hedgehoglab

Lately I have been focusing on the marketing and sales strategy for the lab, especially with the impending release of fixx, our bug tracking product for software teams. When I joined the lab I mentioned in my first post, that I was spear-heading the social computing and networking efforts and recently, this has expanded to a more marketing and sales focused role. As you're all aware we already have profiles on facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc, but we get to communicate with our followers, we don't get to interact with them.

This is why I attended the FUEL conference held by Carsonified in London last Friday, to listen to key speakers talk about how businesses interact with their audience using the latest web tools.

There were some great presentations and I must admit that at the start of the day I was wary that my ridiculously early alarm clock call and 3 hour train journey would leave me somewhat exhausted and not very attentive. However, to my surprise, I had no reason to be concerned because I was fully engaged with each presentation throughout the day.

The key message of the conference was to discuss the different ways which you can interact with your audience and I think that they demonstrated this very well by keeping all of the conference audience engaged throughout the day.

Some of the highlighted speakers of FUEL included:

• Carsonified's co-founder Ryan Carson discussed how you can interact with customers
• Tara Hunt explained whuffie and how it works to build a community around your brand
• Virgin's Alex Hunter discussed how customers played a big role in Virgin America...
• Ted Hunt from Innocent discussing branding and interacting with customers
• and dont hassle the hoff with soocial (Stefan Fountain and Daniel Spronk)

This does not include other great presentations by Keir Whitaker (Carsonified), Nic Halstead (Fav.or.it), Stewart Townsend (Sun), Clive Howard (Howard/Baines), Andrew Scott (Rummble), Paul Boag (Headscape), who discussed some interesting concepts on working with clients, Steve Pearce (Poke), who had a very cool presentation with excellent drawings about how to get the best out of your business as well as a very informative presentation about branding from Richard Moross (Moo).

The overall message which I received from the conference, is that it is essential for any business to interact with their audience using the best tools which the web can offer. Some of the tools which were demonstrated were Seesmic (an online video questions and answers site, useful for interaction between a business and its customers), UserVoice (collecting user votes, ratings on products, etc) and there are many others.

All of these tools were discussed because they can play such a key part in the success of a business' future. Many of the presentations showed how being proactive, creative and interacting with their customers or followers has proved to be very successful for their business. This is something we will be considering in great detail at the lab so watch this space...

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