The Digital Movement

We’re live here from Social Media Strategies, organized by the WebGuild in Stanford Court, San Francisco. For some live clips, please check out the “Live” Qik events page here. Photos are uploaded hourly here. Times are in PST.

Keynote

0910 - Introduction by Daya from WebGuild. Francois is up talking about why he’s here and he’s introducing the keynote, David Carter, Founder & CTO of Awareness.

0918 - David is introducing what Awareness is doing.

0922 - How is the economic situation affecting the social media industry. It’s not as bad as during the dot com bubble burst where money is being thrown blindly into the industry.

0930 - Is Social Media a fad? David says it has really evolved. It’s all about information and relationships management on the net now. It’s a tool that has evolved to solve a certain problem. People want more depth on the internet, and they expect to find it, such as searching for a product info on a site. Enterprises social communities using social media. People will actuallly be vocal about something they really care about, and they want to know about the companies they’re engaging with. Given Forrester’s research, marketing budget spent

Is Social Media a commodity? NO! That would mean we have all the tools we need and innovation can stop. There’re still a lot of improvements that we can make about the social media environment, so we are not able to get the same common experience across different social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Profile portabiliy, contact list management etc. needs to be improved.

0943 - With the economic situation, there’re more eyes on where the money goes. Therefore social media strategies have to be spot on the first time. So how can we execute better? Identify and leverage on points on enthusiasm (press releases, conference events etc.) and make them part of your community. Identify watering holes for customers and pick the project that has the most obvious ROI. It doesn’t have to be about money, it can be about trust scores, community stocks, and in this case to gather the required information needed to measure and analyse this event.

Social Media in the Economic Downturn

0947 - Shel Israel, Social Media Strategist of Global Neighbourhoods and Mark Yolton, SVP Community Network of SAP are up on stage now talking about Social Media in the Economic Downturn. Shel: “This may be our time!! What can we scale back and cut back on in the downturn. We really need to talk to our customers.” Traditional advertising and PR has remained expensive in the last decade or so. Social Media is an answer to the problem of lean marketing and addressing the problem of how to stay close to the customers.

0952 - Mark on stage. Introduction to social media in SAP. Social media being used in SAP for about 5 years now. It’s core to what SAP does today. Given today’s economy, need to focus on cost efficiency.

0956 - David still on stage talking about his 8 best practices in social media.

0957 - Shel opening it up to the floor, but no one has any questions. So he continues, how do you measure effectiveness and efficiencies of social media practices. Mark: Basic stuff is definitely measured, from traffic, engagement and stickiness metrics. About cost, whether the questions from supporter organisations channel into the user community without the need for SAP to do it. SAP still provides customer support, but they have crowdsourced support from the community that comes in and defers cost. How many sales leads are being driven for the specific subscriptions is being measured. Community ecosystem serves to facilitate customer engagement for other departments within SAP. It actually functions differently about the other areas of SAP.

1007 - Mark: If you drive from one part/organization, be it engineering, marketing etc., it’s gonna be hard to bring change. So the philosphy at SAP now, by creating a separate cross group organization to facilitate all the organizations to make contributions. SAP is really close to its customers, by knowing who the bloggers in each country are, engaging in conversations with them, reaching out to a mailing list quickly, getting out to blog readers who are accessing the SAP blog. Reducing cost, agility and reaching out to customers are the focus points of community network at SAP.

1015 - David: What do you have to cut that you now can’t live without? Mark: As budgets get cut, be it training budget, marketing budget, traveling budget etc., social media is the thing to turn to. The same how PR is being done by providing daily news summaries which includes blogger comments. Serious discussions going on blogs and inviting bloggers to product launches, company events etc. Giving them the privilege because they’re the one who are asking the best questions.

1021 - Shel: Blogging gives someone a lot of power (based on experience). What’s your vision of the role that social media plays going into good times. Mark: Focused on engaging customers in other ways than sending someone out to fix something. Getting constant feedback from the consumers, getting product documentation from users, crowdsourcing data for the company. David: An entire circle of development in the company rather fixed product launches in the company.

