September 19, 2011
Top 10 Take Aways from the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit
I recently attended the Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston which featured many well-known social media and marketing experts. Below are the Top 10 Take Aways from the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit:
1. Chris Brogan: The biggest reason you should be on Google+? It’s going to have a big impact on SEO.
2. Chris Brogan: Two great tools to find people on Google+: Group.as and findpeopleonplus.com .
3. Brian Halligan: The next generation of the web experience is the personalized experience a la NetFlix, Pandora, Amazon. The experience gets better every time they come back and use the site.
4. Ben Mezrich: The author of Accident Billionaires (the book The Social Network was based on) and Bringing Down the House, said that the MIT Blackjack Team once accidently leftt behind $150k in cash in a classroom.
5. Dan Zarrella: In a recent study, click thru rates of emails significantly increased when sent out on Saturdays or Sundays. The counter-competitive timing of the emails, when competing traffic was much lower, was the reasoning for this success.
6. Dan Zarrella: Engaging in conversation on Twitter doesn’t build a following, you need to share interesting content. Nobody gives a shit so stop talking about yourself. The most highly followed accounts Tweet a lot of links.
7. Dan Zarrella: When writing for Facebook, write it short and simple. Write for Snooki.
8. Mobile Marketing Panel: Near Field Communications (NFC) will be huge in the mobile space, more so than QR codes.
9. Dharmesh Shah: search.grader.com is a new tool to see the value of your organic search results.
10. Dharmesh Shah: Remind yourself to not think B2B, but rather think B2H(uman).
11. Dan Heath: Placing an image of a housefly in a urinal significantly reduces the amount of “spillage”.
While that was actually Top 11 list, the last point is too fascinating to leave off (look it up when you get a chance for the story behind it). Overall, it was interesting to hear all of the people speak. Many of these people are online celebrities in the marketing ecosystem. There’s usually a book to be pushed and some speakers seemed more interested on enhancing their personal brand than providing valuable information for attendees. Of all the speakers, I was most impressed by Dan Zarrella, a “Social Media Scientist” who works with HubSpot. He provided great pieces of information that was actionable, and it was all backed by actual data. I highly recommend following him on Twitter and checking out his website.
