MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer:
A Forum on Email, Search, and Social Media
October 22-23

Ensure Your Conference ROI: Six Tips to Get the Most Out of this Event

SPEAKER:
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Digital Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

Rohit Bhargava will kick off the Forum by helping you reach your event objectives. After attending and speaking at hundreds of conferences, he's found that a few simple actions will immensely enhance your event experience—and ultimately impact your bottom line. Hear his tips for presenting yourself to others, meeting the right people, grabbing only the most pertinent information and, of course, using social media to grow your online presence and your network.

What Your Customers (Really!) Think of Your Email Program

MODERATOR:
Aaron Kahlow, Founder and President, BusinessOnline

PANELISTS:
Jason Baer, Founder and President, Convince and Convert
Katrina Anderson, Delivery Assurance Officer, iPost
Annie Kinnaird, Director of Business Development, Emma

Knock. Knock. "Hi, I'm your subscriber! Remember me? I've got an inbox full of promotions, newsletters, offers and spam - and a few messages from my family and friends. Tell me again why I should open your email today?" This kick off session will include real data from real subscribers from both B2B and B2C companies about their real inbox habits. Don't miss it. This session will set the stage for all the email sessions at the conference.

On the Shoulders of Giants: Leaping Pitfalls and Harnessing Best Practices When Managing an Email Program

MODERATOR:
Karen Talavera, President, Synchronicity Marketing

PANELISTS:
Doug Williams, Director of Marketing, Lane Bryant Catalog
Daryl Nielson, Commercial eMail Marketing Manager, Hewlett-Packard
Lori Keller, VP, Marketing, Pacifica Hotels

Just like every other marketing program, our email campaigns sometimes get driven by the needs of the organization rather than the interests of our customers. What does that do to the chances for an open, click or response? Not much. Find out from experienced practitioners from both B2B and B2C companies how to optimize your email marketing results by creating relevancy, optimizing cadence, reaching the inbox and conducting effective tests and data analysis.

Get Me Some More of Those Resources: How to Make a Business Case for Investment in the Email Channel

SPEAKER:
Stephanie Miller, Global Markets Catalyst, Return Path Inc.

Maybe you've already seen that the days of mass broadcast email are limited. Whether you are B2B or B2C, each of us must create a subscriber centric approach in order to increase revenue from the channel. However, we first have to get more resources from the CFO. Learn several ways to make an effective business case for following best practices, ensuring senior management buy in, that will enable you to create unique and powerful subscriber experiences.

Seven Sure Fire Strategies for Successful Data Integration

MODERATOR:
David Baker, VP, Email Solutions, Avenue A Razorfish

PANELISTS:
Mark Edmond, Director, NA Field Operations, Cognos, an IBM Company
Paula Drum, VP Marketing, H&R Block

Want to improve results? You've got to improve the subscriber experience. Trouble is, relevancy, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. It's not a one size fits all proposition. Technical improvements make it easier to target the message and segment your file, but at the end, it's up to us to create great subscriber experiences. Get new ideas for B2B and B2C segmentation and contact strategy, and learn what is working (and not working) for these email marketers. Plus, hear how improved ROI helps you grow your budget for new resources (so you can continue to improve your ROI).

Ensure Your Conference ROI: Six Tips to Get the Most Out of this Event

SPEAKER:
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Digital Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

Rohit Bhargava will kick off the Forum by helping you reach your event objectives. After attending and speaking at hundreds of conferences, he's found that a few simple actions will immensely enhance your event experience—and ultimately impact your bottom line. Hear his tips for presenting yourself to others, meeting the right people, grabbing only the most pertinent information and, of course, using social media to grow your online presence and your network.

Search Engine Optimizing Your Website: From Soup to Nuts

SPEAKERS:
Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts
Mark Kaufman, Associate Vice President-CNET Findability, CNET

Whether you are a seasoned marketer new to SEO, or a savvy search marketer wanting to ensure you aren’t overlooking anything, this session is for you. We’ll run through all the different requirements for a website that will ensure SEO success—from crafting content and code for search engines to essential tools and methodologies. Wouldn't it be great if you could enlighten your designers, copywriters, programmers and marketers on being more effective at doing their jobs in a search engine optimal way? Now you can. Whether you have a dynamic site or a static one, lots of content or just a little, Web 2.0 technologies or Web 1.0 brochureware, a big brand or an unknown startup, you'll need this SEO knowledge. You’ll walk away with, best practices for "on-page" SEO—from URLs to HTML to content to site architecture, a bevy of tools—many of them free, techniques for making Web 2.0 and "rich media" content search engine friendly, and ways to circumvent the SEO roadblocks common in Content Management Systems.

