It is always great to have a client mention us as ‘best in class’!

The annual Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA) Summit has established a blog carnival, and one of the subjects they are asking people to react to is “Where Does Content Start Or Marketing Begin…And Vice Versa?”

At CreativeFeed we believe that successful digital marketing — like all marketing — must focus on connecting with consumers. It’s easy to create a buzz by just making a lot of noise with some oddball content, but buzz always dies down fast. Creating an ongoing, mutually beneficial conversation between consumers and a brand is more of a challenge but infinitely more valuable.

Effective marketing today is all about conversation, and listening to this conversation is where marketing efforts/content creation should start. Companies should obviously pay attention to the blogs belonging to well-known influencers and the consumer review forums that pertain to the particular brand’s industry,plus check the chatter on Twitter and Technorati and subscribe to feeds from the meme aggregators like Reddit and Mixx as well as blog aggregator feeds focused on the brand’s target consumer groups. Listening to this conversation results in the kind of market knowledge that big firms pay dearly to obtain — a constantly evolving and highly accurate insight into why and how people are responding to the brand and its services.

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We’ll be there.

WWD Branding Leadership Forum:

Mastering the Multi-Channel World
September 18, 2008
Condé Nast Theater, New York

Digital Marketing and Brand Development for Multi-Channel Innovators

The Bridge between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley:
Building brands and driving sales in a mutli-channel world.

Erick Schonfeld and Mark Pincus of TechCrunch asked leading venture capitalists 20 questions, most of which were submitted by readers. The venture capitalists who were quizzed: Sumant Mandal (Clearstone Venture Partners), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Raj Kapoor (Mayfield Fund) and Ross Levinsohn (Velocity Interactive Group).

Snipped from TechCrunch’s coverage of the event:

Is innovation dying in Silicon Valley?

Botha says the question isn’t whether it’s dying here, but rather that innovation is no longer limited to Silicon Valley. He also says VCs need to continue to take big risks with crazy ideas in order to win.

Schonfeld: What’s more important, great revenue model but no user traction, or great user traction but no revenue?

Zachary - great user traction is really important.

Roelof noted that PayPal had terrible cost issues and little revenue, but founders focused on creating a highly efficient architecture.

Pincus asks how important an obvious monetization strategy is in the early stages. Botha says they’re willing to take the risk.

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Arthur Ceria (Creative Feed) & Bob Plashcke (Sonim Technologies)