June Luncheon–Roundtable Leaders (cont.)

Amy Spreadborough, Creative Ad Campaigns
Great things can happen when you dispense with the marketing mumbo-jumbo, focus on simple, human, relevant truths and break category conventions. That's the philosophy Leopold Ketel & Partners takes to creating great creative campaigns for Oregon brands like OPB, the Oregon Humane Society and many others. In this conversation, we'll explore ideas for reinvigorating brands, find a brand’s unique voice and allow creative ideas to happen within your organization, all while never forgetting that the ultimate end-game is generating results.

Alex Williams, The E-mail Marketing Experience
Without e-mail, there is no digital dialogue. E-mail is the digital backbone of our times. As an e-mail marketer, you are responsible for using this channel to create the most dynamic, personal, interactive and effective communication you can. Alex Williams from eROI will discuss the latest trends, best practices and strategies in e-mail marketing. Learn how to most effectively use the e-mail channel to improve the impact and return on your e-mail efforts.

Bill Dolan, Leveraging the Power of Video in Marketing
Video has re-emerged as one of the most powerful tools in sales and marketing. It can be versatile, engaging and accelerate your sales cycles. However, the wrong video, incorrectly utilized can bring your marketing to a screeching halt. At this table, 30-year TV director and Emmy-nominee Bill Dolan from Spirit Media will discuss the when, where and why (and why not) of using video in your marketing.
We’ll also review:
· the top ten applications for video in marketing,
· the seven deadly sins of video usage, and
· the most effective use of video in the sales journey.

Dale Schreiner, Communication
Whether it’s communicating your product’s key benefits to potential customers or persuading your boss that you truly deserve that raise, “quietly delivering an impactful message” reminds us that we don’t need to shout to be heard. At this round table, we’ll discuss how and why rational discussions conducted with confidence can achieve your desired result without resorting to histrionics or technological gimmickry. Share your examples of client interactions, internal business discussions or even personal arguments where the quiet voice among the din won the day.

Kent Lewis, Search Engine Marketing & Website Optimization
Join Kent Lewis, President of Anvil Media, Inc., to discuss the latest search engine marketing and site optimization strategies. Topics of interest may include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), link development, social media marketing and Web analytics.

Kim Brater, Brand
Brand is arguably one of the least understood and most under-utilized assets in business. However, in an increasingly competitive marketplace, companies that have aligned their brand and business strategies are building real value and positioning their organizations for sustained growth and success.

Join Kim Brater, Certified Brand Strategist and founding partner at Ant Hill Marketing to discuss strategies for transforming your brand from a marketing initiative to a corporate-wide strategy. Kim will also discuss issues faced by marketing execs like: How do I define brand in fifteen words or less? Who owns your brand? And How do I get C-Level buy-in? 

Mara Woloshin, The No Hype, just help approach to Public Relations
Can $1 really work like $3?
It’s true. With strategic thought and planning, public relations and marketing efforts can really make $1 work like $3. Join Woloshin Communications as we talk about how to drive public relations campaigns to support marketing efforts, primarily by leveraging your target’s indigenous values and behaviors. Sound confusing? It’s a time-tested and very, very simple model that maximizes the ROI on the combined efforts of public relations and marketing campaigns.

Register for Event

Sponsorship Spotlight: Marqui (cont.)

Marqui distinguishes itself from the crowd by commitment to the little guys. There are competitors who offer many of the same features, with one notable difference…the large price tag. Marqui targets small to medium-sized businesses, allowing them to run similar sophisticated marketing campaigns on their own.  Moreover,  Marqui is more than just web content management. Our focus on developing marketing automation features allows the marketer to run campaigns effectively from start to finish.  We also offer a fully integrated solution. We provide web content management capabilities, campaign management capabilities, as well as integrating seamlessly with your CRM.

“What was really interesting about Marqui was not just the marketing automation, but that it had built a way to connect all of this data to Salesforce.com CRM,” said Ron Miller, journalist for InsideCRM

We'd like to share an especially satisfying case study with the AMA.  We help many clients achieve results and meet their marketing goals. One recent case study was the Union Gospel Mission who were able to transform their outdated website into an active communications vehicle to promote their good work to the public, recruit volunteers, stay connected to their donors, and drive donations. Their results with the Marqui Marketing Automation Suite included:

· Reduced cost of email campaigns by over 70% (saving $23K annually)
· 22% increase in online donations
· Over 40 volunteer applications submitted online in less than 4 months

THANK YOU Marqui!

Forward 2008–
Re-Cap of the AMA's 2008 Conference (cont.)

