The Intersection of Marketing and Technology

Event: The Intersection of Marketing and Technology
Sponsor: Women in Technology

The Marketing and Technology special interest groups (SIG) returned to a popular topic: that part of the Venn diagram where marketing and technology intersect.  This year's focus was on marketing automation tools.  Speakers included Holger Schulze, Giovanni Collabro, Julia Lim, and Christine Schafer, and it was moderated by Technology SIG chair Kate Hanusik.  Eileen Martin and I were in attendance from Pivotal, along with fellow technologist Angelica Brown.

So, my thoughts?  Great job all around.  Today's event was very informative, and I thought the panelists did a great job of explaining both the market, the options, and their own personal opinions.  And there were a lot of personal opinions.  Holger seems to think traditional marketing is dead; Julia not so much.  The speaker who stole the show, though, was Christine Schafer, whose self-admitted love of analogy gave us an amusing way to understand and internalize the concepts she was trying to convey.  I especially enjoyed Christine's comment that "every time you do a technology implementation, the one thing you're going to need is therapy."  This explanation of the importance of change management in technology implementation will stay with me forever.  I hope Christine follows up on her promise to write a blog post about this.

Other highlights:

• Know your audience before you decide what's best for your web site, marketing campaign, or social media strategy.
• Ask for info a little bit at a time.  Using marketing automation tools, a company can figure out whether the user's been there and filled out information before, and each subsequent visit can request an additional piece of the puzzle.
• Offer free content.  Build trust.  Go out on a first date before pressuring a prospect to marry you.  (Another great analogy from Christine.)
• Write once, use many.  White papers can become a series of blog posts.  Blog posts can become a series of twitter updates.  Webcasts can be created out of presentations and training sessions.  Reuse, reuse, reuse!
• Don't police bloggers beyond the basics.  Don't specify topics.  Don't be afraid to talk.  The key is to be sincere, transparent, and real.
• Blogs are an SEO driver due to the frequency of refreshed content and linking.
• Linked In communities are a great source of discussions on a more thoughtful level than Facebook or Twitter.
• The business case reasons for marketing automation tools include:
• Metrics and reporting
• Insights into the process and cycle
• Insights into prospects, leads, and customers
• What's on the horizon?
• Personalization at a more sophisticated level
• Delivery to mobile devices

And that's it!  WiT continues to sponsor intelligent, relevant discussions.  Eileen and I were quite happy with the event, the panelists, the participants, and the topic.