MarketingSherpa Blog

Last week, we held our Email Summit 2012 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where more than 750 of your marketing peers joined us for four days of keynotes, workshops, discussion panels, case study sessions and networking.

Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter, joined us as one of our three keynote speakers for the Summit.  Brian spoke to the audience about integrating social media with your email marketing to engage a new type of connected customers. After his keynote, Brian took a few minutes to chat with GetResponse Community Manager, Jim Ducharme.

In this video interview, Brian talks about two main thoughts:

The connected consumer

• The democratizing of information is creating an empowered and connected consumer
• Technology simply facilitates to bring about change
• Success now comes from listening and learning from consumers

The “Digital Darwinism” concept

• When technology and society evolve faster than your ability to adapt
• Examples of companies fading away because consumer behavior is evolving toward a digital world
• The connected consumer requires you to design the experiences and outcomes they want in the channels they want

Read more…

Last week’s MarketingSherpa B2B newsletter article covered social media advertising. In gathering information for that story, I had the chance to interview three social media experts. One area that came up in each interview, but didn’t make it into the story, was Google+.

Obviously, that platform wasn’t included in the article because Google+ does not currently offer advertising.  But, since Google is such a major player in online advertising, and its struggles with social media are well-known (see: Wave, Orkut, Buzz), it was interesting to find out what our three practitioners thought about the latest splash in the social media world.

Google’s social track record is not great and the jury is very much still out on how effective Google+ will be in regard to making inroads into Facebook’s channel domination. Even Orkut, which was quite popular in specific countries such as India, Iran, Brazil and Estonia, has been steamrolled by Facebook in recent years.

With all this in mind, Google is still Google, and it is worth a few minutes of your time to think about how Google+ might fit into an overall digital marketing strategy. Read more…