The Digital Movement

Good morning guys, we’re back “Live” on Social Media Strategies 2008. We’re on the 2nd and last day of the conference down at Stanford Court, San Francisco. Did you have a good rest last night? Just a quick reminder, for some live clips, please check out the “Live” Qik events page here. Photos are uploaded hourly here.

Times are in PST.

One-on-One Session with a Social Media Leader

0913 - Reshma is opening the second day by giving a brief outlook of what’s happening today.

0916 - Starting off in the morning, we have Paula Dum, VP Marketing, Digital Tax Solutions, H&R Block and Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Beeline Labs on the One-On-One Session with a Social Media Leader.

0922 - Paula: We launched a broad social media campaign by reaching out to users through a number of social networking sites, and by leveraging on the specific personality of each site and each community on these sites, we tweak our strategies to match the profiles of users on each of these sites. By using this campaign, we’re able to scale and in the process, we find the need to manage each community. Some widgets that we built didn’t relate well with some of the users on some sites (which we thought it would), so we have to move fast and respond to feedback. We are building on top of what we’ve learnt and applying it in future projects.

0929 - Paula: eHarmony - Measurements that we use - using brand tracking studies to study awareness, but social media alone did not drive that. It’s a combination of different strategies, but to actually measure engagement from the social media sites. We’re definitely driving more traffic, conversion rate and retention rate.

0931 - Professional content vs general content - Paula: Showing that we provide tax expertise in terms of tax professionals and advice increases credibility. So we started the conversation and for the users to continue those. After that we end of by fitting the professionals into the conversations again.

0937 - Have you run into scalability issues? - Paula: Twitter is a bit difficult because the questions that are coming in are very diverse, and we need different expertise to answer those questions, so that to me is a question of scale to address when we have more than we can handle. We try to engage external parties to help us to handle these extra issues which we can’t handle and for them to advise us on other relevant tools which we can use to manage.

0943 - How do you manage legal on twitter? Paula: Information on our site has already gone through the legal process. We’re not as legally concerning as we’re filtering it back to our legal team.

0953 - How is the balance between social media and traditional media in such an economic downturn? Paula: Social media is part of human capital. People are communicating more because they’re scared or frustrated. Now the companies are cutting media budget, not staff, so now is the time to focus on the social aspect, the human capital side. Creating a blog or responding to a comment doesn’t really cost a lot of money. The more people you can retain, the more money you save on retraining the staff and readjusting to the social media strategy.

0958 - Paula: It’s been a two year journey in the social media practices. Get it going, start small with some success stories, we started with Youtube user-generated content and SecondLife. Then we went ahead with MySpace, Facebook, eHarmony and creating other community sites. Get some learning, if you want to do something successful, you have to be an active participant.

1002 - Networking Break

Creating Your Social Media

1020 - We’re back from our break right into the session on Creating Your Social Media with Colin Brown, DIrector of Business Development at Mzinga.

1025 - Colin: Dimensions of Online Strategy is all about conversations, content and the influencers. And these dimensions help to solidify the goals. Content strategies - Editorial calendar for the next quarter, half year, one year etc, SEO, Newletter integration, rich media experience, “Live”events and blogs. Make sure newsletter contents are different to that from what users can get from blogs so that they can reinforce each other, rather than create duplicate spam. “Live” event, if done properly, there’s a huge PR aftershock to drive users back to the site, given that both the traditional press and bloggers get to know about it. Any marketer should be looking at the wealth of information that any social media is receiving. It’s the people, not the companies that blog. and focus is on having a true voice.

1035 - Conversation strategies - Get support and develop a moderation policy. We would love to have a “Live” response/update going out, so companies really need to revise their policies in getting the word out quick. Different audiences interact differently to different conversations, so companies will have to align the approach with the audience and the different goals that your company has. Start small with things such as responding to comments and then slowly grow big.

1040 - Influencer strategies - Working on engagement policies and plans on how to engage (listen first, Promotions vs Relevant Contributions), who to engage (Find the influencers in your industry) and where to engage (commenting on external blogs).

