Open Mic

Fast trains, planes, cabs and a good pair of walking shoes was the theme last week: Two conferences, two exhibit halls, networking, seminars, and great food!  The biggest marketing challenge was how to use this new fangled thing called Social Media to make money, close sales, find new customers and students.

The first conference Creative Partners exhibited at was the American Bankers Association Marketing Conference, held at the Marriott Inner Harbor Hotel in Baltimore, MD. On the water, the seafood was good and the beer even better. An area of town that has seen a shift from the longshoreman to blue suits and pairing knives giving way to iPhones and Droids, it is heavily gentrified and host to the John Hopkins School of Business. The exhibit hall was packed with new media and old, but clearly the theme of the conference was social media. Social media was the “thing to solve” and understand as more and more of potential B2B and B2C customers not only go online, but become tied together by the virtual highway of life.

The second conference was the National Association of College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) show in New Orleans. While you wouldn’t know it from the inside, the New Orleans convention center is on the water and it’s huge and –I kid you not – it is 1 kilometer long. Long enough that colleagues from Los Angeles thought we should take a cab from one end to the other.

Creative Partners exhibited at the show, met people, ate too well in the Garden District and at Mothers for breakfast (eggs, a choice of four kinds of meat, grits, biscuits, fried alligator) and found some great Jazz on Frenchmen Street, passing through, if not bypassing the college students making merry in the French Quarter.

We weren’t too worried about missing this one segment of social media users; we knew that there were more just on the other side of the quarter. And we found them. Poets recording poetry into smartphones, but typing away on 1940’s era portable Royal typewriters. Pick-up jazz bands in the street. Beer joints with no cover, but people tweeting about some hot new jazz.  Middle aged women posting pictures of Beignets at Café Du Monde on Facebook.
New Orleans can be summed up best from a guy who dropped into our booth suggesting great places to eat that were not high on my cardiologist’s list: “Why die from nothing when you can die from something.”

The conferences had an air of the late 1990s when everyone was wondering just how the internet was going to change the way we shopped, read our books, trade stocks and talk on the telephone. Back then, Apple Computer was broke, IBM was making PC’s and most of us still used land lines to make calls and considered cell phones still an expensive but interesting tool to make calls on the run. There was mail order marketing, branding advertising, public relations and airlines seemed to have a lot of empty seats on every flight all the time.

The forerunner of true social media, text messaging, barely existed in America. I had one seemingly astute Japanese student claim that the Americans hated text messaging because American hands were too big to text on cell phones– probably due to the rise of obesity. She was convinced that text messaging would always be the prevue of East Asians who were lucky to have hands tailored to phones made in the Far East. Racial profiling at its best.

We now know that as a species, Americans have proven to be adaptable. As the cable and cell companies restructured their pricing plans, Americans became addicted to text messaging, iPhones, Droids and iPad apps, including Facebook—which now accounts for nearly 20% of all time spent on computers in America. We shop online, learn online, have cybersex, hold meetings online, download movies, music and podcasts by the giga-bytes. It’s enough to shake-up the electrons in my dog’s brain.

Like a pricing genie released from a baby bottle,  Facebook, Twitter, Hubspot Google, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, Netvibe, Orkut, Pandora, Foursquare and thousands of other established companies and start-ups have been released on the social media landscape of community bankers and high school, college and university admission folks. It’s confusing.

Whether you are a banker or a college admissions counselor and marketer, everyone has to use this stuff.  Social media is now in our pockets and purses through 500,000 apps for the iPhone and nearly 200,000 for Droids. We can track each other, create mash-ups, see real-time traffic on highways, and crowd-source new ideas. Tied to a good data-mining program, these social media offers segmentation and predictive modeling opportunities that can track.
Smart apps will enable us to create more robust credit models on the fly, or allow bankers to take pictures of parking lots and buildings that another app will evaluate to see how well a company is doing.

College admissions people will be able to see into the souls of potential recruits through dashboards like HootSuite and then deliver personalized view books on any kind of media.
The social media party is on in a big way, just be careful what you eat. As that guy who came to the booth said:  “why die from nothing when you can die from something.”

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