Online Marketing Blog

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.

One of the fun things we get to do on Online Marketing Blog is interview interesting people we meet and get to know by being involved with the industry. This interview is with Rebecca Lieb, Editorial Consultant to ClickZ and former Editor for the past 7 years. In addition to previously offering sage advice on getting more out of marketing conferences here on OMB, Rebecca works as a consultant, is writing a book on search marketing and is often retained as a speaker for industry events.

In this interview Rebecca shares tips on selecting interactive marketing vendors, shares her insights into upcoming marketing strategies and talks briefly about her upcoming book on search marketing as well as the MIMA Summit here in Minneapolis where she’s the keynote speaker.

Your journalism and editorial background has taken you many places topically and geographically. What are some of your favorites?

Editor’s Note: Wednesday this week was the annual MIMA Summit held downtown Minneapolis. With our current workloads and schedules, I wasn’t planning on having TopRank staff attend, but received some last minute encouragement so I had Thomas and Dana attend the whole day and was able to slip in for the last 3-4 hours myself. The attendance nearly doubled over last year to 700+ attendees (an estimate I heard at the event). Hats off to MIMA members for a great job spreading the good interactive marketing word.

The following are wrap-ups from MIMA Summit veteran attendee Thomas McMahon and first-timer Dana Larson.

Thomas McMahon

Going to the MIMA Summit is always a treat. It’s amazing to see how many local people are in the industry and take the time to come out and enjoy a day of great food, networking and great presentations.

The local interactive marketing association I’m involved with here in Minneapolis, MIMA, has launched a new interactive marketing blog that covers some industry news and particularly the good things happening in the midwest interactive marketing space.

Yesterday we had the annual MIMA Summit which went off very well. There were great speakers, a sold out venue, great networking, the best bag of schwag I’ve seen at any conference-anywhere, super food, tons of giveaways from companies like Target and of course some drinking, a bit of electronic-performance art from Popular Front, more networking and libations. A good time was had by all and the feedback has been excellent.

Next year it may need to be a two day event and will certainly need to move to a larger venue. If you’re a marketer working in the midwest, I highly recommend checking out MIMA.

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The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association annual Summit starts in about an hour. This year’s event is sold out and there’s an excellent mix if speakers. With lots of sponsors this year, there are a ton of giveaways as well.

One of our pr firm clients, The Web Marketing Association and Web Award will have their CEO, William Rice start things off with the morning keynote presentation. Bill has run the Web Award competition for 10 years and the program has reviewed over 9,000 web sites in that time. His presentation will offer insight into what makes an award winning web site and he’ll also present industry vertical data compiled over the past 10 years.

That time of year is here again and the annual event held by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association called “The Summit” promises to be even bigger and better.

There’s a fantastic lineup of speakers and sessions including two keynote presentations: One from William Rice of the Web Marketing Association and Michelle Collins, a blogger for VH1‚Äôs, Best Week Ever. Other sessions include:

• Web Writing
• Web Analytics
• Brawny Academy
• Making the Grade
• Ask the Email Experts
• E-Commerce Opportunities
• Site Architecture
• Consumer Generated Media
• Paid Search
• Online Advertising
• Internet Marketing Toolbox
• Can Web 2.0 Change the World?

I would link to the session details, but the promo page was done entirely in Flash with one movie. It’s a very cool sitelet, but not too link or search engine friendly.