1050 - Colin is going to split us into 4 groups - B2B, B2C, Non-profit and Internal and for the next 20 minutes, we’ll be working on the 3 different strategies.

1120 - Groups are still engaged in pretty interesting discussions. Just returned from the group that was discussing internal strategies and they were talking about the challenges of balancing internal and external social media platforms. One huge challenge is getting people to adopt social media on a large scale in MNCs. The common consensus was that ti achieve a high rate of adoption, companies have to create dependencies on social media tools. For example, one organisation started a “no-attachments on email” rule to drive people to wikis in order to get the information and files that they need. This creates a habit that will allow social media tools to be self-sustaining.

1130 - Overheard from B2C conversation: Go to interest groups that are already existing. No point building something from scratch if there are tools available out there. For example, Facebook fan pages are a good place to start to get interested customers who know about your product. Blogs are also a good resource to get customer feedback. Search for yourself to see what people are saying and keep on top of the data that you pull up. It is also a good source to check out the competition. Using personas can be effective, but you will have to know how to manage them well.

1134 - Colin is asking the presenters to report back and regroup. We will be sharing the key learning points of the discussion in a little while.

1138 - Connie is presenting on B2C: How do we create a strategy to encourage user generated content? Put some parameters in company’s product forum. Necessary to have human interaction and engagement. Listening in the product forums and internet to understand customers better. The company needs to be open to the feedback. Incentivise customer participation - feature “experts” on certain subject matters. It’s easier for customer relations too as there is less of a company interest. On negative UGC: realize that negative comments are more managable when they are in your backyard and you can respond to them quickly and effectively. Long term commitment is necessary to sustain continued interaction.

1145 - JJ on Non-Profits: Action plan that non-profits can take. Goals include engagement and fund raising. Start with what you know about your organisation and your community. Learn about their online social behaviour with Forrester. Build a moderating tool to aggregate content and understand where participation lies. Content strategy include starting a blog (which also provides SEO value) where you craft compelling stories, publicize your cause and rallying people around them. For fund raising, ideas include banners, widgets and display ads. Read up on Beth Cantor, domain expert on Non-profits in the online space.

1148 - Internal: How do we connect people within the organization? Challenges include aligning nonmenclature that will aid search of profiles in the database. Tagging as a possible solution. At first, people use tags that are different, so to eliminate confusion, create tag groups. Community buzz on LinkedIn, using groups. Create value for using social media by addressing people’s business interest with it. Appeal to personal interest first before company interest - get people excited to get on the platforms first before asking them to think about how they can benefit the company from it. Content: start off with weekly features (YouTube, Podcast, presentation) to get traffic to the site

1152 - Ryan on B2B: Goals: 1) Inject yourself in conversations outside the site? Realise that the community on your site is your “love group”, those outside are the neutral “swing group”. 2) Measure ROI and maintaining exec support? Key sales metrics need to be identified and continuously improved. Set up your rules on how to measure something and stick to it. 3) How to involve the community in company discussions? Eg Threadless allows consumers to choose which ones they want to order. How do you adopt that model to the commercial area? Need to tell the customer what you want to know instead of opening it up wide and boundless, as they will be confused.

1156 - Connie Bensen and using Twitter for Business. Check out www.conniebensen.com for her blog posts and notes.

1213 - We’re going for our lunch break now, but before that, let me put up some links that was mentioned during the session.

Slides from the session will be up at www.constructingsocial.com.
Alternative to Tweet Scan - Tweetbeep
Business Case on Twitter at Connie Bensen’s blog
Twitter Search - Do a search on #SMS08 will bring up all the tweets on the event

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

1313 - We’re back with Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Strategy, the Tribulations Business Study with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs, replacing Edward Moran from Deloitte Services who could not make it today because of some emergency.

