Wrap Up of MIMA Summit 2008

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.

Despite the sophmoric humor, key messages were clear:

• advertising is evolving as content
• publishers are competing with advertisers
• humanizing brands vs brands being human
• internet access at the Depot sucks during a keynote
• technology connects people and conversations
• the social web creates new channels of dialoge and companies need to identify how to monitor and respond – how to engage with that feedback
• you can be famous on the web and broke in the real world until people start paying you $10k to speak at conferences or “dance like an idiot and don’t sell anything”

TopRank team members posted on a number of MIMA Summit topics and sessions:

• MIMA Summit 2008 – Ashley
• MIMA Summit 2008 Kicks Off to a Sold Out Crowd – Julie
• MIMA Summit Marketing Mix Challenge – Lee
• Storytelling, Advertising and Content – Rebecca Lieb at MIMA – Jolina
• The Changing Face of Email Marketing – Julie
• Corporate Bloggers: Angels or Demons? – Jessica

You can find other Summit blog coverage via Technorati and the MIMA blog.

The Twitterati were active and enthusiastic during the Summit, making the designated hashtag, #mimasummit08 the most popular trending tag on Twitter’s search engine during the event.

All in all, the FEED Summit was a good event for the Twin Cities interactive set.  Outside of the PPC session with Kevin Lee, it was fairly light on the search marketing content but that’s our self admitted bias for any marketing event. The networking was great thanks to ample breaks between sessions, a super lunch (really!) and the inevitable happy hour sponsored by Gage and Microsoft.

Thanks to MIMA!