Earlier this week, I was part of The Art of Marketing conference in Toronto. It was an extravaganza of big ideas and zesty commentary, with 1,600 participants and six speakers in a single day, including:
Seth Godin on Leadership and Creativity
Dan Heath on Strategy and Communication
Sally Hogshead on Persuasion and Influence
Mitch Joel on Digital Marketing and Social Media
Max Lenderman on Branding and Experiential Marketing
James Othmer on Advertising and Branding
(A quick jaunt down Memory Lane… Seth Godin carries a particularly fond place in my heart. I’d interviewed Seth for two episodes of my podcast, The Naked Career. Seth also generously wrote a review of Fascinate, which proudly resides on the back cover. As for Dan Heath, I met Dan years ago at a business author conference; entirely charmed by his intellect and wit, I’d also interviewed Dan for two different posts. When I sold Fascinate to a publisher in 2008, I chose HarperCollins because the editor, Ben Loehnen, had also edited Dan’s book, Made to Stick. Suffice to say, it was fun to see them both again.)
Anyway. The Biz Media folks stirred the social media pot, using Twitter to crowdsource questions. Participants tweeted questions to each speaker, the speaker picked the top 3 questions, and winners received a signed book and video response. The questions were impressively insightful and sophisticated, showing that the audience was really “getting” the concepts behind each presentation. Here are the three questions I picked to answer:
1. How do you spark the alarm trigger without endangering quality or care?
2. How do you fascinate people when your product is utterly boring, and you’re unable to change the offering?
3. You mentioned the 7 triggers, and they fact that they’re irrational. Can you expand on that? Why is that, and why is it important? (or is it)
Great questions, no? Here are my video responses:
The Art of Marketing’s live hashtag at #taom remains vibrantly active; for a for a few hours during the event, the conference was the top trending Twitter topic in Canada. (Yes, this was a remarkably savvy crowd of participants… my thanks to everyone who tweeted questions and brought this conference to new levels of interactive zestiness).
I loved hearing questions from the group, and chatting about how to fascinate. Do you have a question about the seven triggers, how brands apply the triggers, or some other glittering spark of inquiry? Share your question here. You just might see your curiosity rewarded in an upcoming blog post!
