur Magazine