Last month, I attended my very first social media week, and I’m fully jazzed up—it was so inspiring to be around hundreds of people geeking out about the next frontier in social media. Here are a few of the things I took away from the experience:

1. Unify, unify, unify.

Social media is no longer a marketing “silo,” but rather a useful layer for all marketing activities. Many of the sessions focused on how to leverage social at conferences, to support email marketing efforts, and how to generally use social to augment other endeavors. At my work, one of our focuses this year is to multiply our efforts by making email, blogging, social, advertising, and print pieces all work together toward a common goal. The sessions gave me a lot of great ideas for socially powered campaigns, and I can’t wait for the opportunity to put them in action.

2. Content is king, but make sure it’s original.

This past year in my company’s social marketing, we’ve focused on growing our base and presenting thought leadership through the curation of content. Now that the blog is up, we’re ready to share original content! The general consensus at social media week was that content is most valuable when it’s your own—it drives more traffic, provides more social lift, and ultimately leads more people to conversion.

3. Just like on social media, it’s the relationships that matter.

One of my greatest takeaways from this conference was simply meeting people who were facing the same challenges and opportunities in their social media roles as the ones we face here at Intermarkets. I got some great tips on easier ways to give webinars, markup text to improve the function and “search-ability” of emails and websites, ways to manage the social media workflow, and how to put together an effective business-to-business content calendar. Plus, I made some awesome, like-minded new friends.