Last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit produced a number of great business takeaways. Spiral16 Lead Software Engineer Cory Stricklin compiled a quick list of the six things he found the most helpful and intriguing at Boston’s IMS 09:

1. Silos suck.

Tim Hayden from GamePlan Marketing was one of the first speakers to bring it up. Don’t treat your organization overall as a bunch of silos that are separate from one another. Different departments and groups within the business must work together and share information.

Here at Spiral16, we are often asked who is supposed to “own” the social media monitoring responsibilities within an organization. Many speakers, some of whom were representatives of companies currently using social media monitoring tools, said that the responsibilities stretched across the firm. The full power of social media will not be unlocked if it is kept in a single “silo” within the organization.

2. ROI can be better determined by combining online and offline data.

Kodak, a forward-thinking company that encourages product managers to blog, is looking to combine social media information with other data from its business. As Spiral16′s Kelly Kearney mentioned in his panel, if companies really want to determine the ROI of their social media strategy, the metrics must be combined with other types of data (sales, customer complaints, etc.).

3. Companies want to pay for engagement opportunities.

The “Innovative Marketing Programs Using New Media” panel brought up a number of controversial topics, such as this: Traditional advertising is dead. Companies used to pay for the number of “eyeballs” seeing their content, but now companies want to pay for engagement opportunities.

4. Technology can be used to co-create “know, like, trust.”

John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing‘s definition of marketing: “Getting someone who has a need, to know, like, and trust you.” Trust is built when value is created at the intersection of high-tech and high-touch. Trust can be built via a strategy.

5. Public Relations is more than just media relations.

“Relationships” are the key. In the past, PR was required to go through traditional media to reach consumers, but now PR can reach consumers directly via social media and other technological means. The “death of PR” was one of the recurring themes at IMS09. There were differing opinions concerning the relevancy of PR in the modern world, but one thing was clear: The PR industry is in a state of flux. Its role and the methods it uses are changing.