Last Thursday's Web 2.0 Marketing Strategies & Top Business Trends event saw over 100 people in attendance and was a great success! Special thanks to our friends at The Bissett School for Business for allowing us access to their facility and to our informative presenters, Jeff Nelson and Andrew Breen.
Congratulations to Heide Ghelfi who's name was drawn for a one-year free Digital Alberta Membership after completing our event survey. Thanks to all that participated in completing the survey which allows us to continue to meet the needs of our Membership as we build our program for the coming year.
Post-Event Summary - Author Byline: Lindsey Wallis, Journalism Student - MRC
President elect Barack Obama successfully used interactive web tools such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in his Presidential campaign and the average business can use the same applications as effective marketing tools.
This was the message from Jeff Nelson, one of two speakers at Digital Alberta’s presentation of Web 2.0: Marketing Strategies and Top Business Trends, in Mount Royal College’s Bissett School of Business on January 15. The event was hosted by XPAN Interactive. Over 90 guests attended the first Digital Alberta/DemoCamp meeting of the year.
"Ad agencies are not as powerful as they used to be," Nelson said. The power is in the consumers’ hands and the web applications are easy to use, which is why Web 2.0 is such a powerful marketing tool. Web 2.0 includes interactive, social web applications such as Facebook and Blogger.
Facebook was the big winner, with both Nelson and web marketing expert Andrew Breen extolling the ease and cost effectiveness of targetable, pay-per-click ads on the site. "Facebook is only going to get bigger and more diverse," Breen said. He showed that it has a broader reach than newspapers, as over 500,000 Calgarians have a Facebook account. The Calgary Herald website states that just over 480,000 read the Herald either online or in print.
Both also agreed that Google is a far better advertising platform than Yahoo or other search engines. Nelson said that 90 per cent of all searches are done through Google.
Another application Breen focused on was Twitter, which allows you to send and read text-based updates. He said that while it is not a strong advertising platform it is an invaluable tool in creating communities, both with customers and the media. The Calgary Herald and Avenue magazine both Twitter.
"The cutting edge people in pretty much any industry are likely on Twitter," Breen said. The downside is that it takes a while to build a following.
And finally, "don’t give up," Breen said.
