What better way to celebrate the digital Millennium—the technological and Internet boom between 2000 and today—than to attend the biggest annual marketing and technology conference in the Midwest. Here’s a little glimpse into what the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) is toasting:

Celebrate 2000 where computer users feared their personal computer would blow up as midnight on New Year’s struck, the Microsoft™ Windows 2000 released, and the dot com era booms.

Celebrate 2001 where AOL and Napster reigned king, Linux source code first appeared; and where mobile computing gear, USBs, MacAfee computer security software, and the first Apple iPod™ surfaced.

Celebrate 2002 where e-commerce spiked for the first time and Apple introduced Mac OS X 10.2.

Celebrate 2003 where internet privacy becomes a hot topic in courtrooms and newsrooms; and where Mozilla, MySpace, Microsoft™ Windows and Spybots come to life.

Celebrate 2004 where Google gives birth to the now most popular email system in the world, Gmail.

Celebrate 2005 where YouTube™ came into the world, beginning what is now the fastest growing online marketing tool in the world; and where Skype and other videoconferencing systems are incepted for personal and professional communication.

Celebrate 2006 where GIF images become free to the public, Intel introduces the duo processors, and blu-ray and HD change the way we view television.

Celebrate 2007 where the iPhone and Droid start dueling and Smartphones get more pocket play than wallets.

Celebrate 2008 where Apple introduces iMac; and where corporations start to invest in social media marketing to reach the gaggle of consumers.

Celebrate 2009 where Microsoft releases Windows 7, where the economy is gloomy but interactive marketing shines.

Celebrate 2010 where content marketing and mobile marketing reigns king, more that 750 million in 2011 worldwide enjoy Facebook.

Celebrate 2011 by attending the 10th annual MIMA Summit

Here’s when we are doing it:
Join keynote speaker and web analytic evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, over 750 information-hungry attendees, and 40+ riveting speakers and Internet pros on October 11-12, 2011 at the Minneapolis Hilton.

More information and online registration here: MIMA Summit

Here’s the value:
Pricing starts at $45. MIMA members can enjoy savings around $100 with the full-conference, early registration. (Hint, hint: Is this impetus enough to become a MIMA member?)

MIMA Summit

Early-bird registration ends Friday, so either register NOW or tie a string around your finger to help you remember to sign up before the clock strikes midnight on the 1st.

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A special thanks to Allie Gray Freeland a MIMA volunteer, for hosting this post. Allie serves as the Interactive Communication Specialist at Rasmussen College. She is a five-year veteran of online marketing world and received her degree in Journalism from the University of Minnesota. Check out her credentials

Ten years ago, way back before government officials were tweeting their private parts or anyone could plus one their Google, an intrepid group of Minnesotans inaugurated the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s annual Summit. This was a very complex, new conference from a three-year old association with less than 500 members. This was a dare, a risk, a mammoth outpouring of volunteering love. And it took place right before the first dot-com explosion.

In other words—a brilliant beginning. Because ten years later, the MIMA Summit is the largest annual marketing and technology conference in the Midwest, hosted by the oldest interactive marketing association in the country. A testament, if you will, to the pioneering intent of MIMA’s founders, early sponsors and supporters, and most important—the amazing marketing and interactive talent living and working in Minnesota.

We Made Something Incredible

We – the community of developers, technicians, producers, writers, designers, UXers, content strategists, project managers, film directors, account managers, brand leaders, media planners, investors, lawyers and even the Master Social Media Guru Pundit experts – have created and nurtured an awesome marketplace. The talent in Minnesota that defines, funds, creates and sustains game-changing business ideas is second to none. And throughout this past decade, the MIMA Summit has come around each year to remind us of the strength and vitality of our community.

I’m lucky to be involved in this association at this point in time. I am inspired by our association’s abilities over the past decade to continuously build an annual event now serving over 1,200 people. An event with national appeal, that celebrates the story of Minnesota’s powerful and growing interactive marketing industry.

A Continuing Mission

The tenth annual MIMA Summit, on Tuesday October 11 and Wednesday October 12, promises to continue MIMA’s overarching mission—to elevate talent—by providing an incredible roster of useful insights, focused passion and spirited dialogue. You’ll walk in with an incredible array of over 50 speakers, panels and session to learn from, including keynotes by Wired’s Chris Anderson and Google’s Avinash Kaushik.

You’ll walk out inspired—and not just by the talent elevating your talent. Ticket prices for the 2011 MIMA Summit are still being sold at 2009 prices, easily the best value for any conference of this size and scope. I hope you will spread the word and plan to join us as we celebrate the digital decade: what happened, what’s next and why it matters.

— Tim Brunelle

“Once upon a time, advertising was an exchange of content for time spent and exposure to advertiser messages.”  This is no longer the case.  Today, consumers create content and advertisers can too.  Advertising agencies are now switching to a more marketing-focused model that depends upon viral content.

