I spent most of the day at the ‘Digital Summit’ stage so that is what this blog post will be about.

I will aim to keep it as concise as possible. The goal I hope to achieve is for you to investigate further should someone or some company stroke your fancy.

Cillian Kieran

@cilliankieran who is an engineer by trade owns @gofolio & @cksk. For me the main takeaway was how his training and brain influences how he problem solves and gets creative for a client.

Having an engineer involved in each stage of the creative process is very interesting to me. Stay with people that think like you and how will you progress.

‘The world we create the magic dust is limited only by the things we are able to imagine.’

Alan Coleman

Alan Coleman owner of @alancwolfgang gave a great overview of Remarketing with Google Analytics. A simple example he gave was if folks are pausing outside your shop on Grafton Street but walk on, you could still market to them. With the new updates this time if they pause outside your competitor’s window you can do the same. Powerful stuff.

‘The rate of innovation is accelerating.’

Andrzej Moyseowicz

@on_jay whose name looks like ‘my parents fell on a keyboard’ is the Director of Strategy & Innovation @saatchilondon.

Very vibrant presentation. His big thing is that you need purpose. I’ve always believed if your company can’t explain their purpose in one sentence then good luck! Anyhow Andrzej believes knowing your purpose opens up creative clarity which is kinda common sense. His case study of ‘Speak to Tweet’ in Egypt was a great example of participation & also ripe for creative ideas.

‘Go forth & be awesome!’

Joshua March

@joshuamarch CEO of @conversocial basically discussed that if you ignore your customer you lose them. Not rocket science eh? Most good ideas aren’t. He found that businesses weren’t providing that online customer relationship and there are still some that aren’t - shockingly, so he cofounded this nifty idea.

Hannah Gilbert @hanconversocial was on the ball & tweeted me this great link on their site with excellent resources. Biz owners check it out!

Niall Harbison

@niallharbison has a deadly house. I stumbled on it on Airbnb in a non creepy way but I digress. He also founded @simplyzesty and you can tell why it’s a success because he presents directly and with no waffle.

Inkeeping with his style of presentation I will keep this direct: mobile, mobile, mobile… Basically that is where it’s at so get on that train folks.

‘Microsoft is screwed. Mobile will shaft them.’ 

Dharmesh Shan

@dharmesh is a new Daddy - awww! Cue lots of cute photos of his child. He also is the CTO of @hubspot which is about inbound marketing. He is all about useful content, clean designs & fast websites.

Nice little tip is grader.com which is free and will give you feedback on your SEO when you enter your site. He believes in Google+ simply because of the word before the + and start thinking more of Facebook for search too.

‘Great SEO is about making humans happy not search engines.’

Jon Myers

@jondmyers Commercial Director for EMEA Marin Software gave some very thoughtful mobile stats. For example a best practice for getting mobile ready is simply put ‘/iphone’ as not many people are advertising on mobile and you can optimize that space. Time of day & device targeting is another tip.

‘Massive mobile search adoption in Australia.”

Silje Vallestad

@bippermom I have to say was pretty inspirational as my gushing tweets reinforce, apologies if the gush drowned you a little. I just find women in business inspiring especially the premise behind this project.

Basically she has developed apps that help with personal safety like bSafe. Great success story and now she is in Silicon Valley ready to roll it out!

‘If you have a passion or a dream then you can do it!’

Aubrey Sabala

The last woman on the stage for the day was Aubrey Sabala (@aubs) whose CV is rather intimidating in a ‘inspiring lady’ kinda way!

Aubrey spoke about @sailthru ‘a company that provides automated 1:1 email and onsite recommendations using a unique behavioral targeting platform.’ It was a very inciteful look at how to approach the same tools such as e-mail in a smarter way.

‘E-mail is still effective but they are deleting e-mails without reading… yet purchasing just as much 5 years ago.’

Scott Belsky

The key word for Scott Belsky (@scottbelsky) CEO of @behance was meritocracy.

As someone with a fascination with communities I found this approach to the creative business very clever.

‘Fashion designers discovering new designers further meritocracy.’

Mark Kornfilt

The most striking thing to me about at Mark Kornfilt (@markkornfilt) founder of new.livestream.com, presentation was that the average length of time people spend in front of a live stream is 25 minutes which nowadays is phenomenal.

‘It’s a great way to get people’s attention.’

So that’s it folks, hope you gained something from the post. I also hope that I will not slip on wet leaves or gag on chili in my pasta tomorrow.

P.S

Fair play to Hubert Grealish, Global Head of Brand Communications at Diageo @hubertgrealish for directly reaching out to me about my query with regards to the Brew Dog debacle. Says a lot about his personal character, cheers again Hubert!