The South Florida IMA - SFIMA March Event for 2012 was the Peer to Peer Summit. This was the 4th Annual Peer to Peer Summit as this event is always one of the most popular educational events that SFIMA holds for interactive marketers here in South Florida.
The event was hosted by and sponsored by Saveology - SFIMA members and guests were given the VIP treatment, tours of their brand new headquarters in Margate, FL and also treated to a buffet dinner while networking.
The Peer to Peer event was held in the Savology gym, which was large enough for the 100+ attendees and moderated by Tracy Antol and Michelle Licudine. The moderators job is to bring up popular topics facing internet marketers today and also revisiting some popular topics from the year before to get a 'year in review' aspect on what was important last year to see how it has changed and how those topics are still relevant to interactive marketing today.
We started out the session with a legal advisory update from SFIMA board member and attorney, Gaida Zirkelbach.
Here is a review of the topics she covered:
- FL has not passed an 'Amazon tax' vendors in Florida only need to charge tax to customers that are also in Florida.
- SOPA: not going forward but may come back in another form but hopefully will listen and make them website owner friendly
- California Deal - privacy policies for mobile apps before user downloads the apps - highlights the importance of having a privacy policy. California was the first state to impose tighter laws on mobile applications with regard to their privacy policies, and mobile software developers have agreed to a deal where they must first show the user their privacy policy BEFORE the application is downloaded. Other states or federal may follow suit. Here is more on this topic from Adweek.
- FTC is investigating apps targeting kids, specifically regarding the privacy policy of those applications.
- Google recently changed its privacy policy, important for legal and biz teams to analyze if you are changing your privacy policy for your business. Don't just change the policy without having all aspects checked out first.
- Who owns social media? Issue with person who changed the name of his biz account when left the company and kept the followers. Important to consider if you work for a company or are a company.
- Recent tech cases in litigation:
Don't influence or change user comments. Under telecomunications act, you are not libel for those comments, however if you tweak it or comment on it, you may become liable. Safe harbor doesn't apply if biz influences 3rd party to comment or change their comment.
Text entries into sweeepstakes. Shows like American Idol, Fox was charging a premium for text voting, had legal issue with charging text voting, it is considered an illegal lottery.
Surge in Patent Troll Activity in FL. Large influx of patent cases in FL, from people who own patents, don't use them but sue people who unknowingly use them. So advice is to be careful of technology you are using.
Surge in CAN-SPAM claims. starting to see an increase in enforcement in CAN-SPAM, most times it is not the company who sends emails and violates the laws, but email companies and email service providers.
If you buy email lists, you have to be careful that the lists are can-spam compliant.
As if all of that legal topic advice wasn't enough, the SFIMA Peer to Peer event was just getting started!
First topic of the evening:
1. Ad Retargeting
Revisiting one of the hot topics from the Peer to Peer forum 2011:
Last year, many marketers were praising the results of retargeting, specifically Google's Adwords Retargetings, this year regular search and display retargeting working better than Google Adwords retargeting; yielding better results and a higher ROI.
Most retargers are using a plaform for regtargeting rather than contextual text ads on Google, the display and rich media ads for retargeting are working better than text.
The targeting message is important, and how you target or retarget the message, so if you are targeting someone specific, make it relevant.
2. Pinterest topic:
When you sign pinterst terms and conditions, you are agreeing to be held liable for the image, legal fees, etc. so Pinterest, while very popular with women online, is becoming unpopular with professional photographers for that and copyrighting issues.
Interesting case study for a contest on Pinterest was discussed.
How to find out if anyone pinned something from your site on pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/yoursite.com
4 tips for Pinterest for guys:
1. infographics, interest board
2. what inspires you or where you want to go
3.wifes birthday -follow her board
4. hotrods
Pinterest for girls is your bedroom wall, closet door, or back door, back in the day, it is basically clipping from magazines.
3. Facebook for Brands.
Facebook for brands, the new timeline. Cannot use advertising discount or callout in image but can use branding, don't get to use landing pages and links like in the last profile.
