Search, Social & The Future @ Tradedoubler Summit 2010

Having been to previous TradeDoubler Summit's I arrived in time to see Regional Director Simon Burgess giving away some awesome prizes to kick start the day, including £100 Nike Vouchers, a £500 Lasminute.com Voucher and a Dell Business Laptop. There were also a few more Laptops on offer throughout the day plus (of course) an iPad courtesy of Yahoo.

Introduced to the delegates were the newly dubbed 'Dream Team' including affiliate industry 'old-timers' Ricki Jones and Paul Wright to the growing TradeDoubler team, it seems as though TradeDoubler have created the groundings for a 'Dream Team' - let's see how it progresses!

The Future of Digital Marketing

The first session was by Media Futurist Gerd Leonhard, who was talking (funnily enough) about the Future of Digital Marketing. A great insightul presentation followed, talking in regards to the state of online, defining ways to interact online and some perceptions of the future.

I was rapidly jotting down notes from this presentation, and Gerd was coming up with plenty of quotes and ideas that were making me correlate to our marketing activities;

• User empowerment is here - you can't lock up the customer anymore.
• You need to 'With-Vertise', not '@-Vertise' with the user. Too much causes Interruption rather than Interaction.
• More people are watching TV shows online (dubbed Broad-Cast) rather than through TV / Sat / Cable, therefore less money spent on TV Advertising and more with online.
• Data is the new oil - so much data is currently being produced.

A few websites that were also mentioned by Gerd through his presentation were Backtype and Addict-o-matic. Backtype is an analytics platform aimed at helping companies to understand their social impact, while addictomatic creates an instant page of 'buzz' on your chosen search topic.

Social Media & Affiliates

Next up was Sanjit and Ravi, from TradeDoubler and Facebook respectively, who talked about the role Social Media plays (in particular Facebook) and how Affiliates should be utilising the most becoming social media button on the web.

Facebook currently accounts for 20% of all time spent online in the UK, and globally of the 500 million facebook users, 150 million of them have accessed via a mobile method.

From an Affiliate perspective, the main pro's from the session showed that actively adding facebook plugins to your pages adds a 'phenomenal' uptake in traffic. Especially the 'Like' button, which not only aids your activity as an affiliate, but 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know, enhancing what your brand can get out of Facebook if you look at your Facebook page fans. Which of your Facebook fans are influencing others in their stream to buy? How can you utilise these users?

Offline to Online Convergence

The Like button is also helping the wider marketing industry by bringing the offline, online.

An example is from a video I saw during one of the presentations of the day - here is a Coca Cola water park which uses RFID to store that persons facebook username and password. If they go on a ride or visit an area which they like, they hover over the 'Like' board and it automatically gives the appropriate page a like on FB.

Interestingly, only 19% of the Top 100 UK Tech Corporations are currently using twitter commercially!

Location Based Services

Another area which is becoming increasingly more popular is Location Based Services. With the launch of mobile voucher and location apps including VoucherCloud, VouChaCha, FourSquare there is currently a huge surge in the location services on offer.

Reliance on Google?

In other presentations throughout the day, and from some that I have talked about, there seemed to be a similar summary from them all - mainly "We are reducing the reliance on Google, which will benefit Affiliates in the long run."

This is in the form of Facebook's traffic levels and influence levels, and the new Search Alliance from Yahoo! & Microsoft.

The TradeDoubler Summit

Overall, the whole day at the TradeDoubler Summit 2010 was a great experience. Some top speakers were on offer providing insightful and thought-provoking ideas, which i'm sure many Affiliates in attendance will be able to benefit from. It was good catching up post-event with others, and it seemed as though nearly all the delegates had stayed on to network.