Overview:

An effective social media strategy requires research, planning, implementation, tracking and reporting on results. Learn how to strategically implement your social media efforts for maximum return with a panel of Social Media experts (the real kind, we promise) from leading internet presence management firm Red Door Interactive along with industry experts from Petco, Vignette, New Belgium Brewing Company, social monitoring service Filtrbox and the social media solution, Brickfish. In these sessions you’ll gain valuable insights and actionable best practices that you can take back and immediately apply to your social media initiatives.

DENVER

Tuesday, July 14 - 8:30-10:30am

Location: Colorado History Museum

Boettcher Auditorium
1300 Broadway
Denver, CO 80203

Parking is available at:
Cultural Complex Garage at 12th Avenue and Broadway
65 W 12th Denver CO, 80204

$45 - Parking included. Pastries, coffee and juice will be served.

Moderator:  Morgan Witt, Senior Strategist - Red Door Interactive

Panelists:

Jamie Dicken, EVP Sales - Brickfish.com

Dirk Shaw, Social Media Strategist - Vignette

Andrian M Glasenapp, Branding Activities Manager - New Belgium Brewing Company

Ari Newman, Founder President - FiltrBox

Crosby Noricks, Social Media Strategist - Red Door Interactive

Keep these factors in mind when applying your email + social media integrated strategy:

• Understand what motivates your subscribers to share
• Deliver dynamic content that is relevant on the subscriber level as much as possible
• Make calls to action clear and simple
• Know the social networks that are relevant to your subscribers (social technographics)
• Make sharing tools obvious and ask subscribers to take action.
• Always include links to your brands presence in social media (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, RSS feed, YouTube, etc)
• Use Twitter in addition to email marketing to address customer service issues, product launches, and special offers.
• Use Facebook to post important information and updates for your biggest fans and brand evangelists.
• If you have a customer community on your website, provide links to community content within your emails. (Polls, forums, message boards, ratings, etc.)
• Take advantage of opportunities to allow your subscribers to easily share the content of your email newsletters by adding social sharing tools such as “Share This.”
• Turn your best email newsletter content into working social applications for deeper engagement with consumers (widgets, iPhone application, SMS alerts)

The idea, originally codenamed “Walkabout,” was spawned by Jens Rasmussen in Google’s Sydney office. Jens and his brother Lars started by asking several fundamental questions:

“Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication - email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?

Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?

What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”

Working with a small team over the last two years, the Googlers came up with a revolutionary way to mash-up and improve the best features of email, chat, social networking, and wikis. One of the key features is the ability to chat and share files in real-time through a process called operational transformation (explained in a video by Google engineer David Wang). In laymen terms, this means that :

“In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

David Wang explains for private conversations (not being published to the Web), this feature makes online conversations more engaging. With chat (and even more so with email), you have to wait for the other person to finish their thought and hit the enter/send button to comprehend what they are trying to communicate. Since we don’t communicate like that in real life, Wang contends that it breaks the natural flow of conversation.

Moreover, for public dialogues on blogs and Web sites, the possible applications for Google Wave are mind-numbingly endless. Others have already covered what is currently known about Google Wave, but there is obviously much more to come. In the meantime, check out some of these great resources on the topic.

A Sneak Peak at Google Wave at Google Blogoscoped
Google Wave of the Future Revolutionizing the Web at Marketing Pilgrim
Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web at TechCrunch
Google Reinvents Email, Docs with ‘Google Wave’ (with slideshow) at PCMag
Went Walkabout. Brought back Google Wave at The Official Google Blog
Google Wave Homepage at Google

Updated: Video Available

• Number of followers over time
• Number of retweets (RTs) over time
• Number of clicks on tweeted links
• Most popular content (above-average clicks)

The last point is a critical one. Avinash contends that if you determine the number of clicks that an average tweeted link gets on your profile, you can identify and analyze over-performing content that is more popular with your Twitter followers. Of course, you can “learn from your failures” by analyzing under-performering content too. Either way, you have actionable intelligence for creating successful content/campaigns in the future.

While Avinash makes a great point, your tweet popularity only provides half the picture. Click and RT metrics indicate how you can best use 140 characters to effectively promote your content. But once a piece of content becomes popular, you really have to look at site-side metrics to see if the content is helping you achieve your business objectives. You can do this by segmenting Twitter traffic in your analytics tool and measuring conversion/engagement from that specific source (which I’m sure Avinash is already doing as well).

1. Souplantation knew that a great deal of their customers have created strong bonds on Twitter and Facebook. So it made sense for their brand to be there.
2. Souplantation knew that the majority of people subscribed to their e-mail list “Club Veg” would most likely be on social networks.
3. Souplantation set up a Twitter account and a Facebook Fan Page and began connecting with customers.
4. Souplantation promoted the ability to connect on Twitter and Facebook by adding callouts to connect on their website and as standard links in their email marketing templates.
5. Souplantation developed interactive promotional campaigns that were cross promoted through e-mail and social media to drive conversions.

The results: In the first month, Souplantation boasted more than 800 followers on Twitter and 450 fans on Facebook (now 2,600+ Twitter followers and 7,000 Facebook fans). Their Valentine’s Day promotional campaign, where individuals were invited to tell Souplantation via Twitter, just what made their “Sweetie so Sweet,” resulted in a 12% conversion rate, with people either purchasing a gift card, conducting a location search, or opting in for the “Club Veg” e-mail newsletter.

