How Active Rain has helped me keep up with Starbucks, Wal-Mart & Coke

This evening, I had the opportunity to visit with someone that just came back from the National Retail Federation’s convention that was held in New York City from January 13-16^th.   The conventions name is Retail’s BIG Show 2013.    Keynote speakers included the Secretary General of the United Nations, the CEO’s and/or Co-CEO’s of companies such as Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Toshiba, Whole Foods Market, Macys;Coco Cola’s SVP of Marketing and their Chief Retail Sales Officer plus MANY others from large companies.   In 2012, over 25,000 retail professionals from 78 countries attended.  Over 40% of the attendees in 2012 where C-level or senior executives.  (See 2012 Attendee Demographics)  Amazon was a company that was recognized with an award. 

The point I am trying to make is this was a major event in the retail world.   

One of the keynote sessions was “Socialnomics – Transforming the Way Retailers Do Business in the New Social, Mobile and Digital World.”  IBM opened the session with a discussion of its current research on the “Chief Executive Customer.” 

The person I was speaking to was a marketing professor who wasn’t previously all that interested in social media.  She left the conference amazed at the changes that have taken place in the retail industry in the last three years.  She was most impressed about how retailers have been using social media and huge data bases to understand and market to consumers in ways that used to be nearly impossible.

From the sounds of it; Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and Pinterest are not fads that are going to fade away anytime soon.  Technology and social media have transformed the way major retailors are doing marketing, marketing research and business.  LinkedIn was also mentioned. 

Looking at the event’s website – it is apparent that the National Retail Federation values blogging and the importance of videos and photos.  Their blog was a Wordpress blog.  They also used Flickr and YouTube)  My favorite Retails BIG Show Blog was “To Tweet or Not to Tweet…..”      

So…..why as a real estate broker, have I found the National Retail Federation’s BIG SHOW 2013 so fascinating?  How does it apply to us? 

1.     I have learned a lot on Active Rain at a nominal cost.  Active Rain has kept me abreast of current trends and happenings in the real estate world and marketing worlds.  I have learned and have been learning from my time on Active Rain about different aspects of social media.  I learned about Twitter, Pinterest, Google +, and Wordpress on Active Rain. 

I haven’t made time to implement everything that I have read – but at least Active Rain gave me some awareness.   This is significant because even in my wildest dreams, my marketing and research budget will never come close to the budgets of the Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, or Starbucks.   The information that I was able to gleam from this conference confirmed how beneficial Active Rain has been to me.

2.     The information from the conference made me realize that I’d better get on board with these different channels/approaches to multimedia marketing or my marketing efforts could be found in the dust along with the old MLS books, newspaper ads and telephone books. 

3.     I am incredibly thankful that homes and ranches will never be mass produced like beverages, clothing or computers. 

4.     At the end of the day, marketing is marketing.  It doesn’t matter if we are selling cat litter, cars or luxury ranches; we need to enable the consumer to find our “product.” 

Thank you Active Rain!  Thank you to all the Active Rain members that take the time to write blogs and post comments that educate, inspire and motivate all of us.   

Sincerely,

Sondra Meyer, CPA

Colorado Horse Property Specialist

Colorado.   See It.  Experience It.  Live It.