Technology for Marketing 2009

Wow, what a week. That is the only way to sum up last week. Monday kicked off with the launch of Silverpop’s new brand and website around the theme of Engagement Marketing. More on that in another post and almost certainly many more as this idea of actually communicating with your customers rather than shouting is the basis of successful marketing within web 2.0 type websites.

The rest of the week was of course, The Technology for Marketing show which was timed perfectly for Silverpop’s new message. The seminars were buzzing, with all the theatres tightly packed and even more people peering in from outside trying to catch the latest and greatest. There was plenty of presentations around engagement marketing and unsurprisingly the recession. Apart from Silverpop’s own session on using email in tandem with social networks; one in particular stood out for me; Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy had a great session on the opportunities to grow your brand in a downturn and I heard Google’s session on marketing in a recession was also interesting, though I missed this. Thankfully, all the presentations are due to be released online - you can see them all here.

Overall, there did seem to be more people attending the show this year over previous years and I therefore spent more time networking than usual. It was great to catch up with Tamara Gielen and Denise Cox who were over from Belgium and Ireland respectively for a few days and talk email marketing. Tamara has just launched her own email marketing consultancy having left Ogily at the end of last year and was sporting some new and very funky business cards courtesy of moo.com. I’ll leave it to her to provide samples ;)

With all the people attending, the Tweetups each morning were a quick and easy way to organise meeting up with people. Of course, from the stats I posted the other week, marketers are one of the largest groups on Twitter today. I made use of the Tweetup meeting point throughout both days as a result. There were plenty of interesting conversations at the Tweetups themselves and it has given me a whole host of things to follow up on. I am waiting to check out a new new service called Gist. They somehow manage your social network and hopefully solve a problem that is especially acute for me: information overload. Here is hoping they fulfill on that! Given the email marketing crowd, there was plenty of debate on the future of email usage, given the reduction in usage by teenagers and their increased use of social networks. Needless to say I had plenty to say on that given Silverpop’s new message and the seminar we did on combining email and social networks ;)

Overall it was a good week - now for CeBIT this week!