Online Marketing Blog

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.

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.

If you’re looking for sources of information on search marketing, conferences can be a great resource. Or. if you’re a conference junkie like me, then you’ll find the SEOBook “Must See SEO Events” calendar exceptionally useful.¬† Some disclosure here, I am editing the calendar along with Aaron.

Some of the conferences listed include:

• Search Engine Strategies
• WebmasterWorld Pubcon
• ad:tech
• DMA conferences
• MIMA
• eMetrics Summit
• eTail
• Shop.org Summit
• Search Insider Summit
• OMMA
• Affiliate Summit
• SEO Roadshow
• SEO Bash
• And more

If you know of a conference that deals in some way with search marketing (SEO or SEM) then drop a comment. Regional events are welcome as well.

One of the organizations I am involved with is MIMA, the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. It’s been a great experience working with so many talented individuals. There really is an abundance of interactive marketing talent here in the Twin Cities.

Over the past few years MIMA has grown tremendously and this year the size of the board of directors has nearly doubled. Below is a press release:

MIMA ANNOUNCES BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Interactive marketing association changes leadership for 2006

(MINNEAPOLIS) – The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA.org) welcomes 15 local interactive professionals to its board of directors.

The new board welcomes Kristina Halvorson as its new president. Halvorson has been on the MIMA board of directors since 2002 and is the founder and president of Brain Traffic. MIMA’s outgoing president is Bret Busse, the CIO of Evantage Consulting, who began his term in 2004.

I just returned from the 4th Annual MIMA Summit and it was another record breaking crowd, almost 200% more than last year. Fantastic venue at the U of M Alumni Center, which has really amazing architecture.

The keynote speaker was Shar VanBoskirk from Forrester which was excellent. Her presentation on what integrated marketing is and really should be, especially the notion of creating personas was enlightening.

Ward Tongen of Findlaw, Scott Ekman of Rockler and myself presented on Search Marketing with Nina Hale from Capella as moderator. That session seemed to go quite well. I was fortunate to speak with many great companies shortly after and look forward to following up later this week. Susan, Karen, Thomas, Jolina and David from our company were able to come which was very much appreciated. Alas, I did not get to do my pigeon rank bit. Maybe next time.