1025 - Networking Break

Leveraging Social Media for Business

1040 - Up next is the panel on Leveraging Social Media for Business. We have Liz Miller, VP Programs & Operations, CMO Council, Lauren Coberly, Director Worldwide Marketing, Kodak Direct, Kim Johnson, VP of Sales and Marketing at Symantec and Naomi Cooper, VP Marketing, 1-800-DENTIST.

1042 - Liz: 3% of America use some form of social media at least twice a week and 25% of Americans are engaging with companies at least once a week. Introduction about what CMO Council is all about and what the marketing agenda for Marketing leads are and what the new challenges are now. Why does experience matter: A single bad experience will prevent the users from going back to the companies. Social media is a channel for customers to voice out as and when they have bad experience, and marketers are now listening more attentively to these channels. More numbers and stats.

1049 - Lauren: We now have 3 company blogs and chief blogger in Kodak. 1000 Words, PluggedIn and Grow Your Biz are the 3 blogs. Explaining how Kodak is engaging social media, Facebook Fanpage, Flickr integration tools, twitter, podcasts, Kodak Gallery featuring Slide.com integration etc. Traditional marketing complements social media marketing in an integrated marketing plan. Social media industry changing very quickly, that’s no way to create a 10 year goal plan for social media marketing as tools and trends are rapidly evolving.

1059 - Naomi: B2C and B2B in 1-800-DENTIST. Focus a lot on industry partner relations. Strategy that the company is embarking on - how to position themselves as a neutral third party expert, battling huge stigma for mass marketing in the dentistry industry by creating a video site with webinars and forum about how to do marketing for dentists, and also for people in the industry to use this site for lead generation and by giving dentists awareness of the need for marketing and to help them by giving them the information and advice, and even outsourcing opportunities to do marketing for their businesses. This is a positioned neutral site, appears to be sponsored by 1-800-DENTIST as opposed to being run by the company.

1115 - Kim: Uncomfortable for company working on security to create a blog initially, but now it has been experimented and tried to be quite a good way to reach out to consumers and businesses. Social media in the company on the consumer side - web game show at CES, RSS feeds etc. Moving forward, having experimental organization that doesn’t have any stigma, trying out new things. Ability to tie new technologies and new ways of catching customers to the ways of getting revenue.

1125 - Liz: Remember the Symantec campaign with Da Vinci theme? (The Da Vinci Code Anagram Game)

1128 - Lauren: How do we measure and determine whether its successful? Reaching out to other mediums that engages more consumers and through measuring RSS feeds, advertising numbers, Flickr numbers. Moving focus into search to make sure that the presence and visibility isn’t lost. That’s how we’re looking into determining success. We’re rather you be out there to talk about Kodak, saying something bad is preferred to saying nothing at all.

1133 - Naomi: Different from Kodak. People don’t like going to dentist, so people saying something bad is a lot worse than saying nothing :). Social economic bias of going to a dentist, eg pain, negativity, as comments can go really bad. Interesting challenge for conversations with consumers in dentist industry. Moving ahead with neutrality to evangelize about oral health. Just appointed a new chief blogger, usage of tools such as Tweet Scan. We don’t have PR or Social Media department, so you can actually do this yourself, and there’re a lot of great tools out there for you to make use on.

1141 - Kim: Using external agencies to do social media, PR if don’t have time internally to do it. Daily updates on social media ongoings about the company.

1150 - What tools do you use to check business intelligence on social media? (Do give comments! :D) Liz: Marketing now is a core data point for information coming into the company. From there, information is being permeated through to other departments via a collective CMS environment where a single question or problem can be accessed and retrieved by all the departments in a company.

1154 - % of marketing dollars spent on SEO and % of time spent on organic space? Anyone used interactive news release? Liz: CMO Council is partnering a company to do it, creating a compelling a news story. Bloggers are now utilising these news releases more and it’s actually achieving more from a PR perspective, creating an increase in awareness throughout the blogosphere. Lauren: Time and focus spent a lot on organic space. Naomi: We run every news release by SEO person, best way to help results. A lot of organic and paid search.

