24th Annual LMA conference: #LMA10 - a senior marketer's perspective.

• Author: Jalil, Monica Phillips
• Position: Legal Marketing Association

LMA has done an outstanding job at keeping up with the changing times, creating partnerships with other associations and pulling from resources outside of the industry. Membership pulls from so many diverse backgrounds and everyone has a wealth of information to share. What better place to take advantage of those shared experiences and knowledge base than at the LMA Annual Conference? Ready for an opportunity to network and learn from some of the industry's best and brightest, I set out for Denver.

It's a Relationship Business

I arrived at the hotel and was instantly greeted with big hugs from Jose Cunningham (CMO, Crowell & Moring), Chris Batio (Director of Marketing & Business Development, Pierce Atwood), and Nicole Kramer (national Senior Account Manager, ALM Media Inc.). I felt right at home. this was my fifth conference and each time it is a rejuvenating experience--two days full of collaboration, intellectual exchange and shared experiences. And as we learned from LMA President, Nathan Darling, "We hug in LMA."

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An ever-changing Landscape

I oversee our firm's marketing technology initiatives, so I am always looking for the latest and greatest uses of technology--to improve efficiency, help meet client needs, provide valuable information, and serve as an extension of our branding initiatives. technology helps us set the foundation for our marketing department and it is changing constantly.

Social media was on my radar and it was everywhere. I wanted to learn as much as I could about how twitter and other platforms are being used and what others are doing to integrate social media into their marketing initiatives. How will we use it to better serve clients and communicate past the clutter?

The twitter community proved to be a valuable resource. I read tweets live during the sessions I attended and simultaneously caught highlights from the other sessions. thank you, tweeters! While I did not tweet at the time, here are my highlights (slightly more than the 140-character limit) from an outstanding 2010 LMA Annual Conference.

Insights into the Future

A dynamic and entertaining delivery by keynote speaker and futurist Andrew Zolli on the forces shaping the coming decade definitely engaged the crowd.

Zolli discussed the drivers of change he calls "demographic transformation--the slowest moving, best studied, most valuable change we know." For the first time in the United States, the population chart is changing from a...