Yesterday we brought you the complete coverage of day 1 of Brighton Digital Marketing Festival (#bdmf12), it’s great to be able to say that there’s a whole other day to go!

We’ve written up all the speakers in this post, but still have some video to work on so keep your eyes peeled for that. If you want to see more photos taken on the day head over to our Facebook page where we’ve added all our favourites.

Follow us on Twitter for live tweets, talking points and a good dollop of controversy.

 

BDMF Day 2

Keynotes

Allister Frost, Managing Director, Wild Orange Media & Ex-Microsoft
Microsoft, Marketers & the Psychology of the Social Web

Yesterday’s keynotes were something special, so Allister Frost and James Hamlin had a tough job on their hands. Allister from Wild Orange Media certainly got us off to a great start with his psychology focused presentation. Neuroscience is tough work at the best of times, let alone a Thursday morning, but it definitely got everyone’s brains into gear.

It’s often easy to just do in marketing, without really thinking why. If you think that’s you then it’s a shame you missed the talk! We will hopefully be providing video next week.

Here are the key points:

• 10 years ago, there was a scarcity of spectrum. There has been a major switch to a scarcity of attention. The number of channels we have to pay attention to is staggering.
• What people want and what businesses think they want is often very different – especially on social media
• Marketing is a dirty word – people hate us. We have to make marketing noble again.

So how do we combat this?

Using social proof, contrast, hidden delights, commitment, reciprocity and visual stimulus.

We will go into a lot more detail on these next week as the whole subject deserves its own post!

As an example of what to expect – have a look at the FedEx logo. Have you noticed the little arrow before?

James Hamlin, Marketing Director, Seatwave
How to Market 6 Million Great Times Using the Right Combination of Email Marketing and Social Media 

The second keynote was from James Hamlin of Seatwave who took us through a week in the life of marketing an online ticketing service.

Turns out James only finished the talk this morning as it was based on last week and the build up to Lady Gaga’s gig at Twickenham and how they adapted their marketing style through the week and focused on mobile and social to drive last minute sales.

One of the most interesting points was that the closer to an event, the heavier the use of mobile and social. 10 minutes before the event was due to start there were people tweeting tickets for sale for £8!

There was also a good example of driving engagement – providing a photo booth at venues and running campaigns where people would take a photo in the booth (with props) and set the photo as their Facebook profile picture.

The most useful lesson for other marketers was about Facebook integration. Seatwave.com is heavily integrated with Facebook – you can see tickets your friends have bought and artists they are interested in for example.

They’ve also worked out that not everybody wants the same service or advertising – a hard rock fan isn’t going to be interested in Britney Spears tickets - so they’ve introduced a personalised area where you tell them which bands you like and receive updates based on your preferences. If you can do this, we highly recommend you do. It’s very easy to put off customers with a wide marketing strategy that alienates different niches.

Oh, and apparently marketers like boobs – this was the second talk of the event featuring them!

Morning Session

James Faulkner, Vertical Leap
Finding the Right Kind of Paid Search for your Business

Our first workshop of the day came from James Faulkner, Paid Search Manager for Vertical Leap who aimed to give a concise overview of the paid search options at the moment. The talk was perfect for anybody thinking about getting into paid search who hasn’t yet done any research.

It wasn’t the most actionable of talks, more of a complete picture, and there were a few too many points that focused on what Vertical Leap could do for us, rather than what we can do ourselves – not really along the lines of a workshop. Despite this, there were some interesting discussions about social and mobile paid search options.

Social

The jury is still out on the power of social advertising, but James pointed out the benefits of both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social advertising allows you to really target specific audiences based on demographic and interests – far more advanced that search advertising. However, it’s still hard to determine whether it’s worth the large investment needed to run campaigns.

One cool tip is that you can now pay for search placement on Facebook so that your page comes up top for relevant searches. If, like us, you have noticed that random businesses often appear first then this could be a good way to get round that.

LinkedIn is a very under-utilised form of paid advertising, but as it is used more at work than Facebook it may be the best option for professional businesses.

Mobile

There are some clever additions for mobile to help improve the value of your mobile ads:

1. Add a click to call button – it’s a lot easier to convert somebody when you have them on the phone.

2. Schedule your ads – mobile and tablet use spikes at certain points so target your ads to show when people are using their phones!

3. Call tracking – with call tracking you can attribute conversions to paid search that may otherwise be missed

Overall, nothing ground breaking but a very solid introduction to the different forms of paid search available.

Steven Gradidge, White Hat Media
Search Engine Optimisation June 2012: How Google Has Changed the Rules and What you Need to Know Now

The last of the morning sessions came from Steven Gradidge of White Hat Media. He was supposed to be joined by Jeremy Spiller but he was missing – supposedly queueing for the iPhone5!

