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.”
Crispin is up first with a case study.
Why did SAP find social media to be important?
Start by looking at products which are B2B with long lead times and multi-decision makers. Process itself was already social, however SAP were not participating in this conversation.
Path
Business goals were set in conversation with agencies, Outrider, other consultants etc.
- Traffic
- Micro and macro conversions
- Influence and sentiment (analysis)
Consolidate Learnings
- Many SAP teams were testing social media without top down influence
- Need to connect dots with this rogue behaviour
Tracking Reporting & Listening
Learnings
- Not just another channel
- Content production is challengine
- Communities deliver value
- No standard metrics plan
- More and better information needed
- Need for governance
Breadth: 25k fans 4 groups and 30k active members, 20K + Twitter followers
355,766 visits in 09 from social media, with surprisingly high conversion.
They developed policies and guidelines in consultation with lawyers.
Altimeter included SAP in the top 10 most socially active brands, which Crispin puts down to their approach starting early with employees as social media advocates.
Key Take-aways
Audience, Objectives, stuff like that.
Q from Mel – as a large company, what kind of language do the lawyers and late adopters need? Crispin – sales and leads.
We have a stand-in from 77, Amadeo Guffanti. But anyway we’re looking at a FB case study.
Their advice is “have a fan page on Facebook”. Most effective way to promote is to integrate on your website and do some “highly targetted PPC advertising”. (I’ve been doing a lot of vaguely irrelevent PPC myself – must be where I’m going wrong.) Oh.. I get it. Its the demographic targetting facilities you get with FB –
Lots of different types of ad formats to chosse from. Fan Ad, Event Ads, Comment Ad, Polling Ad and Gifting Ad.
Tools – including Facebook Connect, which allows for push integration, which is nice.
Apps – e.g. Mafia Wars, Farmville. Drives a lot of revenue.
Takeaways: SM 1st point of reference for product feedback. SM brings in many elements of mktg mix; and finally, can be highly targetted (with all that juicy user data ) my paraphrase.
Next up is Anders, who leads with a neat segueway from previous topic to point out there is an ad in the conference brochure for FB ads “Find your customer before they search”.
Three forms of media today – earned, paid and owned.
Outrider are very focused on paid media, as it’s quick and results driven.
We’re looking at a GroupM, ComScore and M80: which behaviour of 6 segmented user groups. I’m not really sure what this slide is showing me, but there’s an area of overlap on a pie chart, and I think we’re looking at paid search behaviour for people pre-exposed to the brand through social media. Basically the more social media activity taking place the greater paid search activity and interaction.
Social media drives more search.
Search terms change and are more refined and with greater product detail.
Social and search work together.
Q – Mel “I’m so glad you brought up the concept of earned media, as in working with the Windows consumer brand, Windows set up loads of social feedback points and social touch points. They looked at RTs FB impressions, video impressions etc and in last four days of W7 launch, the team created over 220,000,000 impressions (including comments, interactions).
Our final panellist is Bas van den Beld
Building a personal brand through social media is the topic of this case study.
Bas – quick lowdown. Known for Search Cowboys, just started State of Search, as a boy – wanted to be a football player and around the age of 30 realised this wan’t going to happen…. so decided to become a famous football journalist.
Ok,.. so Bas isn’t a football journo (our gain) but because of the tools available, became famous in our industry.
Note: – it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it (my paraphrase).
We’re looking at the four elemental componants of the social mix.
Earth is the web (content, renew content, be present, share)
Fire is social media (be real, nurture, use right tools for right job, connect, interact, be everywhere, focus outside and be helpful)
Water is offline (help, interact, speak, make friends)
Air is search (do your SEO.) Bas gives the example of being in a car and hearing a radio ad. When the passenger gets home there’s a chance they will try to find you based on ad content – therefore consider search in everything).
Utilise all these four elements and most importantly don’t “silo” them. Bring the mix togther. Cross-reference everything.
Also – another great value of this is social content is rich, and constitutes your universal search results.
Take-aways: Share… really share. Make friends by finding them first. Be recognisable, and consistent with your brand image (don’t confuse with too many picture versions.)
Mel wraps up by talking about the link between search and social and that it is very important, but does give an anecdote about a mobile company that urged people in an offline campaign to “search for I AM”, and they have to take out a huge paid campaign, as number 1 algo listing was a rather amusing, yet irreverant site something like iambored.com
Q from audience about digg Sphinn etc to Bas: how do we socialise this stuff? – Bas, same principles apply. Grab your mates! IM works well here.
Mel – reminds us of this mornings FB stat from social 101. 21% of FB traffic comes from IM. IM is a social media tool, as is email.