MIMA Summit Wrap Up

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.

The session on online branding was very interesting. I asked about the use of search marketing in online branding and only one speaker had an example and that was Laurie Blum, Senior Media Strategy Manager at Best Buy, who was kind enough to describe an initiative where they used paid search to drive awareness of the Geek Squad in new markets and associate with keyword concepts like, “home computer repair”.

The MIMA board and volunteers did a fantastic job putting the event together and I have to give special thanks to Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, who is hands down, one of the top web copy writing consultants, and also responsible for speaker programming. Bret Busse, President of MIMA who did an excellent job with overall MC duties.

There’s a vibrant interactive marketing community here in Minneapolis and St. Paul and I am looking forward to more search related events in 2006.