I can’t speak about Sunday, because I was spending time with my husband; and I can’t speak about Tuesday, because I was in the office furiously working on our redesigned webpages (hopeful that we will be able to unveil soon). Monday was my time at DMA and I had the opportunity to attend a few sessions and time to walk the floor with my partner-in-crime (a.k.a. marketing), Brittany.

I am hoping to get slides from the sessions soon. I took notes - sometimes more, sometimes fewer - but I know there are things that I missed that the slides will help me recall. On some level, I miss the handouts that used to be provided in sessions at tradeshows; they made taking notes so much easier and more intuitive. On the other hand, I appreciate the reduction in waste achieved by not printing out reams of paper that people may or may not be interested in.

I wonder just how difficult or expensive it would be to have rapid-print kiosks scattered about, letting us print  the handouts for a session as we arrive. Given the attendance at some sessions, I think printing time would be the more limiting factor.

But I digress…

Looking over my notes, I find a recurring theme: being customer- (or prospect-) focused while avoiding "creepiness" in order to build an effective relationship and learn how to fulfill their needs. Huh. Sounds a lot like what we’ve been reading about and talking about for quite some time.

At 11, I attended the session Seek, Ask & Serve: How to use E-mail, Surveys & Search to Succeed. It rocked. I came away with some critical considerations for our company website and, as a bonus, some ideas about how our customers may want to use our own product. The main idea here was how to elicit information via email and surveys while remaining conversational. Two gems from this session:

• Surveys are better received as an ongoing dialog, allowing you to build on previous information. While every survey should have 5-7 "baseline" questions that are consistent from survey to survey, and 5-12 targeted questions on the survey topic, they need not be asked all in one lump. "Diffusing" your survey so that you only ask 3-4 questions per interaction will keep it more conversational. (And I’m already thinking of ways that our product can do this. It would be SOOOOO easy!)
• Coupon codes do not have to be crypic. Is there any particular reason that a person redeeming a code over the phone needs to relate "CMB325. That’s C as in ‘cat’ and M as in ‘mary’ and B as in ‘boy’ 325"? Or do we really need to agonize over whether the letter should be capitals or lower-case when we type a code into a web page? Make it natural; make it conversational. "Todd sent me" has become an extraordinarily successful coupon-inspired campaign because it’s EASY.

We had a long break between the end of this session and the start of the next, so, after lunch, Britt and I walked the expo halls looking for booth ideas to steal. Although we saw nothing that said "walk home with me," we got a few ideas for enhancing what we already have.

The 3 o’clock session I attended was Creative with a Salesman’s Edge: Making your Creative Do Its Job More Powerfully. A lot of this was somewhat "basic" information but it served as a good brush-up and reminder.

• Know the strengths and weaknesses of your various channels and use the appropriate one for the particular message/response you need from each campaign.
• Make your offer easy to find and easy to respond to and ASK for the response you want. Don’t make your audience guess.
• If your audience doesn’t believe even one thing that your message says, they will reject the whole thing and that particular opportunity will have been wasted. Be credible.

The final session was all about YOU… really. That was even the title: This Session is All About YOU. This is the session that has most impacted me so far. The speaker, Alan Rosenspan, handed out a great little book that already has a place of pride on my desk called 101 ways to improve your response [sic]. Okay, sure, it’s a promotional piece with his website and shameless self-promotion just inside the front and back covers but, hey, it’s got stuff I can use and he was funny. (And let that be a lesson to you; tangible and useful information gets kept - even by people like me.)

But about the title…

The theme of this talk was that my audience doesn’t want to hear about me or my company; they want to hear about themselves. By using the word "you" in all of our communications, we are forced to take the spotlight off of ourselves and seriously think and speak about our audiences’ needs and desires. It sounds like a simple thing but, as with many simple things, the ramifications can be profound.

I took a look today at one of the web pages we are redesigning. The text was good, but it wasn’t great. I suddenly realized that the pronouns on the page were all "we" and "our" instead of "you." I also borrowed an idea from the first session - put the big idea in the first third of anything you say - and with these two changes I am suddenly much happier with the whole page. Bold a few words and the readability improved, too.

The amusing end to this presentation (and my day) was that the speaker asked us to estimate the number of times he used "you" or "your" on his slides for the one-hour presentation. I tried to guess high with 375 but I am betting I’m still a bit low. Wonder if I’ll ever find out how close I got…