ISA Marketing & Sales Summit

Phil Mershon provides an excellent summary of new research by Hubspot and Edison Research in his July 14^th blog post, How to Grow Social Media Leads: New Research.

The research confirms how social media contributes to bottom-line results:

• More frequent blog posts bring greater traffic and leads
•  A steady library of blog posts grew leads and traffic better
• More Twitter followers = more leads
• Bigger Facebook fanbases mean better results
• Social demographics are growing

Phil’s post includes links to several SocialMediaExaminer’s How-To articles to help:

(1)  26 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Leads by Debbie Hemley

(2)   6 Ways to Constantly Produce Quality Blog Content by Denise Wakeman

(3)   21 Creative Ways to Increase Your Facebook Fanbase by Mari Smith

(4)   8 Simple Steps to Growing a Quality Twitter Following by Cindy King

This post was authored by Deborah Franke, a freelance digital marketing expert who authors a blog and is a member of the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit Planning Committee.

This post originally appeared on the Telesian’s What’s Working in Marketing Blog

We often hear that marketing departments need to be making more videos…and the pressure is on. What to create?  How to best tell the story?

I came across this article on Mediapost about Corning’s recent video that tells a story about the future of glass, and it has skyrocketed in views on YouTube – almost 8M views!  What’s more interesting is that this video was made for the investor community, it was not intended for the public…initially.  But as viral marketing takes over, it’s clear the public thought it was something worth viewing too.

The video, called “ A Day Made of Glass,” was originally created for Corning’s Investor Day in New York City on Feb. 4. The video subsequently hit YouTube and was quickly picked up in Android forums, then in discussions on Wired, Gizmodo and Awesomer. By March 7, it was the number one video on Unruly Media’s “Viral Videos Chart.”

“It wasn’t specifically architected to get 8 million views on YouTube,” John Mannion, director of client relations for Corning agency Doremus, tells Marketing Daily. “We were trying to inspire largely Corning’s big investors as to the applications of glass into electronics and into our everyday lives.”

This goes to show you that inspiring, interesting content can generate BIG results without your planning it at all.  I’ve embedded the video here. Perhaps it will inspire new thinking about what you can do for your brand.  Things that stood out to me:

1.  There was no heavy marketing feel, they used branding elements in the beginning and the logo ghosted on the top left.  It didn’t interfere with the video experience.

2.  There was no narration – just music and images and light use of text.

3.  It was easy to follow the story and was believable – not some Jetson-like world that would bring doubt.  It was fun to join in the imagination of what is possible in our future.

What did you think?

Every year there are enough changes in the search engine landscape that it requires an entire update from year before.  In this presentation, I take a look at the latest trends in search engine marketing to help uncover new areas of opportunity for industrial automation companies.  This year, content is king and is a requirement for driving success in any marketing campaign, especially in search.  I also talked about how social media is now integrating with search in real-time, and that is something we all need to pay attention to in the next year.
It is said that by 2013, the information on the Internet will essentially double every 72 hours.  That’s compounded by the fact that 70% of buyers start their research on search engines.  So it’s important to get this stuff right.

Here is a copy of my slides, I include lots of updated numbers and statistics relevant for search.  Also below that is the video stream presentation that you can download as well, if you would rather listen and watch than read.

My Presentation:

We’ve created a Slideshare event to warehouse all of the presentations from the 2010 Marketing and Sales Summit. We’ll also be creating individual posts here on the site with additional content from some of the presenters.

http://www.slideshare.net/event/2010-isa-marketing-sales-summit