Around 100 digital marketing mavens -- and virtually as many open laptops -- learned much about online marketing Friday at the Module LLC 09 Midwest Digital Media Conference at Schoolcraft College.
Module Partner Adrian Pittman kicked off the day's festivities by exploring the reasons why tech-based marketing projects fail. The bottom line: "We often blame the tools when it isn't their fault," he said. "If you swing a hammer and hit your thumb, who do you blame? The hammer or the person swinging it? Sometimes good technology used incorrectly can lead to challenges that would not ahve occurred by avoiding it."
Pittman said that too often technology implementations aren't carefully studied enough beforehand, increasing "exponentially" the likelihood of failure. And he said they too often include inadequate resources for training.
"Most large implementation budgets allocate less than 5 percent to change management issues such as trianing and communications," Pittman said, while a good budget is somewhere around 10 percent.
Speaker Ken Burbary, vice president of digital marketing at Ferndale's Big Communications, rattled off some amazing statistics about the more or less takeover of the known universe by social media.
Facebook is now over 200 million active users who log more than three billion minutes on Facebook a day, uploading 850 million photos a month.
There were also 14.8 million online video views in January.
Traditional marketing, Burbary said is somebody interrupting you -- frequently by yelling at you. The new digital marketing techniques, in contrast, are a whispier -- gently influencing, personalized, collaborative.
One example: the ad agency Campbell Ewald created a social community for mothers of sailors in the United States Navy, to provide more value for this network of influencers than they ever could have in the traditional media.
Next up -- Amber Naslund, director of community at Radian6, a social media marketing agency based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
She basically described her own role and said it would become increasingly common at businesses of all types.
"There's a lot of misinformation about community roles -- people ask, do you just play on Facebook all day?" she said. "I think over the next five to seven years people will have roles that don't fit into the buckets we've put people into for the last, you know, eon. I'm a little bit customer service and customer relationship management. I'm a little bit secretary sometimes. I'm a little bit anthropologist. I connect the people within our walls to the people outside our walls, customers and potential customers, and find ways to engage them with each otehr. It doesn't matter if you put this job in public relations or marketing, because the customers don't care ... They care that you are making connections with people they want to talk to, and people in your business who matter to them."
She's also a diplomat, defusing tense situations where mistakes have happened and rebuilding trust, as well as an ambassador for the whole idea of Web 2.0 in her company.
So how did she get to that job? A music major in college to a successful nonprofit fundraiser to an accidental corporate marketer.
She said community builders also need to be willing to get their hands dirty and work long hours. And the phrase "that's not my job" simply does not exist.
Damian Rintelmann, director of interative business development at the Maumee, Ohio agency Hart Associates, emphasized the booming mobile phone market for marketers, noting that mobile phones have achieved 2.7 billion users in 35 years, vs., 800 million users in 100 years for automobiles, 1.3 billion users for landline phones in 110 yaers and 1.5 billion users for TV in 60 years.
Marketers, he said, must tailor their messages for mobile phones' narrow feature set, lower tolerance for complicated content, and location-based features. The Obama presidential campaign, he said, was a masterful user of mobile phone communications.
Marcel Lebrun, CEO at Radian6, presented a view of "The Yellow Brick Road to Social Media Maturity."
He pointed out the reality of today's marketing: Your brand is now the sum of conversations about it, your customers are now talking on the 'social phone,' and you can no longer control the media no matter how much money you spend -- you are merely a participant.
The five levels to social media maturity he called listening, responding, participating, sharing and contributing. All involve lots of listening first.
"I tend not to recommend people start with a blog," Lebrun said. "The reason is you risk carrying over a certain type of thinking into the social Web. For example, you might take your one way push traditional marketing habits to your blog."
Instead, listen first, and realize that the social media are about persuasion and influence. "If you're Zappos and you sell shoes you might want to listen to conversations about sore feet," he said.
Well, that was the morning. And there was at least as much good stuff in the afternoon, but I couldn't stay. But check out the first few pages of the 13,700 responses you get by Googling Module Midwest Digital Conference if you're curious.
Module LLC, by the way, is a consortium of five marketing firms with digital expertise.
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