woman with red painted finger nails holds a white touch screen cell phone

Debrief Wrapup – What You Missed

Yesterday, a group of about 20 marketing leaders in Madison met for 3 hours to learn about best practices from some of the countries’ leading brands.  Collectively, we now have a global view of what’s happening out there.  If you were not here, you’ll find links to the slides, and some of the more innovative tools available today.

From Best Buy’s mobile story to Sephora’s social media strategy – the world as we know it has changed.  Social media, the phone as a PC and cause marketing are not fads and this change not going to go away.  If your brand is going to stay relevant, you need to be in this space.

The questions are:

  • How will you engage your customers with social media?
  • How will you build a community around your brand with these tools?
  • On the B to B front, how quickly can you built your niche audience and communicate messages that are relevant to them?
  • How can you foster transparency and trust in your organization and mold it into a singular voice?
  • Will you let people on your team blog, tweet, facebook, etc.?  If so, what are the ground rules?
  • Where can you get a narwhal?
  • And what should you tackle first?

We met after the debrief and talked about what we could do today to improve our own social media strategy.  With that, you can check out our blog.  It’s called “The Quill.”  As we learned in the debrief, blogs are one of the ways reporters are sourcing stories.  We set up our blog in less than 15 minutes through Tumblr.  The real work, of course, is contributing content consistently and driving traffic towards the blog, but we took the first step.

And we weren’t the only ones.

Last night, several of you started Twitter accounts and followed us and we followed you back.  We’ve had a number of requests this morning to connect on LinkedIn and the fabulous Miranda from Metcalfe’s invited me to join Gilt!  You are already working it!  Keep us in the loop with how you’re doing, what’s working and what’s not!  It’s like that popular book – ”All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten : Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things“ by Robert Fulghum – “Sharing is important.”  He actually leads with it.  This is how we get there from here!