While there were several great presentations during ExactTarget’s Connections 2010 Conference, one of my favorite sessions was the Subscribers Fans & Followers: Cross Channel Success With Email, Facebook and Twitter session hosted by Jeff Rohrs (@jkrohrs) and Morgan Stewart (@mostew) on the last day of the conference. You can check out my previous posts about ET’s SFF research here and here. Below are a few videos I took during their presentation.

Mythbusting with Jeff and Morgan:

Throughout the Subscriber, Fans & Followers research, Jeff and Morgan were able to identify some really interesting information. Some of that information was picked up by local and national news outlets, but like with most research, you can make it say whatever you want it to say. Some news outlets ran tiny portions of the research, skewing some of the data. That’s where Myth #1 comes into play.

Myth #1: Email Usage is Dropping:

In the video below, Jeff and Morgan talk about how Nielsen just came out with data saying that email usage has dropped significantly in recent years. In short, the Nielsen study, only includes email accessed via the web – Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc – but it doesn’t include email accessed via mobile platforms or even Outlook!

Myth #2: Facebook Fans are worth 136.38 dollars:

Some recent research said each Fan a brand has on Facebook is worth roughly $136. While that may be hard to prove one way or another, during the SFF research, participants were asked: Are you more likely to purchase from a brand after becoming a Subscriber, Fan or Follower? The results were different than you might think.

Only 17% of Facebook Fans said yes, while 27% of email Subscribers gave the same answer. The real kicker is that a full 37% of Twitter Followers said they’d be more likely to purchase from a brand after following them on Twitter. Obviously, this question only asks about intent and there aren’t any hard dollar figures behind it, but the fact that more than a third of Twitter Followers would be more likely to purchase from your brand after following should encourage you to start using Twitter.

Myth #3: Twitter is Dying:

2009 was a great year for Twitter and it became the fastest growing social media channel ever. At some point, the rate of growth was going to have to slow down a bit. Even though we’ve seen some higher profile users quitting Twitter recently (John Mayer, Demi Lovato), Twitter is far from dying. Jeff and Morgan remind us that Twitter users create six times more content online than non-Twitter users. So, while a few celebrities may come and go, the real influencers on the web still use Twitter heavily.

Did you attend the Connections 2010 Conference? What was the biggest takeaway you got from the conference?

While there were several great presentations during ExactTarget’s Connections 2010 Conference, one of my favorite sessions was the Subscribers Fans & Followers: Cross Channel Success With Email, Facebook and Twitter session hosted by Jeff Rohrs (@jkrohrs) and Morgan Stewart (@mostew) on the last day of the conference. You can check out my previous posts about ET’s SFF research here and here. Below are a few videos I took during their presentation.

Twitter Users as Content Creators:

Through their SFF research, Jeff and Morgan discovered that Twitter users end up creating six times as much content online as the typical online consumer. This is extremely powerful news and should be a wake-up call to marketers – just because only 5% of online consumers follow a brand through Twitter, those consumers are some of the most influential people online today.

In the video below, Jeff and Morgan talk about the tremendous reach and influence of Twitter users.

3 Follow-up Points to SFF Research:

The final report in the SFF study was released just before the Connections 2010 conference and Jeff and Morgan talked about three follow-up points to the research. First, SFF’s are long-term assets, not short term sales opportunities. If you only look at the short term, you’re overlooking the true value of your SFFs. Second, SFFs must be integrated and optimized. Once you’re involved in email, Facebook and Twitter, you must continually work to integrate and optimize the content across all three channels. Finally, leadership must unify email and social marketing – don’t look at email, Facebook and Twitter as channels in separate silos.

Keep an eye out for another post of videos from the SFF talk later in the week. Were you at the Connections 2010 Conference? What was your favorite session?

Welcome to our series of interviews with local (and sometimes national) leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0, a Denver-based blog and digital consulting company focused on the travel and tourism industry

Troy Thompson – Travel 2.0

Troy has been involved in interactive marketing for the past 13 years. After starting his career at NASCAR in Florida, he was integral in launching their interactive department in the late ’90s. After nearly a decade with NASCAR, Troy moved to Arizona to become the Advertising Manager for the Arizona Office of Tourism. During his time at AOT, Troy headed up the social media division and recently moved to Denver to manage Visit Denver‘s interactive marketing department, including social media, mobile, SEO and more. Earlier this year he decided to break out on his own and dive into tourism technology consulting.

The Travel 2.0 blog started while Troy worked for Arizona Tourism as regular email updates about interactive marketing to the AOT staff and quickly evolved into a blog that could reach people far beyond the Arizona Office of Tourism. Now, thousands of people throughout the world read the Travel 2.0 blog each week and Troy is considered a thought leader in the interactive travel and tourism community.

The consulting arm of Travel 2.0 launched in June, 2010 and focuses on social media strategy/social media audits, mobile strategy including iPhone applications, statistical analysis, training and tourism marketing plan development.

What are some current and upcoming trends in the travel industry as it relates to technology?

The two trends we’re in right now that are still progressing are mobile and location based services (LBS). They certainly go hand in hand, but mobile feels a lot like it did in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when everyone realized the web wasn’t going away so they started to shift more budget and create functional websites. I see this a lot within the mobile space. It’s following a very similar pattern where people are saying “I think this mobile thing is going to stick around, I think the iPhone is going to be a solid platform to build on” and they’re shifting some dollars over to address that need. The challenge is that you don’t want to fall into the same trap we all did when we built our first websites – looking for the cheaper option, just doing the basics and not thinking long term. I think a lot of us built a website in 10 years ago and have had to rebuild the site every couple of years, and I think we’re now getting to the point where people are thinking more long term and more strategically about what the site is and what it needs to be. I’m hopeful that we’ll start to take that same approach with mobile – thinking long term rather than short term. While I think there will be a lot of transition within the mobile space in the next decade or so, building a good base at the beginning will help set you up for success in the long run.

As far as location-based services go, Foursquare seems to be the media darling of LBS.

If 2009 was Twitter’s year, it’s fair to say that 2010 is shaping up to be the year of Foursquare. I think with the recent launch of Facebook Places, LBS’s will just become more important, particularly for the travel industry.

The fact that you’ll be able to have geographic information about your visitor while they’re in your area becomes very powerful. Right now, while the tools aren’t there to completely take advantage of that, those tools will surely come about soon. Taking advantage of a one-on-one communication with someone visiting your local Art Museum will be just as easy as setting up an email campaign or a Google Adwords campaign.

The final trend I’m seeing is tracking. It’s been the big demand of everyone, not just within the travel industry, but everyone who’s been involved in the mobile or social media field. How do we track all of these these things and connect the dots between websites, SEO, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and how do we get the accurate tracking to be able to quantify the ROI that we’re putting into these new spaces. I feel like that’s coming along. It depends on how much information the consumer wants to give out about themselves, but I think that’s an area where we’ll see some more big strides over the next two or three years.

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