Interactive Marketing: It’s one thing to listen. It’s another to take part.

Stepping Up: Interactive Marketing & Canada’s Place on the Global Stage
Moderator: Chantal Rossi, Google
Panelist: Brian Cusack, YouTube
Panelist: David Dougherty, Trapeze Media
Panelist: Maggie Fox, Social Media Group
Thursday, March 27 – 2:15pm

With Canada being one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world, you’d expect interactive marketing to be booming. Sadly, marketing in the Canadian digital space has been lagging behind many other countries. What can we do to rectify that situation?

It’s clear that old models (traditionally push models) of marketing don’t translate well onto the web. As Brian Cusack explained, the internet is not only a place for entertainment and education , it is also a place for community. Marketers need to enter the conversations that are currently happening between consumers — and not as marketers, but as active members of the community.

The challenge, of course, is getting clients to understand that they need to take a risk and, as David Dougherty concisely stated, participate in conversations that are already happening instead of simply creating new ones. Maggie Fox went on to dispel the myth that engaging in interactive marketing can be detrimental:

“People will and are already saying bad things about you. Right now, you just can’t hear them. When you engage in social media, you can understand and respond to what people are talking about.”

Dougherty went on to add that “it is one thing to listen, to monitor. You also actually have to take part.”

Cusack gave examples of NBC using YouTube to engage users in context, demonstrating the importance of “being human” in the interaction with consumers. And of course, in the end, content is king. Fox stressed the importance that it takes time to build relationships and engage in conversation:

“The words ‘campaign’ and ’social media’ should never be in the same sentence. Social media is not a campaign, not something you do in six months. You can’t just shut it off. It needs to be part of your business, not just part of your product launch.”

Photos by Rannie Turingan.