I had a great day at Social Media Influence 08 in London yesterday. As always happens when I'm out of the office for a day, there's now a mountain of client work to do, so I wanted to take a few minutes to blog about the key things I picked up.
There were so many great ideas and insights I think I have enough material to talk about in several blog posts, however some themes stood out:
- The need to look beyond traditional ways of marketing and its reliance (for example) on demographics and instead to think about embedding ourselves into niche communities
- The need to listen, participate, be human and authentic
- The need for innovation, which means setting aside time to think and play
My overall impression also was that no-one has yet 'written the manual' on social media, and despite the overarching themes there were many different points of view, loads of interesting examples and plenty of debate, which made for a stimulating day. The standard of presentations was very good; speakers who stood out for me were Antony Mayfield, Michael Steckler, Neville Hobson, Alex Burmaster and Joanne Jacobs.
The reason I went was because I suspected there were no easy answers and I wanted to hear what the brightest minds were thinking and doing about it. I wasn't disappointed.