1315 - Francois: Factors making communities work - people do want to talk to people, not to companies and people want to help other people, which is unbelievably powerful. Last thing that we found was that the commnunities that work the best, were communities that companies could tap into their social framework, rather than their market framework. Social framework is about the feeling when you help someone, market framework is more about relationship on business dealings. An evaluation was done on social framework by varying incentives that were given for help. People don’t understand the forces that are creating positive return on communities.

1322 - Francois: What a lot of companies is focusing on is the tools which is not the point. If your community cannot exist in a yahoo or google group, it’s not gonna exist anywhere. The fundamentals have to be something else other than the technology. In most companies, marketing are the starting point or core of the organization. Page views and time spent on the site are not a good way of measuring community involvement, example is that groups exists on yahoo or google groups who have never been to the group page to have good communication and conversations going on with the community. We’re not measuring metrics for advertising! Main things that company are concerned with qualititative data are measuring Sentiments, Activity Levels, Growth and Impact on sales.

1337 - Francois: 3 takeaways,

1. communities can increase revenue of up to 50% than a company which doesn’t leverage on communities. Communities can increase product success ratio because of the feedback loop that they can make use and improve on.
2. The rise of the CMO 2.0. What happens here is that, leveraging communities enables the CMO to regain the strategic seat at the executive table, representing the customers at the table.
3. To be successful, companies have to think different. There’s a mismatch of goals and actionable plan, mismatch between measuring metrics and goals of the company. Communities will transfer most business processes.
3.5 To build them, they will only come once. 99.9% of people in a community will never go back if you just build it without talking to customers. It’s all about content, moderation and ambassadors. Usually pilot projects are different from the actual situations that the company is trying to address. Communities of different size and goals require very different ways to building them.

1355 - Francois: Thinking out of the box. TiVo engaged users that weren’t in their primary community to provide them with insights on innovation

1402 - Measuring impact where there’re a lot of mentions going on, not just the community. How do you isolate from the noise? Companies that were measuring the impact exactly the way you would want to measure the customer support. Those companies who were successful those who with departments reporting back to their group using their own metrics, and also asking for funding from each department.

How to Implement Social Media Strategies for Big Businesses

1407 - Next up we have the panel talking about How to Implement Social Media Strategies for Big Businesses. We have the moderator Matt Warburton, Director of community Management at Yahoo, and the panelists, LaSandra Brill, Manager of Web & Social Media Marketing Team, Cisco, Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist, Intel and Connie Bensen, Community Manager, Network Solutions.

1410 - How do you define social media? Connie: It’s simply a set of tools that require human interaction, definitely a person needs to interact with the people. LaSandra: Agree on Human Interaction, 2-way communication and also different tools that can become conversation starters and facilitate conversations. Michael: Social media is about relationships across different channel, and there’re a lot of tools to foster relationships. Relationships and conversations.

1414 - LaSandra: There’re lots of red tape in big companies. There’re lots of risks and one of them is about the unknowns, which scares a lot of people. You should maybe do it before asking anyone about it - most effective :P. Mark: Getting stuff done with 3rd party vendors difficult. Michael: Just finding an ROI for social engagement is still blurry for Intel. Challenge is to convincing the traditional marketeers.

1439 - Do you write blogs for your companies? Connie: I’m writing. LaSandra: No. Michael: We want to make the blog less corporate. We want to make it conversational, so when we write, we would encourage people to respond.

1449 - LaSandra: I think the phase we’re at is being able to tie things together, tying the communities together. We want to really take that to the next level, really bringing the communities together, because there’re really some crossovers in these communities. Michael: Aggregate everything externally into one place, so that you don’t have to go everywhere to grab. Connie: We really need to listen and knowing about the customers. (Talks about some websites which are good tools.) Focus of connecting tools to others, something like subcontracting.

1455 - LaSandra: Using blog for getting community feedback. We’re driving topic conversations and listening. The challenge is not getting the feedback, but what to do with it and what processes are in place to manage the feedback. Michael: Not touching on consumer feedback yet. But on Intel Software Network, the businesses are giving the feedback in that thriving community.

1457 - Last comments. Connie: People and human interaction, it takes a number of people to be interacting. LaSandra: Go out there start small, and experiment and then add on to it. Don’t try to tackle everything. Michael: Forrester!

