It’s been a busy Day 1 of SES NY
and I tried to make as many of the sessions as possible, meet as many people as possible and walk through as many exhibits as I could. Unfortunately I started on Twitter this morning during Guy Kawasaki’s opening keynote, but after that I wasn't able to get back online to the end of the day. I kept getting an error message that said that they’re over capacity and to try back later. I guess too many people from SES NY started Twittering after hearing Guy’s talk which was all about Twitter.
It was a very really interesting presentation and I learned quite a bit about this micro-blogging tool and how you can use it for marketing. Guy's opening quote (that I’m sure got many Tweets including one from me) was: “Nobodies are the new Somebodies”. Everyone gets 140 characters no matter who you are. His presentation walked us through 10 rules or guidelines of using Twitter according to Guy.
The first one is a question that I hear asked all the time and I’ve heard answered differently…Should you follow everyone who follows you? Now I’ve been told before that you look at how many followers they have vs. people that follow them and you can kinda tell that way if they’re “worthy” of following. Guy however automatically follows everyone who follows him. He uses a tool called Social Too that automatically does this for him. He believes it’s “arrogant not to follow someone who thinks you’re interesting enough to follow". He wants to enable as many people as he can to direct message him.
Guy’s #2 rules focused on measurability…what are the goals and how should you measure your success. He believes it’s not the number of people that are following you, but the most important measure is the number of retweets you receive. The greatest form of flattery is when someone retweets you and the tool he uses to monitor how many times he gets retweets is ReTweetist.com.
I’m not going to go through all 10 rules, but I’ll leave this at saying he did give me some good ideas that I want to explore a little more and possibly write about after I’ve had some real time experiencing them first hand.
After the Keynote my first break-out session was from the folks at comScore who always have some great data to share. They gave us more insights into the study that they did in conjunction with Google towards the end of last year that showed that paid search in combo with online display ads lifts traffic and sales. The key is keeping a consistent message on both search and display and incorporating good copy that leads to a clear call to action, i.e. “Shop Here, Free Shipping, etc.”
The interesting part of the study is how they attributed offline sales back to the original online ads, so I asked the question on how they did this. They apparently followed-up with surveys both online and in-store to get this data. So, it’s not the easiest thing to achieve obviously.
The rest of my morning went to landing page testing by Tim Ash from SiteTuners.com. Tim was highly entertaining and he reminded me that the basic principals apply to landing pages that we've all been taught in this business as it applies to most marketing communications. It was a good session that reinforced this. I then got to meet Tim after at Google's booth were he was signing copies of his book "Landing Page Optimization".
The rest of the day is kinda a blur and it's now time for bed. And yes, I made it to most of the networking events I mentioned in yesterday's post and met some great people through some real time social networkking. So good night for now and more to follow tomorrow.
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