digital day

Social media and new forms of “conversational” digital marketing have created more hype than the Internet did in 1999. Does every company and brand need a Twitter feed? How should companies and brands adjust their mix to accommodate new forms of connecting with customers? Is interruption marketing dead or is this social media craze a distracting fad? Kevin Nalty, a former product director from Merck and Johnson & Johnson, looks at the marketing mix, and digital's changing role. His unique perspective as a YouTube “star” and marketing expert will give attendees some tangible low-risk, high-impact strategies and tactics.

More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access digital content. Advertisers continue to invest in their mobile web presence to keep up with this impressive growth. Find out in this session how to track the mobile traffic visiting your sites and properties. You’ll also learn tips and tricks from digital marketers from Canwest, Yahoo and Microsoft about what they are doing to optimize their properties and what analytics and opportunities exist in this new medium.

What does the advertising side of Google learn from the Engineering side? Engineers respond immediately to user demand...marketing responds immediately to consumer demand - or does it? "Universal Search" isn't really anything that Google or anyone has done ... it is what consumers/users/people are DOING and what they expect. There are no more information highways…rather, people are sticking to their streets, and even making their own paths. This makes "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful" more challenging. It also makes marketing much more challenging. This discussion will examine "Universal Marketing" and the approach we often discuss with agency partners when it comes to planning media and reaching customers with the right message, at the right time.

eCommerce is often a barometer for digital marketing success. Join a panel of senior digital retail experts to discuss the state of the nation in Canadian eCommerce. Who’s investing, who’s cutting? What are the trends, changes and opportunities? What are consumers doing and what do they want? Most importantly what will happen over the next 12 months? This panel will be able to address these questions with a combination of hands on experience and strategic perspective.

We all know that social media is changing the way we communicate to our consumers and partners; perhaps you have already had a success or two in the space. Now what? Where does it fit in your organization? What skill sets best determine a social media lead? Do you hire an expert, an agency or go it alone? Do we focus on the one-offs, or look at this as a discipline over the long haul? What sort of commitment does it take to really make an impact with your brand in the social space? Join Collin Douma to explore these questions and discover creative options for planning for long-term success in social media.

This session will define social software and discuss what it brings to the marketing landscape that’s new and different. You’ll learn the pros and cons of the technologies that support marketing initiatives (forums, blogs, wikis, tagging, bookmarks, etc.), how to bring these tools together to improve collaboration and communications—across and beyond the enterprise, and how to measure your return on investment with marketing intelligence. Dan Latendre provides his insights on the business potential of online communities and social software solutions.

For Louise Clements, social media means social marketing, and she knows it can be profitable, meaningful, and essential to your business. Facebook is the fastest growing web property in the world (ranked number three after Google and Yahoo). Louise will provide an understanding of how to use Facebook to market your company and how to better leverage this new and exciting social marketing channel for business success.

Wondering what should be included in your mobile strategy? A panel of experts will speak to their latest technologies and findings in the mobile space. Some of the areas to be featured include: mobile couponing, mobile advertising, mobile learning and more!

Markets are conversations. But those conversations can only happen because markets are also networks. And that's the next challenge for marketers who have embraced the new social media. The hierarchical nature of most businesses is an uneasy fit in the network architecture of markets. The networking of business and markets - part of the overall networking of just about everything - not only enables them to scale far larger, but also give these structures the properties of the network itself. The networks of markets will determine the future of marketing.