#SMWF – Morning Roundup

Session 1. Katy Howell – MD, immediatefuture.

Katy was a last minute addition to the agenda and rocked the stage. Great speaker, no BS, no jargon and lots of real “from the front-line” experiences to share.

We’re at a time of Shifting sands. Hidden costs.One client lost their Flickr page mid-campaign. Be warned that there are some drawbacks, hidden costs, content risk (who owns the data).
Popular platforms are looking at charge models.
52% of people on soaicl networks have more than one sn.

Influence should not be a replacement for audience. There is no cost per influence.There are different types of influencers. Authoratative, popular and collaborative influencers.
Another problem – brands shout all the time. How do you compete with this? Authorities hate to be shouted at.

Realtime conversations and the 1st page as brand entry point.

Katy does echo Kevin’s marriage analogy. Social media is not a holiday romance.Are we getting viral and app fatigue. Such strategies smack of the one night stand. B2B example = xerox. They have great multi-platform presence and connect people who are really passionate about their products. Really highlt engaged community. 4 out of 5 tweets generate ocnversation (OMG!)

74% of companies feel that proving ROI is the greatest challenge for social media.

Setting out KPIs and “showing your working out” is extremely important. Look at objectives, what are you trying to acheive and what is the unit value of that and Work back against what you are measuring for returns.

We’re looking at a really cool client greaph (anonymised data) where we’re seeing correlation between Twitter conversation spikes and search spikes. Really close correlation between the two.

Biggest blocks for social media is often the senior management attitude. Katy gives an example of negative comment on a third sector facebook page. Management response was to shut the page down and call in the lawyers; which of course just moves the problem around.

Of course the Habitat intern gets a mention. (I think I shall refer to this as the Habiturn incident from now on).

M&S Direct – each section has social media evangelists in each section.

Session 2. Trevor Johnson: Head of Strategy, EMEA – Facebook

Trevor drops some amusing anecdotes about a FB engineer on holiday working on a pineapple farm. On telling the farmer he works for FB, the farmer says “oh facebook! I love that farm game”.

Also – the burgler that got caught because they couldn’t resist the opp. to check in with their FB network whilst on the job.

Point is: FB shouldn’t be considered as a complementary marketing strategy, or something new/different. FB touches so many of us.

FB is…

#1 web property

5BN pieces of content per WEEK

6BN minutes per DAY spent on FB

(and loads more hugely impressive stats that I didn’t get…)

FB have a trilogy of customers, all equally important – users, developers and brands.

Brands can now communicate with customers and potential customers on a one to one level, which is hugely significant.

Summary points

1. Make it social – leverage the platform of the social graph

2. Keep it simple

3. Don’t think campaign-specific – develop a conversational calendar

4. Think differently, harness new opportunities and experiment.

Session 3 – PANEL

  • Allison Wightman, Head of Marketing, Virgin Atlantic Airways
  • Sienne Veit, Social/Mobile Commerce Director, M&S Direct
  • Igor Beuker, Founder, SocialMedia8
  • Freddie Laker, Director of Digital Strategy, SapientNitro

Session is moderated by Guy Pendleton.

I missed the opening premise from Guy, however it must have been something about where we’re heading in terms of opportinities and difficulties, as Freddie is talking about where social meets mobile and how that’s for him, the most exciting area of development, particularly for emerging markets.

Sienne – linking up all your social touchpoints can be a difficult task.

Igor – Disjointed paths can pose a problem for brand participants. As an example we know that peer approval is an immensely powerful driver of purchase decision. If we have 1500 interactions about a new brand of trainers on Facebook – that is great from a positive mention p.o.v. however where is the shop? An easily tracked conversion journey is a challenge for social media.

Other questions are about difficulties, what happens when the voice changes, how do we justify spending time on listeners/talkers that aren’t buyers?

Sienne – with any friendship we don’t know at what point a relationship may become useful and listeners can be connectors, not just direct buyers.

Question from the audience about the “thank-you” economy (this idea that more and more of the signal/noise mix is just meaningless thank-you noise.

Igor – reminds us that conversation must be two-way and by that, not just about speaking, responding but listening. Therefore the thank-you matters as it is a way to infer some level of recognition for being heard.

Freddie – Yes there is some criticism that the thank-you is just noise; therefore offer some value-add. A link with a thank-you, a voucher etc. Don’t just add to the noise.

Social Media World Forum – Main Conference

With the noted exception of SES London 2010, (power points, tables and vaguely passable WiFi) every conference is the same. No power and no wireless. I’m sitting next to Kristofer Bjorkman, Founder of mynewsdesk. Kristopher managed to get onto the wireless early and he’s showing me the “Tweets of rage” prompted by the wireless #fail.

Guy Clapperton, (@guyclapperton) Chairman is now on stage for the intro.

He’s talkin about working in ‘89 and using a modem for bulletin board updates as the precursor to social media.In terms of history of participation, public meetings, letter pages, radio phone-ins can also be seen as a limited precursor to social media. I think this is quite a journalistic point of view. Sure, there has long been a ‘nominal’ participatory mechanism but with extensive cultural and social barriers, whereas social media participation has fewer barriers (such as crap wireless for example.) I’m sure this is where we’re going with this.

We’re handing over to Kevin, who starts with a quote from Oscar Wild, from the importane of Being Earnest – which he paraphrases slightly unsuccessfully. Somthing about marriage and things coming together and better posiitons. Hmm…

Social Media Decisions – How can social media ve adapted to my busiess.