1500 - Networking Break

Overcoming Objections to Social Media

1522 - Overcoming Objections to Social Media with Gary Stein, Director of Strategy at Ammo Marketing and Peter Guagenti, VP Client Partner of Razorfish and Chris Carfi , co-Founder of Cerado, is the moderator for this event.

1525 - Peter: The number 1 objection, what do we need to do and what does that do to our bottom line. I don’t want anything negative to appear about my company.

1540 - Gary: There will be a few 5 star relationships, a few 1 star relationships and a lot of 3 star relationships. You don’t want to spend too much time on the 1 star relationships.

1546 - Gary: Biggest objection I’ve ever received comes from the legal department. Peter: You want whatever you want correct to be in place. The key is measurement and improve the value of it. Optimisation is always a spiral. Social media is the new thinking, you don’t have a little bit of room to experiment.

1554 - Gary: Social media is the tool to build relationships. It’s is best suited to do it rather than other forms of advertising such as doing it at SuperBowl.

1618 - Anything that is done has the opportunity to show up on YouTube

The Future of Social Media and Business

1620 - Closing Discussion: The Future of Social Media and Business. Panel members are Mike Walsh, CEO, Leverage Software and Shel Holtz, President of Holtz Communication. Darius Miranda, Customer Content & B2B Social Media Manager at Wells Fargo moderates

1624 - What will Web3.0 look like? Mike: From the perspective of communities, there are two stakeholders, the end user and the brand. End user - what you want, when you want it, how you want it. Host - evaluate and analyse information. This will come in the form of improved dashboards and analytics. Web 3.0 will see a maturing of technologies.

1626 - Shel: PR is about building relationships, not dumping press releases.

1631 - Shel: High level execs need to learn about Social Media and understand that it is not just what their kids are using and as a medium to spread bad news. Education is needed to change these wrong perspectives. Mike: VPs of Marketing and CMOs greatest concerns are on security and privacy. There is a need to balance the use of social media on internal platforms

1635 - Tip for success: try not to build your strategy in a bubble

1637 - Mike: Biggest mistake is not understanding how to get technology to advance in tandem with marketing programs. Shel: Biggest challenge: legal issues. CEOs need to balance legal risks with all other risks. Another big challenges include the team, budget and communication. Learnings: Engagement and social media happen on two levels - organic (both inside and out of the organisation) and campaign. Campaigns are a short term strategy and most companies focus on campaign. They need to invest time into both levels in order to fully leverage social media.

1641 - Mike: In the future, the different platforms will be more integrated so management of communities will be more convenient. Shel: Integration will happen on a variety of levels. Engaging people in conversation on your homepage will be a feature of the future. When you are passionate about something, you want to have a dedicated place to talk about your interests. For example, groups on Ning, Facebook and MySpace should be aggregated to create a larger and richer community.

1645 - Shel: Mobile strategy for employee communication is not really in place yet. Mike: It’s industry specific. Realtors and sales people will probably have a higher rate of using mobile devices. Also, it is more prominent in Asia Pacific. America lacks the infrastructure for the growth that mobile has experienced in Asia Pac. Culture shift to use of mobile is also holding the US back.

1653 - How far out should you plan your strategy for? Shel: One of the risks of planning far out is that you lock yourself into tactics within a changing environment. Tools, supply and demand can change. You have to be aware of the situation, and keep the conversation going. Mike: Planning ahead to about a year is the furthest you should go because of constantly changing situations.

1656 - Social media for recruitment? Concerns with legal issues: how do you use the information that is available positively? It is a double edged sword for applicants, so how should employers deal with social media on potential employees? Mike: Take a look at the info that applicants send you. Facebook is the tool for communication in Gen Y coming out of universities. Shel: Limits are set by the industry. The same level of trust should be placed on online conversations. Behave ethically and legally, and you’ll be ok

1702 - Closing statement by Reshma. It has been a great 2 days and thanks for reading!