The Magic of Keywords: How They Can Increase Search Traffic

SPEAKERS:
Ken Jurina, President & CEO, Epiar
Mike Feiman, Director of Marketing, PoolDawg

One of the most important aspects of any B2B or B2C search marketing campaign is keyword research and selection. It is both an art and a science, whether the intended use of the resulting keyword portfolio is for SEO or for paid search. In this session, we’ll discuss how to choose the most appropriate and highest performing keywords, remove negative keywords that will bring down your ROI, incorporate those words into your web pages and your ad campaigns, analyze keyword performance, take actions to either improve their performance or remove them from your portfolio and how to invigorate your portfolio continuously with new keywords to test and evaluate.

Paid Search: Make a Bundle, Don't Lose Your Shirt

SPEAKERS:
George Michie, Principal, Search Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Ed LeCroy, Online Marketing Manager, TechSkills

Pay-Per-Click search marketing is one of the most accountable forms of advertising. With it you can acquire new customers, generate leads, add incremental sales and cut costs. If you're a B2B or B2C marketer wanting to learn how to master this valuable marketing channel, you're coming to the right place. You'll be treated to PPC best practices, new tactics, latest trends, and more. From keywords and writing copy to effective bidding and managing your paid search budget, we’ll review the nuances of paid search to help ensure you’re getting all you can out of your program. We'll cover quality scores—what comprises them and how to boost them, how to test, test, test—wring out more performance by optimizing keywords, ad copy, landing pages and more, and nuances of the major PPC networks and bidding systems.

Search Marketing by the Numbers: The Metrics, Business Cases, ROI and Trends That Matter

SPEAKERS:
Jessica Bowman, Freelance SEO Consultant & SEMPO Board of Directors, JessicaBowmanSEO.com
Darrin Shamo, Marketing Manager, Zappos
Nish Thakkar, Software Engineer, Google

You’ve implemented all the best practices for your paid and organic search programs, but how do you know what’s really working? If it doesn't all tie back to the bottom line, your allocation of time and resources will be questioned, you'll continually have to justify your job, and your budget will be in perpetual jeopardy. Take your B2B or B2C search channel to a new level by tracking, measuring, and reporting on what counts, taking action based on those metrics, and forgetting about the red herrings that are of no real consequence. Attend this session and you’ll take away, the metrics that drive the bottom line, analytics solutions—their strengths and weaknesses as it relates to SEM, building a solid business case for SEM, and showing a return on your link building investment— challenges and solutions.

Ensure Your Conference ROI: Six Tips to Get the Most Out of this Event

SPEAKER:
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Digital Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

Rohit Bhargava will kick off the Forum by helping you reach your event objectives. After attending and speaking at hundreds of conferences, he's found that a few simple actions will immensely enhance your event experience—and ultimately impact your bottom line. Hear his tips for presenting yourself to others, meeting the right people, grabbing only the most pertinent information and, of course, using social media to grow your online presence and your network.

Building Blocks to Social Media Success, Part 1: 4 Fundamentals You MUST Know Before You Grow

SPEAKER:
Christopher S. Penn, CTO, Student Loan Network

Companies are exploring how tools like blogging, wikis, podcasting, and the use of social networks will improve their marketing efforts, drive sales, improve branding/awareness, and deliver more for less. Social media is indeed all the buzz in marketing, but does it deliver results? Only if you lay the foundation. In this session, Christopher S. Penn will help you get your Internet media outlets (website, blog, etc.) prepared for a social media campaign, including the four pre-requisites that MUST be in place to make a social media campaign successful and generate bottom-line results. Don't miss this session which will combine the best of metrics, search engine optimization, and database marketing to make the most of your social media forays!

Building Blocks to Social Media Success, Part 2: First Moves for Integrating Social Media into Your Marketing Strategy

SPEAKERS:
Chris Brogan, Vice President , Strategy & Technology, CrossTech Media
Scott Monty, Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motor Company

Building on Part 1, Chris Brogan and Scott Monty talk about the tools you can use to create an effective social media campaign, and how to apply them. Many companies are exploring how tools like blogging, wikis, podcasting, and the use of social networks will improve their marketing efforts, drive sales, improve branding/awareness, and deliver more for less. But there are different strategies for these goals, and different tools required for each goal to serve your organization's needs. This session will explore mapping goals to strategies, strategies to tools and approaches, and approaches to first steps at implementing and measuring your efforts. 

