Hey Michael!
One of my favorite weeks of the year is coming to a close.
Returning from Social Media Marketing World 2018 I realize I am now a veteran of this event, having made it a tradition for the past 5 years.
This year the dates abutted another large online marketing conference, Traffic and Conversion, so I was able to “double dip” attending both in a single trip.
Traffic and Conversion is a far more tactical conference, focused on tools and techniques that generate traffic to your content, and convert that traffic into a tangible result.
Social Media Marketing World focuses more on community building, content generation and online conversations and relationships.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the demographics of the attendees was profoundly divergent between the 2 conferences, with T&C seeming to be about 90% male, whereas SMMW was at least 60% women.
While the differences between the 2 conferences was readily evident, so were the similarities.
Overwhelming the themes that were most relevant in both conferences were Bots and Video.
Bots, specifically chat bots in Facebook Messenger are about to explode into your consciousness.
Over the next year you will increasingly be experiencing interaction with chat based software designed to answer your questions, sell to you, influence you, or learn more about you.
I am pretty sure you will not always appreciate the experience, scratch that, I a POSITIVE you will land somewhere on the disapprove spectrum for Bots,
I want to add a “but here is the positive spin” paragraph here, something along the line of how positive a tool Bots will be for customer service etc, and there is that benefit, to be sure. But, that will not be your perception this time next year
Bots will make some people a lot of money, cost other people a lot of money, and piss the rest of us off…end of story.
Now video is an entirely different story.
