Live from Paris

Just attended Cisco's Partner Velocity in Paris, France and heard from industry marketing leaders on branding, metrics, and social media. What a great time for my first blog post! Here's a few key takeaways I learned...

- Know your personal brand. What do people think of you? How does it compare to what you think they think of you? (W. Arruda)
- Make your brand 'smashable' like the Coke bottle. If you remove the logo, will people still know it's yours? (M. Lindstrom)
- People are tribal and organize themselves around stories... so what's your story? (J. Evan-Jones)
- Organize your marketing plan based on expected outcomes, not on tactics. How will you find, keep, and grow your customer base? (L. Patterson)
- Explore the 15 ways that you can engage customers in a WebEx virtual event session. (L. Randall)
- A buyer with a NEED spends time. A buyer with a PROBLEM spends money. Which do you have? (H. McFarlane)
- People are evaluating and comparing products based on Ratings & Reviews of complete strangers more than ever. Do you have this feature available for your products? (W. McInnes)
- To be creative you need knowledge (both learned and experienced), a problem, divergent thinking, and collaboration. (M. Lewis)

OK, off to catch my plane back to the United States. Hope you enjoyed my first post.