The Whitelist

breakfast of champions - SP Agency Partners

All good things must end.  Today was the end of the whirlwind (literally, a tornado rolled in today) tour of the SP Client Summit.  Started the day getting to meet some of the SP Agency Partners.  Some collaborating and strategizing got the day off to a good beginning.

Dave Daniels’ keynote on the New Rules of Relevancy got the day ‘officially’ started – he never fails to deliver and it was a good shot in the arm to get energized for the rest of the day.

Right on the heels of Dave’s keynote was yours truly – presenting on ‘Proving Your Worth with Metrics’.  The pressure was on, following Bill Nussey then Dave Daniels on the stage was a tall order – my 9th grade teacher had predicted my future would involve parole hearings and probations officer(s) – she would have been surprised to see me there on the same stage as those guys.

I felt like I was ready, but with some of the best/brightest marketers on the planet in the room – I knew I had to bring a good game.  The applause at the end was not deafening, but I didn’t see anyone leave during the entire hour.  Providing great relief was that I had posted our SMS short code of how people could download the presentation if they were interested – and within a few minutes my gig wrapping up, there was enough traffic/download requests coming in that I was able to stop worrying right away.

88769 is the short code to use, send the message – cmmnews youremail (that is cmmnews, space, your email address) and you’ll get signed up for the ClickMail Marketer and we’ll make sure you get sent links to presentation.

Brandi Heinz and Kristen Hagen - representing divisions of Follett

Kim Peters of Axentis - here for her 2nd summit...

Amanda Horvath of iStockPhoto - all the way down from the GreatWhiteNorth for her 2nd summit

new branding - nice

So we’re underway.  Great opening remarks from Bill Nussey to start the day.  It’s a packed house and after the first two elements, the Summit is living up to the hype!  Bill shared some of the recent and time-proven successes of Silverpop, notably 20 quarters of profitable operation; SP approaching the 1k client mark – a significant milestone in the industry; 375 employees and growing – it’s a compelling story.

a moving target? yes, but attainable

Bill started a great dialogue on engagement, and harkened back to last year when the term ‘engagement marketing’ started being used (as far as we know, it started at last year’s SP Summit).  Wikipedia has a great tool called ‘disambiguation‘ – especially useful when dealing with a term like engagement.  Of the over 1 dozen potential meanings, it was clarified as “to hold the attention of…”.  Going further and more focused to SP’s philosophy – “to involve oneself, participate”.  From there, we were treated to hear/see how the transformation of Marketing 1.0 to 2.0 is happening.  From interrupting to engaging.  From paying attention to participating.  And in particular, going from communicating to segments over to communicating to individuals.  It is the change of 1 way communications (and listening to echoes) vs true 2-way dialogue.

Bill wrapped up with sharing how everything is becoming marketing: every touch point, every support case, etc…  What this is then leading to (according to Bill’s crystal ball) is how we’re going to get from Optimization 1.0 (that can typically provide 5-10% lift) into the 2.0 environment (enabling lifts of 20-30% and more!), whereby O-2.0 is optimized for the individual, not for the site.  AND, this then segued brilliantly into how SP is making it happen.  The BIG RELEASE NEWS – Send Time Optimization.  Imagine, an eMarketing platform system so smart that it figures out when to deliver email based on when a recipient is online and “in” their inbox.  Optimization 2.0 – an enhanced, complex set of business rules and logic to ensure the very best results/conversions/ROI – for every INDIVIDUAL.

Excited – yes.  Inspired – definitely.  Engaged – absolutely!  Stay tuned, more to come soon – same bat channel (but various bat times).

yeah - it's on!

So what’s there to smile about at Silverpop’s Client Summit?  When you’re Mitch Diamond – plenty!  This is Mitch’s show.  His baby.  His 5th year of making it happen.  This year’s numbers?  Better than last year’s! (hmmm, economic rebound already?)  Or is it the drink in his hand?  Or the buzz in the room about what’s in store over the next couple of days?  This blogger has not heard of ANY email event so far in 2009 that has outperformed the prior year’s version.  Way to go MD… 

Saw a couple of icons tonight.  John Coe of The Sales & Marketing Institute (and past board director of the DMA).  John ran the EngageB2B ‘boot camp’ today, high energy strategy for B2B marketers – got great reviews!  He also has a much anticipated webinar coming up later this month (May 14th) in association with MarketingProfs.  “7 fast-acting methods to drive B2B revenue NOW“.  If you’re selling/marketing into the B2B realm, don’t miss this one! The other icon – none other than the author of The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing, CEO and President of Silverpop — Bill Nussey.  Really looking forward to his opening remarks on ‘the future of email’, on deck for first thing tomorrow.

lot's to smile about

This is my first time to a Silverpop client summit, and my first trip to Atlanta – I guarantee you it won’t be my last (for either)!

smiles all 'round

She also offered up her assessment of what the “big release“ being announced tomorrow might be…  In her ’perfect world’, it would be a marketing platform that was even more intuitive and easier to use than Silverpop is now.  She went to describe other elements of her perfect world vision that supported ‘drag-and-drop’ across the entire ‘net for ALL APPS.  Cool.  I am having a good time getting to know the marketers here, there is some serious brainpower in this place.  One more reason to be smiling…

Granite Carving

Dinner and drinks with Silverpop’s Loren McDonald tonight, fresh off the bus from the (huge) Atlanta airport in from SFO…  Got to catch up with LM and shoot the breeze, introduced him to a personal friend (old-time business colleague John Funchess) and JF got a crash course in email and social marketing (’share to social’ – nice branding by SP, though they are leaving it open for others to use).
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