Inbound Marketing Summit Podcast Interviews 2010

Bernie Borges Interviews Marketers at Inbound Marketing Summit 2010 [ 29:09 ]
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During the 2010 Inbound Marketing Summit in Foxboro, MA I caught up with seven marketers ranging from entrepreneurs, to authors and industry pundits. These show notes tell only part of the story. Be sure to download the podcast (or click the play button above) to hear the full interviews.

Rand Fishkin: CEO, SEOmoz

Rand Fishkin is widely recognized as an SEO pundit. He spoke at IMS 2010 and shared his insights into SEO trends. Rand’s insights are supported by research conducted by SEOMoz. He said Google Instant is having a “nearly negligible” affect on search intent. People are searching more and faster. The faster the search experience, the more pleased the user.  Less than 10% of Google searches come from the tool bar, the rest are done at Google.com.  SEO has not changed too dramatically during the past five years. The options have changed (Twitter, Facebook, etc). But, SEO best practices haven’t changed too much. They are still anchored in relevant content, quality inbound links and logical and efficient website architecture.

Christine Major & Joselin Mane: @BostonTweetup

Christine Major and Joselin Mane are the King and Queen of Tweetups in New England. They work with local venues and organizations to organize Tweetup events. Tweetups are a great way for people to connect offline. These events help people find jobs, business opportunities while helping local venues like restaurants. They work with local venues who are social media savvy. They also work with sponsors who want to get their word out. They’ve created an online calendar for these Tweetups. That’s why they are the King and Queen of Tweetups in New England.

Dale Underwood, Founder, CEO, EchoQuote

Dale Underwood has a long history of selling expensive B2B products. In 2005 Dale realized customers are doing extensive research online. Marketing Sherpa research proves that #1 thing B2B website visitors want is pricing. With more product content available online, buyers have to be selective about the products they consider in a protracted evaluation. They want to know the approximate budget range for a product early in the process before spending more time exploring it. EchoQuote sends approved quote requests from a website, to the visitor. The quote is a pre-determined budgetary price sent via email.  The result is a new sales conversation. In the past four years Dale has seen a three fold increase in B2B sales lead conversion from these type of leads. These requests for B2B budgetary pricing tend to be more serious prospects and are generally more quality leads.

David Meerman Scott, Best Selling Author, Speaker

David Meerman Scott‘s new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR will be available November 1st.  David addresses the question; why always focus on planning for months and quarters ahead when there is so much going on right now? Businesses who are good at responding to real time situations through authentic engagement benefit greatly. His new book includes many examples of real-time marketing including government, B2B, B2C, small and large companies. One terrific example in the book that is well known is from band leader, Dave Carroll. United Airlines broke his Taylor guitar on a trip to a gig. He wrote a song called United Breaks Guitars and produced a YouTube video that got 9 million views. He conducted interviews in real time. He seized the moment. The CEO of Taylor Guitar also created a video telling musicians how to care for their guitar when they fly. Calton Cases created a Dave Carroll guitar case. All these business folks reacted in real-time and benefited greatly from their real-time actions.

CC Chapman & Ann Handley, Co-Authors; Content Rules

CC Chapman and Ann Handley‘s new book, Content Rules, ships in late November. The book is about the art and science of creating compelling content. It’s a how-to create content book. Both CC and Ann are prolific content creators and experts at content marketing. The book provides “ideas you can steal” with ideas you can take away and act on today! They include examples of content in action across many industries. They even devoted a whole chapter to B2B. It appears CC and Ann had a lot of fun writing a very useful book. Of course, the book will be available on all content platforms including Kindle. CC is also auditioning to narrate the book on audio.

Margaret Donnelly, V.P. Marketing Jitter Jam

Margaret Donnelly runs marketing at Jitter Jam, a social CRM software tool for consumer facing marketers and agencies. It’s a platform that allows marketers to engage with customers to drive them toward advocacy. A user signs in and is presented with conversations happening in real time on the web. The user can selectively engage and build intelligence on the conversation. (screen shot).  The user sees the status of conversations including how many people and who is talking about their brands so marketers can decide where to bring them into the conversation, what type of offers to make and what content to use to engage them. Social CRM is one of the hottest trends on the web.

Rick Short, Marcom Director Indium Corp.

Rick Short started blogging six years ago. He invited one or two engineers to blog. It grew to 8 then to 14 bloggers. Today they are up to 74 corporate blogs! Rick convinced engineers to blog simply by allowing people to be themselves. And, he led by example. Eventually, others saw first hand the positive impact of blogging on their personal brand, the company’s brand, and they saw an increase of new contacts. Not surprisingly the interest grew. The success of a few bloggers went viral due to these exceptional results. Rick points out that the new contacts from blog content are often self qualified sales leads.  The results for Indium have been phenomenal. Several million dollars of incremental sales are attributed to their inbound marketing and social media content! And who said social media is only for B2C?!

I wish I had the time to interview dozens of other amazing people at the Inbound Marketing Summit. I hope these seven interviews are fun and interesting to you.

Be sure to listen to the entire podcast to catch the full interview with each of these fascinating people.

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