No more default landing page. Opportunity where you can force them to a page is through paid Facebook ads.
Through the end of the month, brands are not forced to use the new Timeline yet, so old landing pages don't automatically refresh so brands have to think about that, don't have to change March 30th. Brands can switch and opt in before then or wait until March 30th to postpone it.
Instead of landing pages, you can pin posts to the top for 7 days at a time.
Cover photo cannot use arrow to point to like button, but you can use the timeline to list company milestones can use apps to promote sales and promos with apps.
4. Google+
Google + is the biggest change for search marketers in the history of Google. It gives marketers the ability to control first page results in search with Google Plus.
Once mainstream realizes that this is what Google Plus does, it will take off.
+1 data shows up in analytics and Google shows the influence click thru rate are 1 to 2 times higher than without Google +.
The search world is moving away from page rank and towards personal rank. Marketers, and especially content writers and bloggers can leverage that using rel-auth tags and also use authorities to write content and become an authority according to Google. You can read more about rel-auth tags on The Google Inside Search Blog.
Advice from the search experts in the room is that the best thing a webmaster or site owner can do for their website is register a Google + brand page and put the coding on your site so that visitors can 'plus one' your site by clicking on the G+ button.
5. Is email dead?
SFIMA members Lead Me Media says with smartphones and more access people have to emails that email is seeing a resurgence.
Test your email pages in mobile and smart phones because of this trend.
Consensus from email marketers in the room: email is becoming more of a merge between marketing campaigns, social media and email. Email is not dead, but it is part of the big marketing picture.
It is important to know your email stats and when iPhone users are main openers of email, graphics will increase the open rate and success of the email campaign.
Responsive Design = response to the size of each screen. Images adjust, text wraps. This is very important for all different size phones, smart phones, tablets, and computer screens. Make sure your design is responsive to the size of the screen of the user.
Boston Globe, Overstock, and BBC are good examples of responsive design. Applies to website design as well as email design.
SFIMA's mobile event in Sept will adress responsive design.
6. 'Managing Up' Popular Topics Before Owners and Upper Management Read About a Hot Topic. . . .
Question was asked along the lines of "What do you do when your boss reads about a hot marketing topic and tells you (as the marketer) to get on that platform, site, social media, etc. The overall answer from many marketers int he room is that you "manage up", be proactive and send upper management articles and data on "the newest" thing they may read in the NYTimes or Forbes so that they come to you before they read it. Control the message.
7. Group Couponing Sites:
Are businesses that are doing Groupons etc. coming back to coupon sites or only 1 time deal?
Answer from audience was that it depends on the type of business, some have success with group coupons and some do not.
The person shopping for the deal is not always customer the business wants.
Businesses need to evaluate their deals and realize that they are a marketing expense, not "a deal".
Business owners need to find something as the business that they want to sell, not what the coupon sites want the business to sell. Should be something that the business can upsell and the business needs to be able to afford the cost as a marketing expense.
Businesses doing coupons, need to recogize that the groupon/coupon is a marketing cost, not "giving something for free".
As part of the closing, the moderators asked the room:
If you can do one thing this year. . . . .
responsive design
partenering
google +
mobile mktg
80% of ppl use mobile at home
We had some future SFIMA event suggestions:
- measuring social media results
- attribution
- global expansion
Do you have a suggestion for a future SFIMA event? Please let us know!
Comments and questions are welcomed and encouraged!
Here are some pictures I took at Saveology during the event:
Jelly Belly in the lunch room!
Barbershop on premises!
Comfy space age looking chairs!
Lunchroom
There are monkeys in the enclosure in the Savology lobby!
The little monkeys were hanging out in the hole there.
And there were parrots too!
This parrot says "Savology!"
Funky chairs and candy machines make for a great networking environment!
And who can go wrong with a mini putting green in the lobby?
Cristy Leon-Rivero, Vice President of Marketing, Navarro Discount Pharmacy
Diego Quesada Grimaldo, Vice President of eBusiness, COPA Airlines
