The Vermont Web Marketing Summit (you can see related twitter conversationss using the #vtweb hashtag), which occurred yesterday at the Main Street Landing in Burlington was a great networking and learning event for Vermonters interested in Social Media and Digital Marketing.

There were some great local presenters, and I think that there was something for more or less anyone that attended the event – from marketing professionals, to non-profit peeps, to businesses with e-commerce sites.

There seemed to be a lot of people from small businesses that were there to learn more about how they could improve/expand their web marketing efforts.  The speaking crew, however, mostly work on a bigger scale – (mywebgrocer, Seventh Generation, and Gardener’s Supply all are pretty big operations.)

I think it’s great to learn from what the biggest and best are doing – and then take that and scale it down to the size of your organization.  I would much rather hear about how Gardener’s Supply is managing email lists and campaigns, for example, than a smaller business – because Gardener’s Supply is huge, and is dependent on the email marketing to drive their revenue.

 

My key takeaway from the conference is the realization that the basics of search, web, email, and social marketing are all scaleable.  The concepts are the same, regardless of the volume.

If I had to choose a theme for the conference, it would have been “The Bullhorn is Dead, Long Live The Laser Pointer.”  Blasting people with information doesn’t work any more.  Choosing your spots with laser-pointer like focus is the new marketing method that works.

The Presentations

To try and provide some value to those that went to the conference and those that couldn’t make it, I made mindmaps of the presentations to share.  Here is a brief description of each, and links to the mindmaps:

• Chris Middings’ (@cmiddings) from Seventh Generation gave what was for me, the highlight of the conference, a great talk on search marketing.  I think he did a great job making search marketing accessible for regular people.  That is pretty dense content, and it’s really tough to gear it to a generalized audience.  Chris did a great job in presenting basic and specific information that can help any business, regardless of scale.  Search Marketing Done Right, indeed.
  • This is the mindmap of his talk on Search Marketing, entitled “Search Marketing Done Right.
  • You can also check out the actual presentation on Chris Middings’ Slide Share page.
• Max Harris (@maxyh) from Gardener’s Supply shared what they are doing for email marketing.  It is very, very sophisticated and interesting.  The key concept that I saw for small business owners is to take away from his presentation is to target specific groups of people within your lists with specific messages.  Don’t just blast people with content that doesn’t apply to them.  They also truly understand their customer and community.  It shows in the way Max lights up when he talks gardening supplies and gardeners!
  • This is the mindmap of his talk, entitled “Integrated Email Campaigns and Listening to the Voice of The Customer.”
• Tom Funk (@tomfunk) from Timberline Interactive talked about web design best practices, usability, and landing page optimization.  Some interesting stuff in here.  Key concepts are to test, test, test what works, and to make your site easy to use (and not make you think.)
  • This is the mindmap of his talk, entitled “Web Design Best Practices, Usability and Landing Page Optimization.”
• Bibi Mukherjee (@wookiesam) of Curve Trends Marketing tied all of this stuff together by talking about metrics.  Measure, Measure, Measure I would say is her mantra.  She shared some great tools for measuring what’s happening on your website.  I think she would be really disappointed to find out that you have a website and don’t have Google Analytics installed.
  • This is the mindmap of her talk, entitled “”Actionable Web Analytics – The Key to Data Driven Business”
• Dr. Elaine Young (@ejyoung67), a prof at Champlain College, gave a great talk about Social Media strategy.  She too shared some great tools, check them out on her blog at www.ejyoung.com She covered all of the basics, and gave a great overview of key SM concepts – measure, schedule time for it, it’s not free, and it’s a conversation that you need to be a part of.  My favorite point that she had was that businesses need to make SM an expectation of employees:  “I not only encourage you to participate on SM, I expect you to.  I want you to have Facebook and a Twitter platform open on your desktop when I walk by.”  Great stuff.
  • This is the mindmap of her talk, entitled “Designing Your Social Media Strategy.”
• Alec Newcomb, of mywebgrocer, gave a great talk on what mywebgrocer is up to.  Two key takeaways are that “local” and “mobile” seem to be the two directions that web marketing is headed.  Good to know.  These two concepts were worth the price of admission to me.
  • Check out the mindmap of his keynote talk here.

All in all, it was a great conference.  I am hoping to attend the 2nd Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit next year!  On a side note, if you attended the conference this year, and would like more help in developing a digital marketing strategy,  check out my special offer for attendees that I am offering through the end of next week.

Did you attend?  Do you have anything to share about your experience?  If you didn’t attend, is there anything you would like to know?

images via flickr/bobw235 and flickr/bruceturner