Len – (we’re going to be looking at a lens or something).

Universal Truths – Human Needs  (social and knowledge)

i.e. we are human, social characters. We want to be part of a tribe and connect with other members. It’s all getting very Seth Godin.

Knowledge – how do I get ahead? Expand my boundaries? Succeed?

1. Innovation will be driven by this thirst for knowledge and information exchange.

2. Global economy – hard to identify, who do I trust, how do we collaborate?

Linkedin had over 1BN searches for people last year.

3. Overloaded – in terms of information and communication. How many people go beyond page 1? Does page 1 mean most relevant or best SEO team? (Erm…)

4. Social Media Facts – We’re in an infancy stage and the web is at adolescent stage. In a green field area, there are many opportunities to innovate.

5. Voice, Identity & Filter – everybody has a voice now. Two-way communication and interaction. What tools and mechanisms can we use to filter the information and make it more relevant to us.

“Knowledge Is Power” – an outdated statement.

Social aware applications need to help us format and filter and “socialise” this knowledge.

The new digital economy opens so much opportunity – “the accidental entrepreneur”. Kevin gives the example of Henk van Ess, who asked on Twiter if anyone had a battery solution for the iPhone. A company in China put their hands up and the journalist now has a global business in supplying longer-life batteries for iPhone. (The site is 3G Juice).

BestBuy (big electronics retailer from US) is coming to Europe. BB staff had a surplus inventory problem so the shop floor staff (called blue-shirts) started to create a forecast model, which is much more accurate and based on custmer feedback. BB are also very active on Twitter and empower the blue-shirts to manage customer interfacing via this mode.

Final Sum-Up. “How can my business embrace social”

This is what we’re here for in the next couple of days. Going social and adapting my business, or business practises to get the benefit of these tools and mechanisms.

Threats: The New Way To Compete

Ever wanted to get rid of pesky competitors without having to get your hands dirty trying to figure out if they are or are not doing anything that violates Google’s guidelines? Now you can!! Why bother actually reporting them? That takes time, and you could be wrong. Don’t take that risk.

Eliminate the competition using the following three safe methods:

1. The Friendly Email
See a site ahead of you in the rankings? Well get a contact email and send something like the following…

“Hi Bob.

Just wanted to reach out and give you a friendly reminder to make sure that you know EXACTLY what your SEO company is doing. I’ve been reading a lot about how underhanded some of them are, so just ask yours a few questions and make sure that they’re being totally upfront with you. I know a guy who just got his site banned and he had no clue that his SEO was doing some shady stuff.

Have a great day!
Jim”
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Social Media World Forum: What Do You Want Blogged?

The 2nd annual Social Media World Forum takes place next week at London’s Olympia; and the schedule looks extremely juicy. The two-day forum starts Monday 15th and attracts some of the true thought- leaders in social media, who should be sharing their knowledge on some of the meatier issues faced by social media practictioners and participants today including; monetization, future technologies, engaging with brands and managing social/business metworks. (Like there’s a difference???)

I’m in the midst of a hardcore liveblog training- regime, which involves a timed laptop bootup, which is more impressive than a rifle assembly drill. Plus a steamed fish and wheatgrass diet (concentration levels) and bionic occular implants (for the slides).

Actually, that is a bit of an exaggeration. I am keeping my nails rather short, and I’m laying off the pork scratchings, but that’s only going to get me so far.

I really need your help!
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Another Underwhelming Google Launch

So I woke up this morning, wondering what to write about for SEO chicks this week, and wouldn’t ya know Google has launched yet another thing that no-one needs. Perfect, this post will practically write itself!

The first I knew of Google starred results, was seeing the Search engine land post on the subject, so I did a quick check, and found that I still had search wiki, in fact as of writing this post, I still haven’t been moved over to the new system, and from what I’m hearing, I kind of hope that I get left out of the update all together.

@Seobegincom has been keeping me updated on his initial experiences of stared results for much of the morning, and it seems that Google is continuing it’s trend of giving us things that we never wanted, can’t switch off, and make life more difficult than it was before. So far some of the issues that seem to be appearing are:

  • Google adding things to your google bookmarks, based on search history & auto categorising them
  • Auto bookmarking sites from your public profile
  • In order to prevent it tracking trends you have to turn your history off

This raises so many questions for me, especially as I have over 100 google bookmarks stored, and keeping them organised and findable is hard enough at the best of times, the last thing I want is Google coming in and messing with my system.
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SES London PANEL: Social Media & the Marketing Mix

Moderated by Mel Carson, this panel of presenters and social media marketers will be taking us through their approach to integrating social media.

Panelists are Bas van den Beld of NetTraject and www.stateofsearch.com, Crispin Sheridan of SAP Marketing, Marco Cosaro Amadeo Guffanti of 77 Agency Ltd and Anders Hjorth of Outrider.

Lisa’s lunch is still on the press table just next to me; and it’s actually looking better now than it did three hours ago. I’m trying not to look at it. Hope Mel starts soon.

And we’re off…

The room is looking a little sparsely populated, which is a shame as this morning’s session was packed.

Mel sets the scene by talking about how marketing strategies incorporate more than just search and more than just

Mel asked Tamar Weinberg for a definition to focus our understanding, which I’ve paraphrased. “Collarabative tools for communication; the mechanism to get your message across.”
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