#ET11: My Roundup of ExactTarget Connections

It’s September and it has already been a busy few weeks for marketers.

Last week Brendan Cournoyer and I attended Content Marketing Institute’s first ever Content Marketing World hosted by Joe Pulizzi and his team.  If you weren’t in Cleveland, you definitely missed out on a jam-packed session for content marketers.  But fear not, Brendan has two really great writeups covering Day 1 and Day 2 of the event.

This week I am in Indianapolis for ExactTarget’s annual user conference (Disclosure:  Members of the OpenView team sit on ET’s board).  It is my first time here and so far I am blown away.  This event is HUGE.  There are seemingly hundreds of ExactTarget employees, a great lineup of speakers (Aron Ralston, Jimmy Wales, Ann Handley, C.C. Chapman, Joe Pulizzi, Jay Baer, to name a few), marketers from across the country and globe, and several great vendors walking around.  There are about 3,000 people here, which can be overwhelming in the common areas and main ballroom.

So here is what has gone down on Day 1.

The main conference space takes up six ballrooms in the new JW Marriott.  Six, meaning this is one huge room.  Pop music is blaring and LEDs are flashing.  All of the sudden it gets quiet for a split second, then the guitarist of the Jon McLaughlin band starts playing.  Soon the rest of the band joins in and before you know it one by one a whole percussion band is whaling at the drums.  It was quite a way to kick things off.  Here are the specifics:

• The theme of Connections is The Power of One.  The conference opened with a keynote from Scott Dorsey, CEO of ExactTarget.  Dorsey explained the concept behind the Power of One by outlining the power of one consumer, one platform, one cloud, one person, and one foundation and how everything is tied back into the updates ExactTarget has brought to the table since last year’s event.  Dorsey shared several insights from the many research reports ET has released last year called Subscribers, Fans, and Followers.  Key takeaway for today’s marketers:  FOCUS!

• Next Dorsey passed the reigns to Scott McCorkle, COO of ExactTarget.  McCorkle shared the news of 11 new product announcements/enhancements.  He led quick demos of each and I can say that I’m most excited about its central platform – Interactive Marketing Hub.  The Hub integrates email, social media, and mobile into one neat place.  Key takeaway for today’s marketers:  Shameless plug – Check out ET’s solutions!  The platform looks really cool and I encourage you to demo it.

• The rest of the afternoon wraps up with guest keynote speakers including Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer; Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia; Rob Stephens, CTO of Best Buy; and Aron Ralston, author of Between a Rock and a Hard Place.  All the keynotes were interesting, though Aron’s talk really stood out to me.  He shared his amazing story of being essentially trapped in a slot canyon in Blue John Canyon for six days.  It was moving and inspirational.  Ralston really drove home the focus on one – being completely alone and able to have a profound impact on his life.  Key takeaway for today’s marketers: As human beings, we are all capable of extraordinary things.  Just as Aron focused on the power of one to truly connect and save his life, marketers can learn the impact of one and the importance of building and maintaining relationships with their customers.

Happenings on Day 2

Over 50 breakout sessions are scheduled for today across 11 tracks, making it practically impossible to decide what sessions to attend.  I found myself torn between two and sometime three topics each session.  Here are my summaries from the best events that I attended:

• For the 8:30 session I attended the talk with Jim Kukral, author of Attention! The Book that will Make You Money.  Kukral offered real life examples of successful entrepreneurs and brands that have tapped into ONE idea and hit it big.  Some examples:  The WillItBlend? video series from Blendtec and the turkey and gravy flavored soda from Jones Soda.  Key tips for today’s marketers:  Don’t be afraid of new ideas.  In some cases we have been trained to avoid innovative ideas.  Push yourself to build a list of ideas you can execute to stand out for our target audience.  For B2B companies, this equates to valuable and entertaining content.

• For the 9:45 session I attended the Basic track with several speakers including Bob Ullery, ExactTarget; Simms Jenkins, BrightWave Marketing; Lora Downie, Catalyst; and Alyson Shurtliff, Eastman Kodak Entertainment Imaging focusing on growing subscribers, fans, and followers.  The panel focused a great deal on B2C situations, though there were also some takeaways for us in the B2B space.  Key tips for today’s B2B marketers:  Conduct an audit of our your list sources to determine which to optimize.  Consider using SMS Capture to quickly grab your audience’s email address.  Integrate your marketing channels and cross-promote between social media and email.

• Next I jumped in on the B2B Content Marketing session with Joe Pulizzi, Chris Baggott, and Mandy Lewis.  First off, I am no stranger to content marketing, but I still found the session insightful.  Joe shared great stats on the adoption of content marketing in the B2B world (too many to share!)  Key tips for today’s marketers:  Hire editors to help manage your content program, focus on your keywords, tell a compelling story, define clear goals, and include calls to action in all of your content.
• After lunch, I jumped in the session on Measuring Social Media ROI.  The panel included Forrester Analyst Zach Hofer-Shall, Bianca Buckridee, Kaitlyn Dennihy, and Zoe Levine.  I was really interested in sitting in on this session because ROI is important to so many people in the business world.  We’ve all heard the question, what’s the ROI of social media? These four experts shared their viewpoints and no surprise here there is not a perfect calculation!  Key tips for today’s marketers:  Before tracking anything, write down your business objectives and goals for participating in social media then align quantitative and qualitative metrics.  For example, if you are interested in driving awareness, then consider tracking number of fans and followers.  If you are interested in boosting engagement, track RTs, @replies, and comments across your social channels.

• The sessions of Day 2 ended a little short for me, as I had to duck into my hotel room to catch up on some work.  I then headed to a fantastic dinner with some inspirational thought leaders (Peter Kim, Jay Baer, Jim Kukral, and Joe Pulizzi to name a few) before checking out the Katy Perry concert.  One thing is for sure – ET knows how to throw a party.  Once the main concert ended hundreds of participants flocked to a smaller venue for a private show with rock band Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybees.  Good times for sure!

And onto Day 3

Day 3 brings the close of Connections 2011.  Before scooting over to the airport to only find out that my flight is super delayed (hey, at least now I have time to write this blog post), I sat in on the Marketing Burst Sessions with speakers from Klout, Twitter, Facebook, foursquare, Yahoo!, DachisGroup and Adobe.  Each speaker had about 20 minutes to speak on the Power of (fill in the blank).  Topics included people, social, measurement, mobile, location, inbox, engagement, influence and NOW.  The presentations were chock full of ideas and statistics.  The stats that stood out to me most included:

• “There are more people in the world with mobile phones than toothbrushes.” via @mobiledirect
• “There are currently 100 million active users on Twitter posting more than 200 million tweets a day.” via @brent_hill

Were you at Connections?  Tell me what you thought!