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meshmarketing speaker spotlight: David Usher

By meshmarketing

meshmarketingDavid Usher is not only a popular musician but an entrepreneur and savvy user of social media. We’re excited David will be our closing keynote speaker at meshmarketing. With a hectic schedule in the wake of his album, Last Day on Earth, I got a chance to speak with David about his keynote.

What’s the theme of your presentation?

It really talks how to re-engage creativity. A lot of it is about the ideas as we go through life, and how curiosity tends to get worn down. The beginning point is remembering you’re a curious being. It goes through the basic elements of the creative process. What are the steps? Creativity is a learnable, repeatable and transferrable process. Anyone can learn to be more creative. Once you learn the process of creativity, you can use the process over and over in many different areas and disciplines in your life.

How does this reflect your personal experiences?

Right now, what I have found in my own life and everyone surrounding me is the world is in transition and personal cycles and business cycles are so much faster. It not just about being more creative to make better products and services, but being creative because you have to adopt an attitude of change. You are in a constant state of motion and change, and that’s the new normal for everyone whereas before we could be the best locally and that was fine. Now, we are competing on a global scale so we need to open up and branch out.

What’s new in your world these days?

The newest thing is I have finished building and launching is Artists for Amnesty. Artists give us songs and we ask their fans to help spread the world about social justice. We are in the beta phase. We launched a couple weeks ago. I’m also writing for the Huffington Post and working on a TV show.

Tickets for meshmarketing are on sale for $299, while student tickets are $49.

Keynote Spotlight: Lee Odden

By meshmarketing

meshmarketingOnce in awhile, you come across a blogger that resonates because their posts consistently deliver valuable insight. A great example is Lee Odden, who writes about content marketing, search and social media on the Top Rank Marketing blog.

Lee, the CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Minneapolis, is also the author of “Optimize“, which is a must-read for anyone working in the digital marketing space.

When we were looking for speakers for meshmarketing, Lee was an obvious choice given the growing interest in the intersection between search, social and content. So, it goes without saying we’re delighted he’ll be kicking off meshmarketing on Nov. 7.

A key part of Lee’s approach is the importance of integration so all parts of a business – customer service, marketing and sales – are collaborating and sharing ideas to help audiences discover information, consume it, and take action.

Lee’s not only one of the leading digital marketing voices but his presentations are engaging, informative and bound to give you plenty of food for thought.

Tickets for meshmarketing, which takes place at the Toronto Reference Library, are still available for $299 ($70 off the regular price). Student tickets are $49. Here’s the schedule.

Keynote Spotlight: Kristina Halvorson

By meshmarketing

It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the growing focus on content marketing, which is has been defined by Joe Pulizzi as “the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

So how do brands approach content? What are the strategic and tactical considerations that have to be explored before brands launch themselves into content marketing. To answer these questions – and many more – we’re excited to have Kristina Halvorson, the CEO and co-founder of Brain Traffic, as one of meshmarketing’s keynote speakers.

One of the world’s leading content strategists, Kristina will provide attendees with the insight, perspective and advice they need to successfully leverage content to drive their strategic and tactical objectives.

To get a flavour of Kristina’s presentation, I did a mini-Q&A with her about a few key areas:

What’s your take about all the buzz out content marketing?

With content marketing, you need to produce a lot of content and send it across all the different channels to establish yourself as trusted resource and create alliances and create value. Now, brands are dealing with their Websites, they are dealing with search, which is screwing up a bunch of content, they are dealing with blogs that are under-resourced, and social media channels they have lost track with. They are dealing with trying to format all this content for all these other things and everyone is creating silos, which is making it worse and worse.

This stuff is not just random activity. We are creating content and the content is what we are asking people to engage with. We want them to find it valuable, so how can we go about consider content from a strategic perspective? Let’s not think about it as tactical. Let’s think of content as sharing across silos. Content strategy provides guiding principles and identifies work-flow to ensure we are creating the right kinds of content for our business and users, that we are measuring its effectiveness and identifying area for re-use, and we have the right people in the right seats empowered to the right things. How can we create consistency across channel to optimize communications efforts?

What are the mistakes being made about content marketing?

People are jumping into tactical initiatives without thinking about what is going on elsewhere and what they will do with it once it’s out there. We are basically making the Internet a dumping ground for content. Everyone is under pressure to create more content and always be producing. We ask people to slow down and say “Why?”.

When you dig into their objectives, there are no solid outcomes that are mapped back to business objectives. We are creating content that we think our customers want versus what they are reading or talking to them about or done analytics about. As communications professionals we have been measured on activity, and so it is a different idea that we would be asked to back up and spend time choreographing our efforts, which takes time and investment.

Tickets for meshmarketing are now on sale for $299 until Oct. 8 – a $70 discount from the regular price.