The Art of Marketing, Social Media and Social Networking

On Monday I attended a conference entitled Marketing 08: the Art of, it was held at the Sage, Newcastle (fantastic venue!) and hosted by Business Link.

The conference will act as a forum to share knowledge and best practice and hopefully help attendees inject creativity into their marketing plans.

It was a very informative day out. Publicity king Max Clifford was the keynote speaker - very interesting and entertaining. Max considers his job is to "promote and protect" his Clients.

Max has an enviable position - he does not and has not advertised his services, people/businesses come to him! To become a Client of Max's you'll need £20,000 minimum per month (for 6 months!)

Amazing - and all of this on the back of developing the Beatles brand!

The Digital Dialogue session for the day included:
Social Networking (Ian Green of Green Communications)
- an overview of social networking and how it influences media, culture and society globally.

Ian asked the audience of approx 340 if they used Facebook for personal use - majority of people raised their hands, and for business use - dramatically less raised their hands.
He also enquired as to how many had blogs for business and I was shocked to see around less than a 1/4 raised their hands.

Latimer Hinks use social networking to a great extent and seem to be (going by the number of hands raised/not raised) quite forward thinking. We use LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogger and something Ian didn't mention - social bookmarking, Digg, Reddit, Flickr, FurlIt, Stumble.
All of those mentioned are free resources and in this time of financial unease, something businesses should consider using.

Here is a link to Ian's slides
Here's a couple of blog posts i've already made on the subjects
Social Networking Sites and Employment, do they mix?
Social Bookmarking
Social Media Starfish - available media
Web 2, RSS Feeds and their benefits

The second speaker was E-marketing Design (Ian Gibbons of Mobious)
how this new online medium offers a new landscape for creativity.
Ian spoke in numbers -

• there are 25 million online in the UK with an average of 31.1 hours a month in front of the internet.
• £3.5 billion online media spend.
• £110 per second spent by brands online.
• Ads have 4 seconds to capture a visitors interest.
• Today one edition of the Sunday Times contains more information than a 17th Century man faced in a lifetime.

Ian suggested visiting the IBA website for a creative showcase gallery of online ads.

All in all it was a very informative day and to summarise - embrace RSS feeds, blog, bookmark, network socially and "look outside of the box" - try it, apart from time it's all free!!