October 13, 2005 | Thursday
Latitude Intelligence Network: Manchester
By Jackie Danicki - Blogger in Events |Latitude Intelligence Network |Marketing
I just returned to London from an all day Latitude Intelligence Network event which we held in Manchester for some of our northern clients. The aim of our Intelligence Network is to put our clients together with Latitude’s specialists and external industry experts, giving them in-depth information on the future of search and the online marketing developments they need to know about.
The line up for today was superb.
First, my friend and former colleague Adriana Cronin-Lukas, founder and CEO of the Big Blog Company, talked about the implications of blogging, podcasting, and RSS feeds for online marketers. We had a lot of financial services clients in attendance, so Adriana focused her presentation on what finance companies are doing - correctly and (mostly) incorrectly - with these emergent technologies. The examples were often amusing...but not in the way the advertisers had probably hoped.
Miva‘s James Ross followed Adriana with lots of detail about pay-per-call. Latitude is one of the first UK search agencies to offer Miva’s pay-per-call product to our clients, and some of the companies in attendance today are already making use of it.
After lunch, Nixxie‘s Satish Jayakumar presented on how some companies have been monetising their exit traffic. The rationale behind doing this is that, as not all traffic will convert to sales, building a new revenue stream out of your fall-off traffic is a way to increase the ROI of your online marketing. I found this presentation especially interesting, as the trust built from showing your potential clients how to double-check your offering against the competition’s could be substantial. Definitely not a marketing move for the timid!
Leah Stitson, Overture‘s European Sales Operations Director, then showed us all what Yahoo has in store for its search network over the coming months and 2006.
Finally, there was an open discussion between the panel of presenters, Latitude’s specialists, and our clients. It was a great exchange, with lots of good questions, lively discussion, and closing references from our CEO Dylan Thwaites to John Battelle‘s fantastic book, The Search.
All in all, it was a really informative day - and fun, too. The fact that I enjoyed it so much was surprising to me, but then lots of things about search are more fun and interesting than I thought before I started working in SEM. Meeting some of our northern-based clients was especially good, and I was happy to see that they are so pro-active in monitoring online marketing and know so much already about things like blogging and RSS. One of our financial services clients told me that he discovered podcasting when looking for information about kite surfing - exploding the tired stereotype of the staid, derby hat-wearing banker, I’d say!
Thanks to everyone who came along today, and to our client Britannia Hotels for use of the venue. Latitude Intelligence Network events in London and the Midlands are coming soon - if you’re a client and want to find out more, !
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