12 Lessons You Might Not Know Yet.

I am often torn between the simplicity of the web versus the vast expansion of space. Depending on the content I am reading, or the mood I am in. I am not sure which web I like more. The vastness or the ease. There are no walls to our ability to connect and leverage our existing (or historical) set of skills.

In early July, I was looking for a new office in New York for our creative agency. We are only small so we were looking for what we thought to be an “uncluttered white space” in a certain part of town.  I ran a simple Google search and came across a web site called of course, uncluttered white spaces (or UWS for short). I have been an avid reader ever since. More recently, as recent as last week, I received an email from the founder Ben Rennie with an invitation to join Brand Lab which I graciously accepted. We had never spoken, I had not made comment on the site and in fact, I was actually very protective of my relationship with the site. I had not told anyone outside of my agency as the content was proving to be a great source of inspiration for my team and I. It was a coincidence provided by the vastness of the web in all its simplicity.

Here I am, now writing for the site and feeling rather privileged. I am totally new to blogging however not new to branding, marketing, design and business. I have had our agency in new York for just on 7 years and we work with some of the best brands in the city. I didn’t agree to write for UWS to promote me or my agency. We do well and you can read about my business on Brand Lab. I agreed to write for personal reasons, to have a voice and share my thoughts and do it in short punchy 3 minute grabs as Ben likes to refer to them. So enough about me. More about you. Or, to the point, what we have learnt recently.

I recently attended to the Inbound Marketing Summit and had a great time. So to keep this brief and within the guidelines of the editor, here is a 3 minute adaption of the top 12 lessons from the conference:

1. Everyone is a blogger – what happens offline is just as important as what happens online – Tim Hayden (@GamePlanHayden)

2. Every business is reactionary – brands talk about two-way conversations, but they don’t really engage – Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee)

3. What will work in the future is what worked in the past – strategy trumps tactics – Rich Ullman (Ripple6)

4. We’re in social media because we do crave contact with other people – we’re inherently social John Jantsch (@DuctTape)

5. Your Web site is not a brochure anymore; it’s a living and breathing thing, refresh it frequently and people will come back – Jason Falls (@JasonFalls)

6. The function of social is bottom up, it’s not about top down control, so there is a natural tension – Greg Matthews (Humana)

7. Trust in mainstream media is eroding – the media organization that survives will be much smaller than what we used to have as a model. This is becoming a market of small, engaged, and trusted entities and communities. Paul Gillin (@PGillin)

8. Social media was made for Southwest Airlines – the company has always focused on customer communications – Paula Berg (@PaulaBerg). Southwest handpicked 30 employees, uses the blog as the anchor of their social media activities.

9. Every industry has a difficult time justifying ROI. There’s a lot of fear about doing social media and so people are using ROI to push back – Brian Solis (@briansolis)

10. We need to get over what we were taught in school. Look at Google, everything is always in beta – Paul Gillin (@PGillin)

11. Businesses that are in a multi people sale and complex industries still love content that will make them smarter – Chris Brogan (@ChrisBrogan)

12. Give your community something to do – a company that has already 150,000 fans on Facebook, for example, needs either educational or entertaining (ask them) content – C.C. Chapman (@CC_Chapman)

How do these 12 observations impact your business and what you do day to day? It is changing and changing fast. Are you keeping up?

To follow these guys on Twitter, the handles are provided. Till next time.

Taylor.

Let me briefly introduce our latest contributor Taylor Fitzgerald from NYC. Taylor has been a UWS reader for some time and is a recent addition to Brand Lab. Taylor is an expert in brand, marketing, strategy and design and has worked with some of the planets best brands. Over to Taylor.
Cheers Ben.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under BUSINESS and tagged with branding, EVENTS, MARKETING, New York, Social Media, STRATEGY. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.