I was honoured to be asked to present a keynote at this year’s Online Marketing Conference & Exhibition held at the East Midlands Conference Centre, within the University of Nottingham’s campus.

This post has been composed and published on the train back from Nottingham to London (thanks to East Midlands Trains free WiFi).

The event had some great presentations from Graham Jones and DK (his legal and actual name) @mediasnackers regarding social media and digital marketing.

Looking at my iPad notes from the conference

Graham Jones

  • hard to get people away from their comfort zone where they are socialising so we have to go to them
  • 52% of internet traffic is on social sites
  • first even banner ad was  27 Oct 1994 ad from AT&T  – it simply said “have you ever clicked your mouse here”
  • 30 April 2007 the day the internet changed – the unlock code for HD DVD was cracked and posted on Digg and big brands took notice that social could be extremely disruptive
  • the social group controls the conversation, not the owner of the group ergo Digg
  • businesses want to control digital marketing but you cannot –  it is social
  • the brain’s left prefrontal cortex controls our social urges
  • 80% of all Google search results fail and people go back to Google to keep searching

DK

  • we have a digital dialogue – it’s not about marketing.
  • social networking is a small part of the pipe
  • humanization of brands is the future of social
  • it’s not about advertising, it’s about connecting
  • 50% of the audience today (approx 550 people) are not on twitter
  • start using social media to see how it works
  • golden rule of social media: treat it like a big room of real people.  What would you do in that big room?

Andrew Grill

In the expert practitioner panel that followed, I shared a range of websites and tools to try – presented below

Tweetdeck – free Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn management
GetClicky – web analytics tool 10x better than Google Analytics
Google profile – set up your own
Google alerts – free email alerts for your name or brand
My conference slides on Slideshare
About.com – 1 page social media promotion site
How to set up your own URL shortener
Backtweets – look at where your tweeted links get re-tweeted
Flickr – photo sharing
Tippex YouTube campaign
Managefilter – manage your twitter followers (analyse and unfollow)

My social media credentials can be found at http://lc.tl/about

It was a great conference and if the tweets are anything to go by, the audience gained some valuable insights from the day.

A big thankyou to Diane Simpson and Jon Egley from the eBusiness club for putting together the event and for inviting me to present.