Nevertheless we were looking forward to this talk as it closely matches our thinking for SEO in 2012.

Steven started off by highlighting a shift in the focus of SEO. Linkuilding, PageRank and On-Page optimisation are becoming less important, the focus has shifted to Content and Social Media. Apparently, 2012 is the year that Search and Social have finally got married!

 

The rest of the talk focused on how White Hat Media have been running a successful campaign for The Gym Group using a solid content and social strategy. Key points included:

• Using social stats (Facebook insights) to examine the demographic of Gym Group followers and compare this to customer demographics
• Facebook insights and similar tools are giving more and more data, while Google takes it away – making it more useful for analytics
• Optimising the placement and visibility of social buttons on your website can dramatically increase social follows
• Customer reviews are a great way to gain user generated content (UGC) that also promotes your business
• Optimising your site for mobile should increase your mobile traffic, but make sure the site is designed with mobile users in mind
• Content calendars are a useful way to keep on top of content
• Positive tweets on a Monday morning make your followers smile!

Afternoon Session

Roger Warner & Nils Mork-Ulnes, Beyond
Moneyball for Social Brands: Changing the Plan for Branding and Engagement in the Age of Facebook 

The afternoon’s workshops began with baseball and football analogies from Roger Warner of Beyond. Unusual for a marketing conference but not unwelcome – especially when he used Arsenal as an example of a good sports business model!

The reason for this was the book & film Moneyball, which was all about buying success in a different way – buying wins not players. It also features a great quote for anyone who is wondering why their business plan isn’t working – “Data Beats Opinions”.

Tying this to social media and Facebook in particular, Roger points out that brands don’t understand what people want, and until they do they won’t be truly engaging. Most brands just bombard their followers, and ignore the lightweight interactions that make up most social relationships.

It was then Nils Mork-Ulnes’ turn to explain why people share and what we can do to leverage this information:

• Other people’s opinions are more important than ads – encourage reviews, comments and shares rather than bombard people with advertising
• High sharers are 3x more likely to recommend a product, so target these people before casual sharers
• Find the people who you want to amplify your brand and use them

It’s a common misconception that people don’t want to be friends with brands – Nils says they do, but you sometimes have to bribe them first! Comscore reports show that fans exposed to brand content on Facebook buy more, so it’s crucial to build and retain your follower base.

Lastly, you should think about the future of sharing and the sorts of things people want to share. Two examples Nils gives for encouraging sharing are frictionless sharing (thinking Guardian Facebook articles) and personal milestones. People love to share when they’ve done something good – if you can exploit that then you’re on to something good.

Charlie Peverett, iCrossing
Ban the Blog

Closing the day, and the festival, was Charlie Peverett from iCrossing. Despite working in content, Charlie was here to argue for banning the blog.

In brief, Charlie’s point was that most businesses start blogging for the wrong reason – just so that they have a blog. These sorts of blogs have no aim, no focus, no target audience and serve no real purpose. The other problem is that in deciding on a blog, businesses often overlook their actual website content.

So why would somebody start a blog for the wrong reason? Because their website is crap, their boss heard about blogging, or it’s treated as a media buy. Charlie introduced a great acronym – HIPPO – the highest paid person in an organisation. Often they are the one who decides a blog is a good idea, but they leave others to actually create it. This causes all sorts of problems.

What does a bad blog look like?

“It’s not enough to say ‘I’ve chosen to speak’” – there has to be someone to listen.

If you do decide to go down the blog path, you need to avoid the fate of 1000s of company blogs, which are often a mix of great content and awful stuff like news of the company bake sale.

Charlie says that they have a term for these blogs at iCrossing – sh*tpot.com – sung in the manner of the moonpig.com advert. A sh*pot is a blog with no strategy, blogging for the sake of blogging and for nothing else.

A blog should only be a last solution once all other content options have been explored, then it is a positive decision and everyone should understand what the blog is for. Move from ‘we need to produce more content’ to smarter communication.

When starting a blog:

• Beware marketers who tell you then can be interesting on your behalf – agencies make a lot of money doing this badly
• Don’t step away from your products & services or way out of your comfort zone
• The less relevant you are to what your customers want from you, the more your brand erodes and the bigger the risk of looking a bit desperate
• Tag clouds are the mullets of the internet

Lastly, Charlie asked us all to come up with some examples of good blogs, which resulted in some interesting characteristics:

If there’s one thing we learnt from BDMF12 it’s that marketers love cats.

Live updates from Brighton Digital Marketing Festival – 12-13 September 2012

Live updates from Brighton Digital Marketing Festival – 12-13 September 2012

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#BDMF, Brighton, brighton conference, Brighton Digital Marketing Festival, e-commerce, paid search, SEO, social web

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