How Great Content Keeps Customers at the Table

Speakers:
Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Strategy & Marketing, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence
Mildred Center, Director of Web Services, Corporate Marketing, Sony Electronics
Esmee Williams, Vice President of Brand Marketing, Allrecipes.com
Becky Carroll, President & Founder, Petra Consulting Group

In social media, content is the currency. Content that’s engaging and interesting is what will attract an audience. In fact, your content is what people will talk about, bookmark, link to, and return to again and again. But what makes for good content? How do you develop it, and where can you get started? Here’s how to produce great content that will keep your users engaged.

Making a Business Case for Social Media: Measuring Its Impact

SPEAKER:
Katie Delahaye Paine, CEO, KDPaine & Partners, LLC

Your marketing efforts need to show a return on your investment, and your social media forays are no different. Socially-driven efforts like blogging, microblogging, social networking and the like are often criticized for not having a direct ROI. But in fact, they do offer measurable results. Here’s how to measure your results, and the tools you can use.

Quality vs. Quantity: List Growth & Data Collection Strategies

MODERATOR:
Austin Bliss, President, Fresh Address

PANELISTS:
Angie Belknap, Director, Revenue Management, Radisson Hotel
Nicholas Einstein, Vice President, Datran Media

Managing an e-mail list requires careful planning, regular maintenance, and rigid discipline - whether that list is a newborn or a gangly adolescent. Buying or renting lists is an even more delicate matter – is it "clean?" Learn to build, maintain, grow and segment a quality list that will continue to deliver value; and what to look for if you're considering an outside list. Both B2B and B2C panel members will discuss ways that email can be used more efficiently at the ends, but also throughout the entire spectrum. We'll break some china and challenge old assumptions. The goal: identify (or dismiss) practical and actionable strategies to test the impact of email - and earn new revenue (and higher budgets).

No One Buys Enterprise Solutions Online: B2B Email Newsletter Strategies

MODERATOR:
Jordan Ayan, Founder & President, Subscriber Mail

PANELIST:
Denise Cox, Newsletter Specialist, NewsWeaver
Luke Glasner, Email and Database Administrator, Rodman Publishing

Enterprise email programs are unique - they often are indirect (through a channel), infrequent (quarterly) and content rich. But that shouldn't stop you from making them compelling, engaging and interactive! Learn several great strategies for building a successful B2B newsletter program, along with a number of great ideas to steal from other marketers already achieving success.

Where For Art Thou Batphone? How ISP Relations Really Works

MODERATOR:
Michelle Pelletier, Senior Director, Deliverability Services, Return Path Inc.

PANELISTS:
John Caldwell, Director, Email Operations, RealtyTrac
Sherry Schreck, Manager, Email Services, MGM Mirage
Dennis Dayman, CPO, Eloqua

You just found out that your email messages are being blocked at AOL and Yahoo! The CFO is banging on your desk. The cash registers have stopped ringing. Even your corporate subscribers are not getting their messages! Who can you call? Well, no one, actually. It's all based on your Sender Reputation - the sum of your practices and how relevant subscribers find your messages. Be sure that your B2B or B2C program is optimized for inbox deliverability. Understand how the ISPs actually make those inbox, bulk or missing decisions. Find out how it works and what you need to know about your Sender Reputation in order to reach the inbox consistently. And, get a higher return on your email investment!

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The All Things Web Version

SPEAKER:
Amy Africa, President and Chief Imagin-8-tion Officer, Eight by Eight

Amy Africa's fast-paced, interactive game show session will test your Internet savvy while showing you what really works in web commerce. You'll walk away with dozens of new ideas that you can use to improve your business including: how to develop website navigation that works, how to design the perfect shopping cart and/or lead forms, and how to create a trigger email program that brings in the big bucks.

A Deep Dive into B2B Search Engine Marketing

SPEAKERS:
Bill Leake, CEO, Apogee Search
Hans Keil, Director, E-Business Channel Development, PerkinElmer
Ben Hanna, VP, Marketing, Business.com, an R.H. Donnelley Company

Everyone knows selling to businesses is entirely different than selling to consumers. It’s a longer and more involved sales process that requires deeper information and more nurturing of prospects. Therefore it’s critical that search engine marketing for B2B is done in a way that suits the unique needs and challenges of a B2B selling environment. We’ll take an in depth look at how B2B search is different than B2C and how to build strategies to it well. You’ll learn why optimizing to cost per web lead can harm you, how to use both marketing automation and CRM technologies to your online advantage, how to blend search into more traditional campaigns for greatest effect, new conversion tactics that work, and more.

