Keynote: Sean Moffitt, Agent Wildfire Inc.
Let’s Get Wiki – Building Your Brand in a Customer Controlled Marketplace
It comes as no surprise that word-of-mouth marketer, Sean Moffitt’s keynote address was absolutely jam packed with stats on social media usage, brand integration and spending, clearly showing that a fundamental shift in marketing is underway.
For instance, he notes that although 70% of companies are currently spending less than 2.5% of their budgets on social marketing, 81% of respondents projected that by 2012 they will spend at least as much on conversational marketing as traditional marketing.
Where consumers are spending as much as 20% of their time online, advertisers are only dedicating 8% of their budget on that channel and accordingly Moffitt advises spending 20% of your advertising budget on conversational marketing.
For traditional marketers this may represent a hard sell internally, but Moffitt is quick to point out that brands that have engaged their customers enough to build evangelism have grown by over 15% this year alone.