OM Marketing Bootcamp Day One Wrap-up

Whew! It's been a GREAT day at OM Marketing Bootcamp. My personal highlights:

1. I not only MET Avinash Kaushik, but I got his autograph for my Web Analytics Book. Great speaker, very relaxed and seriously into analytics, data and very customer-centric. Really liked him in person. Thanks Avinash! Yes, Trinity Rocks and So do you!!
   
2. Cathy Resmer "live blogged" all day -- was way cool to read the re-cap and figure out this new journalistic endeavor. Down-side is the application she used was not Blackberry friendly so I had to wait until the end of the day to read it all, so couldn't participate.
   
3. Networking, networking, networking! Chatted with former students, other business people including folks from Epik, Propeller, MyWebGrocer, and the Publisher of the Burlington Free Press.

My biggest take away is that overall, I'm on it. There weren't any surprises that made me feel like I wasn't on top of the space I'm teaching. Whew -- that's always my concern and I'm glad to see that I've been able to stay on top of the trends and issues in Analytics, Advertising and Social Media. And actually, I might be a bit ahead on the mobile use and Twitter...but that, of course remains to be seen.

Best Advice and overall great themes that came from today:

1. The CUSTOMER should drive your decision-making (in other words, know your target market, where they go online and what they are doing online). Use analytics data, surveys and A/B and Multivariate testing to help get clear on what customers want from your online presence.
   
2. Give up control Marketing VPs and CEOs! Your brand is no longer your own -- now you need to MANAGE the brand using other tools, but you have to be willing to let consumer generated content run its course.
   
3. Be open and flexible and ready to try out the new tools to see how they will work and if they will work for your target market.
   
4. Data driven decision making ROCKS or...as Avinash would say, "It's crazysexycool". Even better, is data visualizations of the right information. Data by itself is often crap -- but with the right visualizations it can actually tell you what you need to do and better yet can help you convince the HIPPO to let you do it!

For the nitty gritty check out http://twemes.com/om -- which are all the Tweets that came through today about the OM bootcamp -- of course most of them are me! I think my thumbs will fall off. Also the live blog from Blurt provides some great things too.

I'll be back on tomorrow for the second day -- the focus will be Analytics. Yippee!