1159 - Lunch Break in Forneau’s Oven!!

Tapping into the Power of Employees Through Social Media

1310 - Now we’re back from a sumptuous lunch, straight into the first track after lunch, which is Tapping into the Power of Employees Through Social Media. We have Dr. Jim McGee, Director of New Shoreham Consulting.

1313 - Jim: Stories on Xerox, Accenture - knowledge management station, talking about social media usage in accenture. Jim is getting some feedback and input from the audience in talking about what social media tools and practices that are being used in the company. These are examples of inexpensive ways to get starting in solving problems, not economic for big consulting firms to use it. The idea is also to find the difference in working with knowledge workers as opposed to the engineers and features makers. It’s now we, as knowledge workers, have the discretion to use tools, and from there influence the rest of the companies to use it. You cannot force the management people to actually use these tools. By starting to use the tool in your company, it could potentially be a good gauge for how consumers will pick up this tool and give feedback on your company.

1343 - Jim: “Community trumps content”. Knowledge management systems are build by people who are more technically savvy who doesn’t really know about the expertise and environment they’re building for. Should we build social media tools that should be fun so that the pick up rate is fast and creates a perceived low barrier entry? Debate going on about this. It just needs to be relevant to the work. Don’t use “fun” to sell to senior management :P. Perceived fun is making some people think that productivity is being sacrificed because they’re having “fun”.

1352 - Jim: There’re 3 ways where employees in an organization to relate to each other.  Will try to get the model up later. AI - wonderful debate in the early days between needs and scruffies, kind of like the knowledge management and social media.

The Importance of Content in Social Media

1357 - Next up is the session on The Importance of Content in Social Media with Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, Scott Wilder, GM of Online Communities Division at Inuit and Sylvia Marino, Executive Director of Community Operations at Edmunds.com Inc.

1405 - Is content an important issue in social media? Sylvia: Content is extremely important. Different communities all have a lot in common - a lot of people have questions, some others have answers, and many people have opinions. Content is important because it is relevant to consumers and consumers really need it. Scott: At the end of the day, it’s all about the conversations that’s going on. It’s not about the numbers, it’s all about the verbatim and what people are saying, the sentiment that is being conveyed that’s teaching companies a lot. Content is to be developed by our users. Is plumbing a good analogy to refer to a tool facilitating 2-way communication? (Would you want your plumbing to flow back?)

1410 - What kind of content are important? Sylvia: Content MUST be AUTHENTIC!! Readers and minders can smell it a mile away. Dialog has to be not me but you. Making the commitment in learning about consumers through 2-way engagement with them and listening to them. Scott: Community is not the place to market, but it’s the place to build a relationship. Authenticity and transparency is important.

1417 - Good quality content vs High SEO (Quantity)? Scott: Am I doing this to make me feel good (more traffic), or am I really solving for making it easy for user to contribute? Think about the technology that we use these days, there are a lot of people who are lagging behind and it’s harder for them to pick it up. So it’s all about who are you solving for and about making User Experience good and easy to pick up. Sylvia: It’s all about solving problems and needs, instead of blindly going out for the sake of creating something social. And it’s all about the correct and most relevant tools to use for the job to meet customers needs.

1425 - Systematic way of determining ROI - Omniture, Google analytics, look at consumer response, did they have a positive experience with the brands?

1458 - Afternoon Networking Break

Thinking Vertically Across Social Media

1525 - We’re back from the Break with the panel on Thinking Vertically Across Social Media with Rajiv Parikh, CEO of Position2, Chris Carfi, Co-Founder of Cerado and Darius Miranda, Customer Content & B2B Social Media Manager at Wells Fargo.

1535 - Darius: Ghost-writing?? Never!! The need for bloggers to have certain expert knowledge. For banks, how relaxed can they be? It’s all about people to people and how to be sticky. Chris: A lot of old media push tactics are not working effectively any more as users move online. Darius: We’re going to run a pilot to measure sentiment online. Because of our expertise, we should be able to influence our customers, and with our customers’ influence, they are able to influence other people.

