We want to thank host Brian Solis and the folks at this week's Pivot Conference for inviting Spiral16 to participate. There were tons of great speakers and opportunities for learning and networking. Not mention, it all happened in New York, which can't be beat.
Two members of the Spiral16 team were there, but I was sitting in front of my computer (where data nerds belong, I suppose) watching many of the presentations from the #PivotCon livestream. As kind of a Friday wrap-up, though, I wanted to point people in the direction of some of the resources currently available on the web that came from the 2011 Pivot Conference.
Charlene Li presented a compelling speech on how companies can prepare for the new landscape of business. Disruptive technologies are hard to keep up with and if companies create a culture of sharing and prioritize these technologies by their value to the company, they can stay on top of things. As usual with the meticulous research of the Altimeter Group, Charlene offered a framework to help companies succeed in this area:
She also published a quick overview/review of Solis' new book, The End of Business As Usual, which covers similar territory, but in a much broader sense:
"I found the most valuable insights in the second half of the book where Brian becomes prescriptive about how businesses need to approach business differently. In particular, Brian makes the case that you must evolve your business to become "adaptive" to the connected consumer. He's evolved his call to action from "Engage or Die!" to "Adapt or Die!"
Scott Brinker author of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog, made the case for companies needing a CMT (chief marketing technologist, duh). This is someone who translates the strategy into technology and back again for the company's CMO, and who makes new technologies functional across the organization.
Another important step - and a result hopefully of the steps before it - is that new technologies should be fused into the DNA of the marketing. Here's Scott's presentation:
Megan Cunningham, CEO of Magnet Media, shared some of her thoughts from various panels at her blog. As she pointed out, it was pretty hard to miss the fact that most everything revolved around a sense of collective emergence. Everything's changing and that means businesses have to keep up.
One interesting quote about buyer's intent that she pulled out was from Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus, during the "Where's the $%$# Money?" panel. It reminded me of a recent study that showed that organic searches and links from other websites are still driving more traffic to blogs than anything else:
Schafer: (roughly) "The keyword for social media is 'discovery,' and that's what developing brands are about. Direct response is about intent-responding to a problem. Can you solve this? Yes. Buy this and we'll fix it. When people have intent they don't turn to social media, they search."
For all of the talk of disruptive technologies, it's kind of funny that when it comes right down to it, people are still going to do an old-fashioned search when they are looking for something valuable online. For businesses, it's more important than ever to be able to utilize new technologies to encourage loyalty, but getting them to the right web destination still involves using the right keywords and getting the right links.