Dr. Anita Sands led an outstanding presentation on the role of Innovation within The Royal Bank, it’s impact on the bottom line as well as the role of Internet Marketing and Social Media.
The afternoon sessions proved to be as good as and better than the morning sessions. Dr. Anita Sands is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University and is now currently the Head of Innovation and Process Design at RBC. Her presentation was outstanding and clearly demonstrates the role of innovation in todays new paradigm of the creative economy. If you like what she had to say about innovation – you need to checkout the Killer Innovations podcast for a weekly dose of creativity and innovation training.
Brent Muhle of Nettwerk Music and Amber MacArthur gave a great discussion and interview regarding the state of the music industry right now. Nettwerk Music for example abhors DRM and embraces social media as a marketing platform for their bands. One particularly interesting statement Brent made was that when they allowed a photo slide show site use of their bands tracks for free – that track out sold other tracks on the album 4-1! It just proves that you don’t need DRM and that sharing music can improve sales overall!
Unfortunately I was not able to attend the panel discussion “Pioneers Perspectives – Reflections on a Decade of Digital Marketing”. If any of you reading attended please comment on this session and let us know how it went.
The final session I attended today was the round table on Online Communities and Social Media. As a round table it was close and intimate. What I came away with is that business from different industries, both small and very large are all interested and wanting to participate in social media but don’t know how to begin. More importantly their reluctant to try too hard for fear of making a mistake and creating a permanent scar on the brand online which they can’t possibly get rid of if they tried.
Our advice to the round table was to definitely get started. Doing nothing is worse than making a mistake! We also suggested:
- Take it slow, do the research and understand what you want to try and then ease into it. If possible find a friend or colleague who is already doing it and ask their advice.My contact info is available to all – and would gladly share all of my insights and experience with anyone who wants to benefit from it. – just ask!
- If you’re starting a blog but are afraid of the comments that might come – turn comments off until you get comfortable posting on a regular basis. Then when you’re ready turn the comments on!
- Measure your results – use analytics (Google is free but you can use others) to easily gauge which of your content writing efforts are generating the most interest and then repeat what you did.
- Track online conversations on the easy and free side or the expensive. Forums, blogs and man social communities are syndicating their content via RSS. You can easily grab their feeds add them to Google Reader and filter them for the topic your interested in such as your brand or product name. You are then only a few clicks away from participating in a conversation you never would have known was occuring. On the expensive side there is BuzzLogic which takes this a step further by helping you understand who is an advocate of your topic because they speak of it frequently and deeply. You can then use this information to target them specifically to help promote your business online.
- Leverage the availability of free software such as WordPress and Pligg to produce your social communities without investing too much money.
There were many more tips we suggested but unfortunately we ran out of time! We’re looking forward to tomorrows line up of speakers and we’ll be posting about them too.
