Online Marketing Blog

The digital and interactive marketing space moves fast and as both companies and individuals scramble to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, it can be a challenge to find resources and likeminded individuals to help make that happen. Associations offer education, networking and in some cases, advocacy for members and sponsoring companies. The question is, where can you find interactive marketing associations are in your area?

We’ve listed regional Interactive Marketing Associations in the past and thought it would be time for an update. This post will be a work in progress, so please share in the comments the name and working URL of other interactive marketing associations that we’ve missed.  We decided not to include groups and meetups that are primarily dedicated to SEO/SEM or social media.  You can find a list of local Social Media Club chapters here and a list of Social Media Breakfast cities here.  You can find abundant internet professional meetups here.

Companies world-wide are looking for more creative, high impact and accountable marketing.  To find out how marketers were allocating their marketing efforts, we ran a poll of our 18,000 Online Marketing Blog subscribers to get a handle on what the top digital marketing tactics would be in 2009.

Poll respondents cast 1559 votes for their 3 top digital marketing tactics (out of 45) for 2009 with Blogging, Twitter and Search Engine Optimization topping the list. Out of the top 10 tactics, 6 fell into the category of Social Media Marketing.

Companies that don’t have a Social Media Strategy or Roadmap in place now, will most likely fall behind by Q3 or Q4 of this year. I can think of few things more expensive than than having to play catchup, especially in the social media category. You can’t “buy” relationships on the social web.

Last weekend SXSW Interactive was abuzz everywhere you looked from the sessions to the halls, to the Techset blogger lounge and certainly the after conference festivities on 6th Street.

Out of all that buzz came new connections, insights and renewed connections such as the one I had with Ogilvy 360’s Senior Vice President of Digital Strategy & Marketing, Rohit Bhargava. I’ve known Rohit online and off for a few years and finally had a chance to capture a conversation on video.  Watch the interview below regarding the opportunities of attending SXSW including knowledge and networking as well as a few thoughts on his popular book, Personality Not Included, which TopRank has reviewed in the past.

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Readers of Online Marketing Blog may know that after last week’s WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference, I stayed over the weekend in Austin for the Interactive portion of SXSW. I’ve heard up to 9,000 people were registered for the SXSWi event and by looking at the conference sessions, hallways and restaurants/bars, it was undoubtedly the place to be. Below is a summary of my brief time at SXSWi in picutures where search marketing, social media and public relations people converged, networked, talked and listened.

If there were baseball cards for internet marketing and social media superstars then these three would be Upper Deck Premium: David Berkowitz of 360i, Frank Gruber from AOL and Brian Solis, owner of FutureWorks PR

This morning the 8th social media breakfast meeting (started by Rick Mahn) was held at the Deluxe HQ here in the Twin Cities.  In a very short time this meeting of a few social media enthusiasts at a coffee house has grown to over 125 people hosted by the likes of  Best Buy and PartnerUp, a company acquired by Deluxe.

The main speaker at this morning’s event was David Meerman Scott, popular author of several books including, “New Rules of Marketing and PR” which I recently recommended to a crowd of about 400 at the PRSA International conference earlier this week.  Graeme Thickins was able to convince Scott to stay an extra day for the smbmsp event from another speaking engagement, much to the benefit of the MSP social media crowd.

The dust has settled, mountains of email have been sorted through and most of this year’s attendees of MIMA’s Summit, branded “FEED” are back into the swing of things.

As you can tell from the photo above, it was a sold out event and a very big venue. Both keynotes were informative and entertaining. Rebecca Lieb’s presentation was covered by TopRank’s Jolina Pettice and while we didn’t post on Ze Frank’s amazingly entertaining presentation, you can pretty much get a feel for it from his presentations at SXSW last year and from what he’s presented at the TED conference.

Those whose interactive marketing interests extend to the boob and penis humor category were likely satisfied by both keynotes as they touched on everything from jiggly French Maid “how to” videos to crowdsourcing creative phallic drawings.

Incorporating a company blog into your social media and marketing mix can be a tug of war, finding both supporters and defeaters within the organization.

At the MIMA Summit (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) this afternoon, I attended a session discussing the pros and cons, along with the challenges a corporate blogger must overcome to represent the company and still make a connection with the blogging community.

Valeria Maltoni is a blogger at Conversation Agent and Director of Marketing Communications for SunGard. Valeria kicked off the session with a discussion around how an organization can get started with social media and a company blog.

As a business and marketing professional, we are tasked to find different ways to make a profit, find new customers, and build the company brand.

I must say, of all breakout sessions at the MIMA event today, “The Changing Face of Email” session was the one I was most excited to attend as it ties into what I love to do – email marketing. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long to dive right in as it was part of the Summit Kick-Off Breakout session: Deep Dive Discussion Series.

Jamie Schissler, Strategy Director at Avenue A – Razorfish, the presenter for “The Changing Face of Email” session shared with the MIMA audience that as the role of email evolves, so too will its impact.

So why will the email marketing strategies of yesterday not work for email marketing success today?

The annual MIMA (Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association) event kicked off this morning with Rebecca Lieb as the opening keynote.

In a nutshell, the sessio

n was funny, insightful and not without the inevitable internet issues which seem to plague all search conferences (ironic, yes?).

Rebecca got Minnesota online marketers thinking about the following 3 items:
1. Informative (be the content)
2. Entertaining (let people play)
3. Viral (make something people want to share)

From Jerry Seinfeld to French maids to Sarah Silverman’s video about Obama, everything Rebecca shared with the audience centered on the above 3 items.

The first is be the content. It isn’t enough, and hasn’t been for awhile, to publish product or service content. Rather, content that is compelling to your audience needs to be created for them.
No one wants to read standard brochure information. No one.

The Marketing Mix Challenge session promises to answer the question: “If you’re going to launch a new product, how do you formulate the marketing mix - in this economic climate?”

The panel included a mix of in-house marketers and agencies: Luba Smulka from General Mills (Cheerios), Eric Boyles from Medtronic, Ron Corbisier from Cadria (agency) and Patty Henderson from Colle+McVoy. The Moderator is Jeffrey Gorder from ideapark.

The product to be rolled out in a 3 month trial with a $500,00 budget is a yogurt based vitamin drink: Edge-Y.

First up is Luba Smulka, Consumer Insights Manager from General Mills. The challenge is to determine whether there’s viability for a national roll out. To do that, you’ve got to test it.

Matt Wilson, the President of The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), a networking and professional development forum for interactive marketing professionals, kicked off the 2008 Annual MIMA Summit this morning in grand fashion!

With a sold-out room full (600+) of Minnesota interactive marketers chomping at the bit to learn the latest and greatest, it is guaranteed to be a wonderful event.

As the introduction to the event, MIMA ’08 played an awesome & quite humorous MIMA theme song / video by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal that had flashbacks to the “old days” of the interactive – my favorite reference was a lyric that eluded to the good old days of interactive and the internet when you had trouble keeping up the monitoring of your 2 email addresses and posting to blogs a many times…a year.

On Wednesday October 1st, about ten of TopRank’s finest will be making the trek from the Western suburbs to downtown Minneapolis for the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s (MIMA) “sold out” Summit.

As in years past, MIMA Summit will take place at The Depot with a new focus on the subject of “mutualism”. Mutualism centers on the open use of material in the online world, in which web marketers and users alike participate with one another and share information together. In that spirit, I’m going to take the information provided by MIMA about the Summit and share with our readers.