The ad:tech franchise continued its rolling thunder in San Francisco. Congrats to Drew Ianni and the @adtech team for hosting another successful event with good attendance, relevant content, and ideas to mull over and share.

As with prior stops in Sydney and Paris -- thought leaders, vendors, marketers, analysts, press and the curious came together to learn about and discuss a wide variety of online and digital marketing topics including industry trends, creativity, strategy, search, email, traditional and new media, TV, mobile, user generated content, emerging best practices, solutions and more. ad:tech and San Francisco always deliver variety, so it’s wise to tag-team to cover ground.

J.D. Peterson and I did just that, along with other Lyris colleagues, to participate in key sessions, talk with marketers, network and connect with old friends and new. Following are some thoughts we took away for you and your team to consider:

Social media enables businesses to open-up, listen, serve, innovate and scale. There is no question that social media is transforming businesses. Reason being, to do social media right your business needs to be receptive to engaging people in real-time conversations online. This requires executive commitment, process changes and cultural shifts. Social media also provides new channels and tools to sense and analyze target markets and end user-behaviors to help businesses be more innovative and effective in product development, marketing, sales and customer service.

You’re a mobile marketer whether you know it or not; keep going. Laptops and mobile phones today are very sophisticated and have made mobile marketing achievable by virtually any business. Your email campaigns are being accessed and shared via these devices, and there are tools available to help you optimize and amplify email marketing messages and offers. SMS is a great complement to email, and SMS adoption is on the rise worldwide. We are increasingly becoming a more mobile society everyday and there is no turning back.

Transparency is in vogue. With all things considered including the economy, government bailouts, financial scandals, political changes and people needing more assurance they’re not being taken for a ride – businesses and marketers need to focus on building trust. Trustworthiness is achieved when businesses and solutions execute against their promises and can provide data to prove results.

Integrated marketing makes sense for the times. The growth of customer segments, media vehicles and channels have made marketing potentially more complex and less cost effective. Today’s challenges and opportunities require marketers to evolve to compete and succeed. Your customers and prospects expect new and better ways of communicating with your business. Learn more about integrated marketing with tri-messaging via a brief webinar from Lyris and the UpShot Institute.

Email’s vitality continues. It’s no surprise that email marketing is a top channel and marketing discipline. Good news is you can now leverage email for social networking content and community building – at no additional cost.

Anything you want to add in terms of thoughts regarding ad:tech San Francisco? Contact us or post comments if you have questions or ideas.