At Revolution, one of our core agency values is to keep learning, expanding our personal and professional knowledge. To support this, we recently attended SIC (Seattle Interactive Conference), an annual conference that draws entrepreneurs, PR, marketing and digital professionals, and visionary thinkers. This year’s conference had a focus on cutting-edge practices, but many of the sessions also came back to fundamentals of the industry – understanding your audience, having well-written content and crafting thoughtful strategies. We attended both days, selecting sessions that would enable us to broaden our thinking, reposition how we approach our job and provide new insights that make our campaigns sparkle.  A few of our top takeaways from this year’s event follow. Know your audience The “Gadfly: David Meinert on Bad Policy, Stupid Tech and Good Business” session focused heavily on the business industry in Seattle. As the city rapidly evolves, the talk offered valuable insight into the social issues, culture, history and future of Seattle. Working with so many local media outlets and amazing bloggers, this was a great refresher on what matters to Seattleites and how brands can tap into the culture. Listening is an art that leads to good storytelling “The Art of Listening” was an amazing session at SIC – solely focused on storytelling. The speaker went in depth about how, as Americans, we love to talk and that can be our downfall! When we take the time to listen, we can gain so much more insight. Professionally, this was a great reminder to invest more time into listening to our colleagues, clients and audiences. As storytellers for our clients, we need to emphasize listening and challenge ourselves to ask more questions (just so we get a chance to listen more!). Your social media content is a gift for your audience One of the most insightful talks from SIC was titled “Our Brands, Ourselves” and discussed social media content and how, often, we’re overthinking it. As brand managers, our audience is extremely important and this talk brought to light how we sometimes think for our audience or only post when we know it will be of interest to everyone in our following. The speaker urged us to re-think our brand’s social media, stop reducing our social posts to short and boring text, and forget about people who will hate the content – that’s not who we should write it for! Data is all about the “why” Today, the amount of data we receive is endless and it can feel overwhelming to sift through all of it to find what matters. The talk emphasized the importance of understand human emotion and intent behind the data. You should always look at analytics and Facebook insights with the lens of why people are acting the way they are and do your best to communicate with real members of your audience (through polls, surveys etc.) in order to understand them better. PR as we know it is dying It’s a talk we wanted to give, but attended a different discussion on PR instead, where we realized the industry is evolving in such a way that no one is prepared.  Traditional media relations no more. A good PR firm will leverage earned and paid opportunities with influencers and media, know how to utilize traditional media in a completely new way, activate experiences and super fans, and help your brand execute strategies to gain the loyalty that will drive successful sales in a new era of communications. Did you attend SIC this year? We would love to hear what your takeaways were! Share them with us on Facebook or Twitter!