We were relieved listening to this month’s panelists talk about moving beyond webinars and addressing life after wave of fear and uncertainty caused by the pandemic. August is typically a quieter month with less business and more family time or vacations, but professionally it’s also a time to build on relationships. We saw a lot of Happy Hours in the Marketo User Group community this past month. A few innovators – like the Houston and Austin groups – even held a Pub Trivia Night where they asked questions from the Marketo Certified Experts exam, as well as sports and pop culture questions.

There were lots of learning opportunities as well:

• In London, Adele Miller and Emily Poulton ran a session in London that talked about many uses for Webinar data for other channels.
• Jon Bourne at Digital Pi held a discussion on Data Quality best practices with the Dallas MUG.
• At the Seattle Marketo User Group, Nathan Smitha at Etumos held a session talking about the different strategies around A/B testing methods and requirements for gathering conclusive results from those initiatives to help with future marketing decisions.
• Chelsea Kiko and Julz James had an insightful session talking about best practices for keeping alignment between Sales and Marketing at the North American Virtual MUG

Our guest panelists included longstanding Marketo User Group Leaders, Kelly Trantow from the Milwaukee MUG, and Bekah Walters, who is rebooting the Iowa MUG. They did a great job participating and summarizing the many presentations this month. We’re looking forward to Kelly’s session with Natalie Kremer, with a Comedy show from Jason Raisleger at Perkuto on Sept 15^th. After all, this year we could all use a good laugh!

Join us for next month’s MUG Roundup on Thursday, October 1^st at 12pm EDT here. Currently our roster of confirmed panelists includes Andy Caron at Revenue Pulse who runs the Chicago MUG, and Courtney Tobe, who runs the Marketo instance at AvidXchange and is just starting to lead the Charlotte MUG.