Digital Perspective Blog

I’m in San Francisco today for the Future of Influence Summit, an event that explores the concept of influence as the center of the media and marketing world. The summit is off to a good start with Ross Dawson defining his definition of influence and talking about measurement, reputation, democratization and trust. Tara Hunt delivered a keynote on her thinking on companies putting people before profits. She used Zappos as an example and I’d add Southwest Airlines to the mix as they have been transparent in their approach to conversational marketing and customer service.

All of this has me thinking about the same thing we’ve been talking to clients about for several years now – the need to move from control to influence. When you let go of trying to totally control your marketing message you have the opportunity to be more influential than ever before. I’ll be talking about that shortly as part of the Influence at the Center of Marketing and Advertising panel discussion.