Are you integrating e-mail marketing and social media to give customers more ways to connect with your brand?

The focus of the presentation was to analyze an industry leader, Simpson Property Group and illustrate the SPG customer online experience. Additionally, the broad based presentation set the stage for the more focused presentations on social media, analytics, and search marketing throughout the rest of the conference.

Key Takeaways included:

• Your internet presence is not a website. Instead, it’s every point your target audiences are exposed to your brand online.
• Break down the online experience of your target audience into defined steps of the customer relationship – Acquisition, Conversion, Retention and Extension.
• Renters are looking online for peer support as well as information. Ratings and reviews as well as social networks are becoming huge factors in major decisions like where to live.
• With Internet Listing Services (ILS) and Online Classifieds, leads come from a multitude of online sources. Track and measure of all these sources and optimize these acquisition and conversion resources.
• Segment your audience into personas and understand their desired tasks.
• Get local. Capitalize on local search, and local social to acquire traffic.
• If nothing else, start ‘listening’ to social networks and create strategies to start participating.
• Be aware of mobile users and target them with mobile friendly listings.
• Your digital brand experience is not just your website, consider how users learn of you and make improvements wherever possible.
• Retention tactics like email, social and CRM may be the most effective ways to weather a tough economy. Keeping tenants is far cheaper than finding new ones.
• Build your plans from well implemented analytics. Without measurement, you’re not able to measure your impact on each step of the online customer experience.

Learn more about the the 2009 Apartment Internet Marketing Conference, and check out the Twitter history during the presentation, (start from the bottom).

As senior vice president of marketing for Leap, Scott Edwards is responsible for developing and managing the Company’s strategic marketing, consumer and marketing research, product development, branding and communications initiatives.

Edwards brings to the Company an impressive background spanning more than 22 years in leading marketing organizations, most recently serving as senior vice president worldwide consumer marketing with Hewlett-Packard. Prior to Hewlett-Packard, Mr. Edwards held senior management positions with Gateway, Sony, and Leo Burnett Advertising in Chicago.

Mr. Edwards received his B.A. in theology and philosophy from Denison University.

Red Door CEO Reid Carr is a SIG Co-Chair. CommNexus San Diego, formerly the San Diego Telecom Council, is a non-profit network of communications industry companies, defense industry companies, service providers, professional trade organizations, and local government.

I am proud of our compensation structure, which has always been performance-oriented and our results, bad or good, have always been transparent to our clients. That is why we continue to grow and thrive through these economic times, with long-standing clients (with several over five years which is not too shabby for a seven year old company) increasing their dedication to their improving Web presence by increasing budgets and allowing us to deliver results.

At the end of the day, by being transparent, we illustrate what works and what doesn’t in the same breath. While not everything “works” execution by execution, at least we learn and improve each day. By doing so, we reward risk for both us and our clients as well as provide a consistent positive net on our services. Our clients make more money each year they work with us which both weathers storms and rises with tides by being organic, adaptable and fluid as a true partner is.

In 2008, retailers suffered from some of the worst sales and traffic numbers in years. Optimizing your email marketing strategy will play a key role in reversing this trend in 2009 and beyond. When done right, email marketing messages drive more conversions than all other digital marketing mediums combined.

The email channel provides the most opportunity to create dynamic, effective, and personalized marketing communications. This session will empower you with the actionable strategies that you can apply immediately to exceed your business goals.

A panel of email marketing gurus from leading internet presence management firm Red Door Interactive and industry experts like  email service provider BlueHornet will show you the way to email marketing “nirvana.” In this session you’ll gain valuable insights and actionable best practices that you can take back and immediately apply to your email marketing initiatives.

In this session we will discuss:

• Acquisition best practices
• Deliverability optimization
• Email creative/design best practices
• Segmentation and data management
• Integrating email with emerging channels such as social media
• Lifecycle messaging
• Testing and analytics

If you have any questions, please contact Morgan Witt at mwitt@reddoor.biz or at 619-398-2670.

Times and Dates and Sign ups:

SAN DIEGO

Moderated by Reid Carr, President – Red Door Interactive

Rachael Anderson, Marketing Manager – BlueHornet

Kailin Terrill, Marketing Manager – Bikebandit.com

Pilar Bower, Email & Optimization Strategist – Red Door Interactive

Morgan Witt, Senior Strategist – Red Door Interactive

TUESDAY, APRIL 28th / 8:30-10:00AM

8:30 AM Registration & Networking

9-10 AM Program

Diamond View Tower

350 10th Ave., 15th Floor Skybox

San Diego, CA 92101

DENVER

Moderated by Morgan Witt, Senior Strategist – Red Door Interactive

Rachael Anderson, Marketing Manager – BlueHornet

Aaron Howell, Marketing Manager - Web – Cricket Communications, Inc.

Pilar Bower, Email & Optimization Strategist – Red Door Interactive

TUESDAY, MAY 5th / 8:30-10:00AM

8:30 AM Registration & Networking

9-10 AM Program

TAXI II Building

3457 Ringsby Court #231

Denver, CO 80216