The In2 Innovation Summit in 10 Quotes

Last week I attended The Holmes Report In2 Innovation Summit, the first in what The Holmes Report hopes to be a “global series of events bringing our industry’s great thinkers together to discuss and deliberate and (hopefully) disagree on topics related to insight and innovation.”

 Two days’ worth of content ultimately boiled down to this: Regardless of the context in which you work – large or small company, agency or in-house, East or West Coast or somewhere in the middle, retail, manufacturing, financial services or any other industry – the success of your job is closely tied to your ability to truly understand your audience; be creative with the content you develop; deliberate about how, when and where to distribute that content; authentic in the relationships you build with customers and influencers; and smart in how you measure the impact of your campaign or program.

 The Holmes Report has done a great job reporting on the most interesting of panels. I walked away from the summit with the following sound bites firmly lodged in my brain (please note I’m paraphrasing!) .

1. Don’t ‘craft’ a message – tell me what you would tell your spouse when you come home at the end of the day. - Chris Taylor, Mashable
2. Love thy reporter. If you don’t love journalism, and journalists, you’re in the wrong profession. We have a role in enabling great journalism. - Gabriel Stricker, Twitter
3. Focus on social business instead of social media. - Dan Moriarty, Hyatt
4. Be fearless and experiment. - Kim Milosevich, Andreessen Horowitz
5. As communicators we’re typically not that comfortable in a quantitative world. But our strategic value at the table is enhanced by our comfort with numbers.
6. We sometimes try too desperately to find value in a tweet.
7. People should be able to tell the story by the images, even if they can’t read the text. - Brett Wallace, LinkedIn
8. I haven’t met a founder yet who doesn’t understand the power of PR. - Jodi Olson, Google Ventures
9. I don’t want to be in the news business, I don’t want to constantly generate content – I’m not interesting enough. Oreo screwed all of us. We’re getting pressured into doing that. - David Matahia, Hyundai

To which Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, countered…

10     Well, every company is a media company, but that doesn’t mean you have to be CNN.