The closing session of the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer featured a team of four "mixologists" who gathered and shared their top takeaways from the event. The mixologists were Jason Baer (@jaybaer), Stephanie Miller (@StephanieSAM), Michael Brito (@Britopian) and Beth Harte (@BethHarte).

Stephanie handled the Must Know track:

• Build credibility before you start selling via social media.
• Allow open (but governed) access for employees to Twitter and blogging.
• Broadcast emails are not effective. Create relevancy and be helpful - even once a month.
• Use your Facebook fan page to promote key content of your email newsletter.
• Join the right conversations at the right time.
• Think about your front page as a collection of pages, not one home page.
• Improve search spending ROI by using down-funnel data. Use a human filter to get rid of the keywords that don't perform.
• Invest in social media. It's not free.

Jason Baer handled the Integrating Marketing Programs track:

• Companies are telling people that they have to blog because of their position, but you should find the people who really love it.
• Don't be afraid to test things that defy convential wisdom, because you might be surprised by the results.
• Clean up your landing pages.
• Keep your troops informed.
• Insert retweet buttons into PDF documents.
• Remove gates in front of content. People are getting used to free content and are less likely to register unless you have really great content that no one else has.
• Use your brand community as a free market research program. ("I actually crowdsourced this beard.")
• Engage in online communities as a person first, as a marketer second.
• Use Google keyword tool to determine how your customers describe you, your products or your category.
• Optimize all your content for search.

Michael Brito covered the Engaging with Customers track:

• Build relationships with firestarters (influencers).
• Build community first, monetize later.
• Offer value on Twitter, don't self-promote.
• Have passion and jump on every possible situation you can on the social web.
• Through the social web, building relationships with customers creates a memorable brand experience.
• When you launch a blog or Twitter account, set goals, measure, iterate.
• Social media guidelines should be short and succinct.
• Be organized internally to effectively manage social media externally.

Beth Harte covered the Peer-to-Peer track:

• If you're blogging, no one really cares about your products. Tell them how your product fits into their life.
• Humanize your blog.
• Get your legal counsel talking to other companies who have succesfully implemented social media.
• Have conversations with senior management to find out their appetite for social media.
• Provide your community something that is personally beneficial to them.
• Let your members decide how they want to use 'their' community.
• When doing video, be mindful of people's time, attention and surroundings.
• Use trackable links to help track back to metrics.

Beth: You need a plan. Benchmark where you are and create measurable objectives. Your objectives will drive your strategies, your strategies will drive your tactics. When someone questions why you're doing this, you can say, "It's in the plan."

Best quotes:

"Content doesn't win. Optimized content wins."

"People don't expect your company to be perfect. They expect you to provide solutions."

"Don't train. Simplify."

"Measurement is like laundry. It piles up the longer you wait to do it."

"Your customers are listening in social media, and so are search engines."

"Many crummy trials beats the big thinking."

"The art of Twitter is in the retweet - you must be interesting."

"Tactics without a strategy is like doing nothing."