Get a crash course in what you missed at this year's iMedia Brand Summit in the Blue Mountains.
This year's iMedia Brand Summit in the Blue Mountains was a great success. Lots of fantastic people, brilliant speakers and plenty of time to network.
The Australian digital industry is relatively small but is growing fast, so there were lots of new people to meet and loads of fun catching-up with the person behind their online persona.
On the first evening Mark McCrindle gave a brilliant keynote about the changing landscape of Digital Consumer Behaviour. One thing that resonated with me was the increasing complexity the 'life-stages' that we need to include in our marketing plans. In the early days we were just 'kids' then we grew up! Now we need to recognise the growing needs of tweens, teens and even kippers.
Like many industry events, the socialising is as much fun, and as important as the scheduled speakers - and everyone was in high spirits. While some of us 'older types' may have retired relatively early in the evening, the festivities in the room next to me carried on well past 2:30 a.m.
Day two kicked off with Dave Cormier explaining the value of transactional email. Although 8:00 a.m. might be a little early to be talking email, Dave raised very valid points about the missed opportunity transactional email can offer. By transactional emails he is referring to receipts, statements and order confirmations that we send to customers. For the most part, the customer is anxiously waiting to receive these, which presents an extremely high 'open rate', however few companies leverage this. Dave explained how, if done correctly, this can create an opportunity for positive brand reinforcement with your customer.
The next keynote was Mehrdad Baghai from Alchemy Growth Partners. His insightful presentation was on: how to sustain growth in highly competitive markets. Mehrdad explained research and cases studies that demonstrated that to identify growth organisations need to look beyond the obvious industry level opportunities (e.g."China is a growth market") and focus on the granular opportunities within individual market segments. By making smarter decisions and targeting granular segments in order to compete, companies have greater potential for achieving sustainable growth and profitability than simply chasing the same big dollars that everyone else is chasing.
The spotlight presentations were also of great value. One of the risks in having sponsors present, is that they may use the opportunity for a hard sell! However, this was not the case. The sponsor presentations added a lot of additional insight and value. In fact it was in one of these presentations, by Antony Goldman from Next Digital, that I heard some of my favourite quotes when Anthony quoted a client as saying "I must get on facespace" and spoke of the weakness in many digital agencies as "flashtibation".
I must confess, the morning of day three saw me feverishly finishing off my presentation -- managing change in the digital environment -- so I only caught part of what was a fascinating presentation by Peter Pynta. This was on the relationship between Neuroscience and Marketing Communications. He went through a variety of studies on brain activity and talked about how personally relevant communication can trigger additional brain activity leading to higher levels of engagement.
Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the conference was the twitter backchannel #imed08. Although there were only about eight to 10 people actually twittering, the dialogue provided excellent coverage of the event. A number of people who could not make it to the Summit, were able to follow the backchannel from their offices, and later commented on how this participation made them feel that they were there.
Another interesting example of Twitter in use during the Summit, happened when, Phil Smith, in his session on managing online brand conversations was relaying a story of Julian Cole of the blog 'adspace pioneers' and his anti-spam stunt at NAB. As Phil was doing this, Julian picked up the feed in real-time and twittered back to the conference. A great example of someone managing their brand in the digital space.
Most of the attendees where from the client-side of digital marketing and needed little convincing in the importance of digital to their business. In chatting with them during the event, it was interesting to learn that they often face a lot of challenges in transitioning their organisations to value and utilise digital properly. Many spoke about having to "turn around the dinosaur", and getting the dregs of the marketing budget, as left-overs from the above-the-line campaign and the issues they faced, not even allowed to use facebook in the office.
This allowed me to reflect on the difficulties we face, as leaders in Digital Marketing, to fully understand the impact and lost opportunity. I believe that the greatest value gained from events like is the not only the sharing of knowledge and best-practice but in arming attendees with strategies that they can take back to their workplace that will effect positive change in the industry.
The conference was a great success and the feedback from everyone has been highly supportive and positive. The iMedia Brand Summit has proven to be a highly valuable two and a half days in the calendars of those in the Digital Marketing industry. If you could not make it to this one, I look forward to seeing you at the next one.
Jenny Williams is the principal of Ideagarden Consulting.