Advice & inspiration

Lessons learned from Internet Summit 2011

Internet Summit 2011 wrapped up last night and I finally caught up on my sleep in order to recap the two-day, 27-session conference. This was my 2nd year attending the conference, and, in my opinion, the biggest difference was the number of entrepreneurs in attendance this year! An overwhelming majority of the 1,800 attendees were entrepreneurs recruiting engineers, networking with VCs, and raising awareness about their new companies.

Here are notes from some of the sessions I attended. Also, attendee Claudine Caro took excellent notes throughout all of the sessions she attended, so I encourage you to read them on Google Docs. Lastly, feel free to check #isum11 to hear opinions from all of those who tweeted throughout the conference.

Measuring Social

Jeff Ragovin, CRR at Buddy Media, said that three metrics should be used to measure social media: reach, buzz and engagement. He noted that by 2015 social commerce is expected to account for $30 billion in revenue and that it is currently under reported since many social sales are being attributed to Google due to the inability to many times track a consumer’s purchase activity through the entire funnel. He also stressed the need to eliminate the paid, earned and owned silos since they should all be managed simultaneously by the same team. Interesting facts that he shared include:

• 3.2 average unique visitors garnered from every social share
• 90% of consumers trust recommendations from friends
• 67% of consumers spend more after the initial recommendation vs never being recommended to a site
• Average Facebook share generates $2.10 in incremental sales
• Engagement rates are three times higher for share posts that include a full-length URL

That last point scares me because we are all accustomed to shortening our links in order to track CTR, but is this data worth losing 3x potential traffic??

By far the best presentation in my opinion was Matt Crenshaw, VP of Marketing and Analytics at Discovery. He said there are 10 people on the social team at Discovery that is co-managed between the Digital Marketing and Corporate Communications departments. He said their two goals in social media are engagement and conversion. They partnered with a data mining start-up based in Seattle to assess their user activity across its Facebook fan pages. Interestingly enough, they noted that even though producers were posting three times a day (morning, noon and 5pm), their fans were more active mid-morning and right before and after the show aired. Thus, they have since changed their posting schedule to better align with their consumer activity.

Moreover, he stressed the importance of splitting fans by gender and geography to better target them. For instance, they noticed that a large percentage of women were active on one page at a certain time, so they now make sure that their post is targeting this gender at this specific time. I like the strategy going on here rather than simply posting haphazardly! (They also did competitive analysis that showed one competitor only posting once daily, between 8-9 am). Obviously these types of user insights would help them as well!

Mobile and Location Marketing

David Perry, Business Development Executive of Software and Services at Google, noted four mobile trends: hyperlocalization, video, mCommerce and desktop mobile. He said the three mobile drivers are mobile computing, cloud computing and unlimited connectivity. He presented some impressive stats on the growth of mobile, such as year-over-year mobile search at Google grew 172% this past year and that mobile queries made up 7% of search in 2010 and is expected to be 15% in 2011. Yet, he mentioned that 75% of Google’s top 1,000 advertisers do not have a mobile website. YIKES!

My favorite take-away from this session was “SoLoMo” – Social-Local-Mobile with the mindset that “social is sharing, sharing is telling, and telling is selling.”

Online Video

Donna DeMarco, Viddler co-founder, said that a company needs at least 100,000 views per month on their videos to make the display ads profitable. She said that video continues to be a huge trend and will be for the foreseeable future. Viddler sees 7 million embeds per day and has more than 1,000 SMB clients. Sam Kimball, EVP at Livestream, noted that people watch live video for 9-12 minutes compared to a mere 2-3 minutes for non-live video. He also said that pre-roll ads have a 1-3% CTR (versus .54% CTR for other pre-roll ads, according to DM Confidential).

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Did you attend the Internet Summit? If so, what was your key take-away from the conference?

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