Diarmaid Mac Mathuna

Head of Client Services

+353 1 7088154

OCTOBER 26, 2012

Between the inspiring talks and catching up with clients and friends, I really enjoyed being at the Dublin Web Summit last week. There was a lot of talk about digital marketing at it, and here are the top three tips I took away from the event:

1. Forget about search engines and focus on people
   Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Co-founder of inbound marketing company HubSpot, gave a great talk full of easy to implement tips. His biggest message? Forget trying to please search engines with over-technical SEO trickery and instead, concentrate on making people happy with interesting content, and “solve for humans.” The search engine companies are trying to figure out what people are interested in, so they’ll catch up with you pretty quickly if people are interested in what you do.
2. Go mobile and go live
   Ok, so we all know that mobile is important. Even Facebook knows that now. But Hubert Grealish, Global Head of Brand Communications at Diageo, emphasised the scale of the opportunity by pointed out that only “1% of marketing budgets” are currently being spent on mobile. There’s only one way that will go, he says, and live experiences are a great way of capturing attention. And because people “want to think in pictures” he says brands should be looking at Pinterest more too.
3. Live streaming in HD is where it’s at
   Speaking of live experiences, you’d expect Mark Kornfilt, Co-founder and GM Europe of Livestream, to be positive about the opportunities around live streaming / webcasting video. He didn’t disappoint and focussed in on how Livestream offer both a hardware and software solution that helps guarantee great viewer experiences on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. We’ve been working with our friends in Livestream for years to do HD live streaming for our clients in Ireland, Europe and the US, and Mark highlighted the opportunities around this on the digital marketing stage. He had some interesting things to say about how content creators could put their own ads on their live video channels too.

Were you at the Web Summit? Did you follow it online? Are there other digital marketing tips you picked up from it? E-mail me to let me know, send me a tweet at @agtel_ diarmaid or share them in the comments!