On Thursday night 10.22.09, Girls in Tech Portland (GIT PDX) hosted an event for inspirational speaker, Katherine Durham, Vice President of Marketing, Imaging & Printing Group, Americas, Hewlett-Packard. The event started off with social networking among women with backgrounds in technology who reside in Oregon. We had a great mix that included engineers, developers, social media specialists, marketing and PR professionals, entrepreneurs and others. The evening ended with a great presentation and Q&A during which Katherine shared her passion for the HP business and connecting with end users.
Katherine started off by sharing her background and then quickly dived in to how to shift the digital marketing and technology mindset to harness the power of an integrated approach. With constantly emerging digital trends and a new media-mix landscape, how does HP harness these trends and measure success?
Effective marketing has remained the same for years: connect the right customers with the right message at the right time and in the right place. What’s changed is that consumers are spending more and more time connecting through social networking, video and mobile.
In fact, consumers are now devoting more time online than to any other media, averaging a total of 14 hours/week or more. This amounts to more than 40% of their free time. In the last year, microblogging and social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogger, Baidu and more have exploded in popularity. Video and mobile technology trends all continue to point up. There is huge opportunity if you look at total media consumption vis-a-vis the total U.S. advertising spend.
HP concentrates on maximizing the cross-channel shopping opportunities online, in-store and via advertising. This creates a synergy that delivers results.
Take “Pioneer Woman,” one case study in success. The campaign features Pioneer Woman, a blogger with a growing following. HP reached out to her niche audience by having Pioneer Woman show how she incorporates HP solutions into her life. By leveraging this already-existing social community, they were able to bring more credibility to the message, in that the audience is not being told what to do, but is having information shared with them.
One key takeaway from the HP social networking presentation was how important and effective it can be to find ways for your brand or business to share and collaborate in the social media space.
Katherine closed with a few takeaways:
- Digital AND social media are the future…how do they work with and impact other assets?
- Use the data AND trust your gut if you have a good compass (or get someone who does)
- Leave enough room for innovation AND experimentation
- Traditional AND emerging measurement are both important
Thanks to 24Notion for the event sponsored. As well as for everyone who attended the lecture. For more info about Girls in Tech Portland, check out our Facebook group