Andy proved to be a very animated and convincing evangelist for the power and usefulness of word of mouth marketing.  His thesis  for successful word of mouth marketing campaigns includes these components:

• Talkers, who are very ordinary persons and convey a certain trustworthiness about themselves, but, generally are not customers
• Topics, which are portable stories to talk about, but are not about product features or attributes
• Tools, that make it easy for the word to spread
• Taking part, which Andy boiled down to conscientious, consistent and authentic personal customer service

Andy's evangelism was spoken through the many stories he told as examples of his points.  A few of these are:

• Making Talkers- The luxury Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas created lots of word of mouth marketers for themselves by inviting the city's cab drivers to complimentary stays in their hotel prior to opening
• Making Topics- Andy took his family, which includes a toddler, to a new restaurant in Chicago, which created a topic for Andy to talk about by offering valet service for his child's stroller and giving the little boy a piggy bank to play with while the Andy and his wife enjoyed their meals.
• Making Tools for spreading the word easier- remember the matchbooks that every business establishment made available for customers to take away for free?  Make sure that nobody leaves your business empty handed.
• Take Part in your customer's dissatisfaction- The best marketing comes from changing an unhappy customer into a happy one.

The afternoon keynote speaker was Mrinal Desai, formerly VP with LinkedIn and currently VP and founder at CrossLoop.  The LinkedIn social networking website is quite familiar to people by now, but CrossLoop is still in its startup phase.  So, Mrinal addressed most of his comments to how CrossLoop has found success for its continued growth.  What seemed to be amazing serendipity, relative to Andy Sernovitz's morning presentation, was Mrinal's descriptions of CrossLoop's heavy reliance on creating Talkers for word of mouth marketing.

The CrossLoop product is a software package that allows Internet users to share each other's computer screens and access expert help on computer related issues, given that the proper bono fides are provided.  CrossLoop's aims their software development at making their computer service providers' customers successful.

Very much as Andy Sernovitz outlined earlier in the day, CrossLoop tries to convert every provider's customers into Talkers.  And, as mentioned before, the serendipitous choice of speakers meant that the Conference attendees were able to see in CrossLoop's marketing activities a real world application of Andy's word of mouth marketing techniques.  Among these were:

• Build a relationship with each and every user- said Andy's way, don't let anyone leave your business empty handed.
• Listen hardest to your critics- said Andy's way, the best marketing is changing an unhappy customer into a happy customer
• Make certain that every customer communication is handled in a conscientious, consistent and authentic personal service- said Andy's way, take part in your customer's experience.  (Mrinal enjoyed describing the very early days of CrossLoop, when he was working alone, of how he would often be awake into the late hours of night writing personal email responses to each of, sometimes, 500 customers.  Mrinal enjoys telling this story because those 500 customers told their friends and CrossLoop grew.)

The presentations and Q&A came to a graceful close about 2:30PM with most everyone taking away new ideas. 

Special KUDOs go to Platinum Sponsors Bill Dolan and Spirit Media for providing all of the presentation production work and Robb Crocker and funnelbox for the filming work!

About the Writer: Susan Federici is Principal of Federici Business Group. She can be reached at susan@federicibusiness.com.

Field Report from the Microsoft Vision to Venture Conference (cont.)

Other speakers included Susan Wilson Solovic (Author, CEO, and co-founder of Small Business Television, www.SBTV.com,) and Rich Sloan (Author and co-founder of www.StartupNation.com, an assistance for entrepreneurs website).

I have to say it was pretty impressive to see so many women passionate about their businesses. Since returning, myself and Matthew Scott, another Duct Tape Marketing coach, have been asking ourselves what we learned. Are women entrepreneurs different from their male counterparts?

The danger of such a question is that we so easily fall into sexual stereotypes. A few things came out loud and strong -- at least to my ears however.

The first is that women seem to be better at collaborating and learning from one another. At the conference I was impressed by the amount of information exchange. During panel sessions the women were passionate in their questioning and it was obvious that the rest of the audience was at full attention. During breaks the conversations continued and business cards exchanged. In my experience with my fellow men, I do not see this same level of vulnerability that I saw in the questioning at the conference. I also do not usually see the same level of interest in collaboration from men even though this can be a huge competitive advantage.

The other noteworthy comment came from Susan Wilson Silovic who said that most women don't think big enough. She said that women are starting companies at twice the rate of men but only 3% of those women have businesses with over $1 million in revenue.

I think Susan's comment is a good one for all of us. Don't let your own head trash limit your potential. We need to give ourselves permission to dream big. Go get 'em!. If you'd like to comment on this topic please go to my blog and continue the conversation.
In a couple of weeks I will also have a podcast interview with one of the organizers of the event.

Ciao! Michael Thompson
www. marketaccelerators.com