What’s Working in Marketing

The 3rd Annual ISA Marketing & Sales Summit was held last week in downtown Cleveland, and what a week it was!  This event is co-chaired by our very own Shari Worthington and editor of Control Magazine, Walt Boyes.  Thanks to everyone who attended and presented, our events continue to increase in quality and caliber each year.   And a special thanks to the ISA M&S Planning Committee, it was all your work over past several months that contributed to the outstanding success at the event.

The event kicked off Wednesday evening with an engaging talk by Julie Fraser from Cambashi.  For those of you who do not know Julie, she’s been in the plant automation industry for years, was a scheduler at one point in her life, one of the original members of MESA, and has written about plant automation in Managing Automation, Manufacturing Business Technology and more.  She recently joined Cambashi after working many years as an independent analyst at Industry Directions.  Julie led a highly interactive conversation about the convergence of IT and Engineering in today’s buying cycles, and the challenges that brings.

Thursday morning started with Jim Cahill, Marketing Communications Manager at Emerson, a.k.a. Emerson’s official “chief blogger” at Emerson Process Experts.  Jim explored Challenges, Perils and Opportunities in Web 2.0 for Automation Marketing, and took the audience through the paces of social media and Web 2.0.  He open the eyes of our attendees to the many communication options & opportunities available for automation marketing in Web 2.0.   Thanks, Jim you did a fantastic job.

On Thursday afternoon, Rick Dolezal, Marketing Development Manager at Rockwell led us through an engaging discussion of “The Future of Automation: 30 Years Hence”. The event closed on Friday with industry visionary, Dick Morely talking about Black Holes, Marketing, and Chocolate – it’s all about the surface.  Dick’s delivery was entertaining and full of surprising facts like why you can’t make chocolate in the summer because a cow eats grass rather than hay and it changes the consistency of the milk. And you were thinking heat may be the problem??  Nope, it’s the grass.  And another fact about the ratio of engineers to marketing folks in a healthy start-up organization, but before I go off and misrepresent the data, I’ll hold off on the rest and confirm my facts later.   Rodney Jones promised that he would post all the presentations from this Summit in the next couple of weeks, we’ll keep you posted on that.

Thanks to Walt for keeping close tabs on what whas happening throughout the event on his blog.  And thanks to Gary Mintchell, Editor at Automation World who posted his experiences on both his blog and on YouTube.   Great job on experimenting with video for your travel updates, I’ll be watching for more!  Both Gary and Walt were also chatting on Twitter, and a couple other Twitter conversations were happening here.
A shout out goes to Donald Lupo at Acrogmag who won Telesian’s Microsoft Zune grand prize in our contest!  Kudos to Don for getting ALL the questions right on the Telesian quiz.

Watch for upcoming announcements on the 2009 ISA Marketing & Sales Summit – we’re aiming for Boston, and its going to be a fun!

We are also in discussions with how to expand our group’s learning and networking throughout the year, and will be introducing new ways to connect with ISA’s Marketing & Sales Summit attendees.  If you have any suggestions, send them my way at julianng@telesian.com.

Shari and I will be sharing more details from our presentations over the upcoming weeks here on this blog and “Whats Working In Marketing” e-news.

Thanks again, Shari and I both enjoyed the Summit and seeing you all there.