I attended B2B Online’s Digital Edge Live conference on March 20th, a full day of insights on trends and best practices in the digital world from executives from the largest companies to small agencies. My head is still spinning with info, but there were a few takeaways that I thought were blogworthy.
Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group opened the event with a presentation that encouraged us all to approach social media with a methodical growth strategy starting with a solid internal foundation and rising to a holistic model where social media is completely integrated into the organization and everyone is completely informed of the corporate guidelines. Without this approach, he warned, organizations will be entrenched in crisis management, or “social media sanitation.”
An interesting point Jeremiah made that was reiterated throughout the day, is that people will no longer refer to Social Media in 5 to 10 years, as it will be so pervasive that it will just be considered an integral part of all business. We don’t see many people these days referring to themselves as Internet marketers. Your first question would be, “As to what? A non-Internet marketer? How do you do that?” It won’t be long before people will ask social media marketing managers, “What other kind of marketing managers are there?”
Mark Wilson from Sybase had one of the most tweeted data points in his presentation on mobile marketing: There are about 2.5x the amount of mobile phones in the world as there are toothbrushes. The statistic accompanied a wonderful photo of a man with disastrous teeth holding a cell phone to his ear.
Attendees tweeted interesting points throughout the day at #DEliveSF. It was an amazing collection of presenters leaving all of the attendees with lots to think about. And maybe it was the last event that will use the term Social Media so pervasively. Perhaps next time they’ll just call it “communications.”