Link Building Your Way to the Top of the Rankings

SPEAKERS:
Neil Patel, Chief Technology Officer, Advantage Consulting Services
Dustin Woodard, SEO Director, WetPaint
David Patterson, President, Elbrus Consulting

Regardless of whether you're B2B or B2C, links are an excellent way to increase your search engine rankings. In fact, without good links, you can’t expect top search results. But developing links is an arduous task and it's often not well-executed. Come to this session and gain link building strategies, tactics, pitfalls and opportunities from one of the world's leading experts on the topic. Also learn how to evaluate a link’s value, tools to use, how social media can be leveraged to build links, and more. You’ll walk away from this session with creative strategies for developing new links organically, a list of dos and don’ts for acquiring links through commercial means, and tools, tricks and tips that will help you be more effective with identifying link targets and with making your link requests.

Reputation Management: Preventing Negative Statements from Ruining Your Brand Image

SPEAKERS:
Rob Key, CEO, Converseon
Sean McDonald, Director, Communities and Conversations Global Communications, Dell Inc

The last thing you want are negative comments about your company from a disgruntled customer appearing at the top of your search results. In this important session we’ll show you how to keep track of what is being said about your company online and how you can keep the less than positive comments from surfacing at the top of the search results. If you are suffering from negative listings in results for brand-related searches, the options include occupying more of the slots in the top 10 results yourself, assisting other non-competitive and neutral pages to rank highly, and pushing the negative results downward. We’ll also discuss essential tools for reputation management, how (and whether) to utilize reputation management various tactics, and even what your competitors may very well be doing subversively to harm your reputation online.

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The All Things Web Version

SPEAKER:
Amy Africa, President and Chief Imagin-8-tion Officer, Eight by Eight

Amy Africa's fast-paced, interactive game show session will test your Internet savvy while showing you what really works in web commerce. You'll walk away with dozens of new ideas that you can use to improve your business including: how to develop website navigation that works, how to design the perfect shopping cart and/or lead forms, and how to create a trigger email program that brings in the big bucks.

Email and Social Media: True Love Always

SPEAKERS:
Greg Cangialosi, CEO, Blue Sky Factory, Inc
Gary Vaynerchuk, Director of Operations, Wine Library
Christopher S. Penn, CTO, Student Loan Network

Sure, social media is the cool new kid at school. But email is far from old news in this new social media world. In fact, as new approaches and channels emerge, marketers are increasingly incorporating email.  Here’s how you can embrace social media as well as rely on email as a cornerstone for your efforts, leveraging it for its ability to build and sustain an audience for your marketing efforts. 

What Is Twitter and What’s In It for Me? Best Practices in Microblogging

MODERATOR:
Connie Reece, Founder, Every Dot Connects

SPEAKERS:
Donna M. Tocci, Director, Web/New Media, Ingersoll Rand
Bryan Person, Social Media Evangelist, LiveWorld, Inc.
Francine Hardaway, Stealthmode Partners
Frank Eliason, Digital Care Director, Comcast Corporation

You’ve heard of Twitter, and you’ve heard that some companies – like Dell, Comcast, and Zappos – are using it. But how are they using it to grow and nurture their businesses? In this session, hear how some companies are relying on tools like Twitter and other microblogging platforms to service and nurture existing customers as well as expand their market reach.

Video and Podcasting: Making Media as Marketing

Speaker:
CC Chapman, Partner, The Advance Guard

All kinds of companies – both B2B and B2C – are creating and distributing videos and podcasts as part of their marketing mix. But is the effort and the expense worth the results? Here’s how to gauge whether – and how – you should create digital content along with your traditional offering, and how it fits in. 

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: The All Things Web Version

SPEAKER:
Amy Africa, President and Chief Imagin-8-tion Officer, Eight by Eight

Amy Africa's fast-paced, interactive game show session will test your Internet savvy while showing you what really works in web commerce. You'll walk away with dozens of new ideas that you can use to improve your business including: how to develop website navigation that works, how to design the perfect shopping cart and/or lead forms, and how to create a trigger email program that brings in the big bucks.