UnMarketing President Scott Stratten at SXSW 2011: Stop Marketing, Start Engaging by, Vanessa Zamora on May 17, 2011

---

During the recent South by Southwest conference in Austin Texas, PubCon video content producer Vanessa Zamora caught up with UnMarketing president Scott Stratten. Stratten, who is well known for his social media engagement practices, said one of the biggest problems at tech and marketing conferences is that everyone is trying to determine the next new trends, and advised companies to instead focus on such fundamentals as customer service, engagement, and a solid product before looking ahead.

Paying attention to what your audience wants is best, Stratten said, instead of pushing possibly unwanted technology onto them. It is one thing to be viewed as a leader in engagement, but it is another to come off as pretentious and push things like QR codes, Foursquare or augmented reality on your audience, Stratten said.



Stratten continued by saying that some of the best and most undervalued tools have been around for a couple of years, like email lists. Stratten, who has 80,000 Twitter followers, said he would take 10,000 confirmed opt-in email subscribers with a fifty percent open rate over 100,000 followers on Twitter any day. It is not how many people follow you, the important part is how people act on the information, Stratten added.

Companies that are doing it right, according to Stratten, are the ones that don’t chase the bright shiny object, and and as an example pointed to Zappos, which focuses on blowing their customers’ minds by going well beyond what many firms would do to please a client. Animoto, a brilliant slide show software, is another company that is doing great things that has been around for years while flying under the radar, concluded Stratten.