INBOUND 18 - DAILY ROUND UP 3

Inbound18 - Day Three Roundup from Huble Digital on Vimeo.

It's another day and another round-up of the INBOUND 18 conference direct from Boston via Huble Digital.

The weather has taken a stormy turn but that hasn't cut the electricity at the conference and the buzz is as palpable as ever – the never-ending vats of coffee are contributing to this as well no doubt.

If you've ever watched the hit TV shows Scandal or Grey's Anatomy, you'll understand how excited we were this morning for a keynote address from their creator, Shonda Rhimes.

Hearing about Shonda’s writing processes, as well as her attitude to work/life balancing and motivating a team, was a great experience for all of us and something we all walked away from inspired.

After that talk, we've all been making the most of the breakout and educational sessions on offer, and today has provided some cracking anecdotes, new phrases and some genuinely interesting ideas.

It turns out that everyone is either an owl, a dove, a parrot or an eagle depending on their personality types and you should never start to engage with a customer or prospect without knowing which one they are.

We've spent the best part of an hour trying to work out which birds we are, and we can't help thinking we need a new category as many of us to seem to come closer to Dodos than any of the above.

Just to confuse matters, marketers are now expected to be like Swiss Army Knives, capable of doing content creation and design, outreach, analysis and optimisation (which we're pretty good at here at Huble Digital). Thankfully, there was no mention or expectation of us to come complete with pull-out magnifiers or corkscrews.

A talk on "being a champion in sports, life and business" provided a pretty good insight into the shortfalls of business people when it comes to performance, and quelled the myth that sports and business are anything alike.

Turns out sportspeople are better suited to success because they take the time to look after themselves and improve their performance to achieve results and earn money, while businesses spend too much time just focusing on the cash dollars (the US lingo is rubbing off on us).

On the content side, we learned that the average length of content which audiences want is about 2450 words (if this is you, apologies, this blog is not that long) which is music to the ears of our content guys who will get some more white space to play with.

It was a great day for players of buzzword bingo with some gems emerging to haunt us from the vocabulary abyss, including "Energy Vampires" aka long meetings; “aggregate virality” (no, we don't know either); and "toneology" (we groaned too).