Lieb provided an excellent example of an advertiser creating content.  The Great Schlep is an advetisement for Barack Obama presented as an extremely entertaining and viral video.  The creator of this content knows how to reach her target audience; she presents her content in her audience’s voice.  This example fits all three of the content criteria that Lieb focused on during her presentation:

• Educates and informs audience
• Amuses, engages, entertains
• Creates a story that consumers can spread (viral marketing)

Another example of content being used for advertising purposes is Pet Charts, a consumer-focused website that aggregates pet-focused content from other sources and invites consumers to vote for their favorite content (stories, photos, videos, etc).  The beauty about content driven sites, such as this one, is that they also support organic search engine ranking.  Search engines look favorably upon websites that constantly add fresh relevant content and raise rankings accordingly.  

Lieb dubs this approach (advertising with little-to-no significant media buying) as the ”Jerry Seinfeld” school of advertising.  The recent Seinfeld and Gates commercials are successful in humanizing products to create viral momentum.  Consumers are so engaged by these commercials that they voluntarily go online to subscribe to subsequent commercials.  Note that the mention of the product in these ads is minimal.  Instead, the ads focus on entertaining and engaging the audience rather than hitting them over the head with product mentions.

Brands are now dedicating their budget not to media buying, but to creative and spokespeople.  Advertising is no longer about buying media placements that overtly promote products, but about finding a way to engage consumers via compelling content that gets consumers talking and only subtedly promotes a product.  As Lieb concludes, advertisers are becoming “storytellers”.  If you want to sell a product, you need a story.  What’s your story?

So…are you curious about what’s happening with interactive marketing in other parts of the country? Check out these IMA websites. Sign up for their email newsletters or just see what they’re up to. And if you’re traveling to these cities, why not attend one of their events? We’re reaching out to these organizations to make MIMA even better, but we encourage you to network with them, too. Other IMAs can be great resources for job searches, recruiting, making connections and building your business.

Atlanta
Boston
Chicago
Dallas-Fort Worth
Houston
NY
Philadelphia
Portland
North Carolina
San Francisco

These IMAs weren’t able to join us in Atlanta, but they are going strong in their regions:
Milwaukee
South Florida

If you’re aware of others, let us know. Email Jason Kleckner, our National Partnerships Chair.

As a side note, did you know that MIMA is the only interactive marketing association in the country to hold a full-day interactive marketing conference? If you haven’t registered for the MIMA Summit yet, don’t miss it. It’s your chance to hear amazing speakers, find out what’s hot in interactive marketing and network with over 400 MIMA friends! Sign up today.

Anyway, Adaptive Path is Jesse James Garret’s firm in San Francisco, and you may remember JJG as one of the earliest advocates for “user experience” or UX, he wrote a book about it back in 2002. The M in MX is for “managing for the user experience” and the conference was aimed at a multidisciplinary audience of both agency and client individuals who are charged with creating/managing/improving user experience within their work, projects and teams. The bulk of the presenters seemed to be very product design focused, which was ok as there is decent overlap, but I personally would have liked to see more focus on both interactive and service oriented user experience strategies. Adaptive Path blogged the event and has some killer summaries. They are also going to be posting podcasts of each presenters piece. Check out the blog here, but I am going to inspire you first with some of my highlights from the conference:

Jesse James Garret

Jesse opened the conference with a really nice talk on what the whole experience thing is really about. He used the story of Kodak and the first consumer tech product (you click the button, we do the rest…) as a case study and dropped thought bombs on us like these:

- Biggest compliment that can be paid to what we create? I can’t live without it.

- Too many people are approaching problems through technology, others start with features. To be really successful, we need to solve problems by beginning with experience.

- The experience IS the product and business value + opportunity = experience strategy

Lou Carbone (our own local marketing strategy guru)

- CRM does not = relationship, it’s just data so get over it.

- Our goal, our objective should be to create value for our customers. Profit is only the reward for doing this well.

Caterina Fake (Flickr co-creator) interviewed by Peter Merholz

This was a pretty cool interview. Basically, Flickr was an accident. She and her team had been jamming on some online game called Game Neverending. They realized it was not going to scale the way they needed to, and in an act of desperation began re-purposing code and created Flickr. They were broke. They had no plan. They did no research. They had no idea, really, what they were going to end up with. None of them were even photographers, per se, but they were adept at creating social software and knew they were on to something with the idea of photo sharing. They benefited from an intense feedback loop, constant improvement and testing with real live people. Now, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, they’re all rich and have been on the cover of Newsweek. Dreams do come true for all you mom’s basement-working code geeks.

Overall, the conference was great. Really interesting mix to the audience, great conversation and networking, and the weather was nice. I had a killer dinner at Range in the Mission, too.