1548 - Chris: Whoever fills that gap that questions that customers have and information that they need will actually come up high in Google organic search because it’s what they’re looking for. It can vary from the main website of the company or product to 3rd party sites that are able to provide the most relevant and most sought after information. Darius: Example is Oracle Openworld where there’s a monthly meeting all the way up to the event and during the event, people will look for each other. Dialogue will also carry on after that. Chris: Having a balance with offline and online flow is really great. Communication spikes usually happen before and after a physical offline event.

1604 - Darius: On blog, it’s real time, as compared to a few weeks to get some words on to your website in a major company. All blogs on Wells Fargo are legally compliant. We won’t change anything on a post or comments, unless it has some security and privacy issues, because all blog posts adhere to blog policies. Chris: As long as the blog posts are within legal means, get all the information and transparency out there, because it really helps the trust and authenticity.

1610 - Darius: If someone requests something about a product that requires an answer that is off topic, we tell them that we are working on it at the moment, but not actually revealing what’s in the works. Bringing the relevant person to give a reply usually works, and always end the answer or response with a question. Talk to them like he’s your best friend. Talk to people from other departments and find out what actually works, and if there’s a need to, split the cost. That will help large companies.

1612 - Question from audience: any crisis issues and how did you manage it? Chris: If the organization is okay with bringing internal discussions out in the open, the organization can already tackle these crisis by allowing the customers to know what goes on internally and to let them know that the organization admits or agrees that it is an issue that they have to solve. Being honest and humble helps. Rajiv: By engaging the community, we can really avert the crisis. Darius: For B2B, practise social media strategies inside out, so that the pick up rate for external customers will be smoother.

The Best and Worst Social Media Marketing

1620 - And here we have the last session of the day: The Best and Worst of Social Media Marketing with Sean O`Driscoll, Ex GM MVP Program, Microsoft, David Needle, West Coast Bureau Chief, Internetnews.com and Francois Gossieaux, Partner at Beeline Labs.

1625 - Sean: The day I left Microsoft, I got a question asking me whether Microsoft now won’t get social media.

1628 - Francois: We’re in the first stage of making social media work for enterprises, although we’re in the stage of transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. If you’re thinking about social media as part of your business, it’s not about using social media for your business, it’s all about putting social into your business. They need to develop initiatives that are social media based, such as social communities.

1630 - Sean: People always want to go for the shine and dime of tech. I learnt quickly as a consultant, it’s not my core competencies to be at the fore-front about knowing what’s the latest technologies and tools, it’s about finding out which tools are more relevant to the companies. The most important issue is how to measure the effectiveness of these tools, instead just about using them.

1636 - Francois: You can’t shut down a social community, otherwise there will be a revolt by the people who will still strive to carry on, which might turn its back against the company. Sean: The community brought back the MVP program when users sent thousands of mail to Steve Ballmer when they decided to close it down. Robert Scoble really became a big part of the MVP face, engaging the community for Microsoft. Top-down didn’t really drive things, so people will just go off and do stuff, eg the launch of Channel 9 - people at the top didn’t even know what was going on!

1642 - Sean: Expectations of companies - ROI is my favourite red herring. On one side, you need to have a business case to articulate that it benefits the company. Community meetings are useless as the people you are talking to are not as passionate about technology and social media as you are. But you’re working on the product quality line, so communities are not exactly inline with the business process goals. The dark side of ROI is realising that there are people who keeps bringing up ROI, because they don’t buy it. They are looking for a level of granularity in ROI that doesn’t really apply in a lot of the ROI analysis.

1645 - Sean: Engagement model: communities are not channels, not partner organizations - they do what they do not to help the company, but to help other users. Transparency is not a value proposition, but a tactic. Joining conversation is an importance piece of advice, but for a big company, there’re probably tonnes of conversations out there. So take 6 months off to listen to those conversations.

1649 - Francois: Build it and they will come concept is a sure-fire failure model. First mover advantage is only true if you can engage the 4 pillars of social media such as content and more importantly, transactions as part of the community.

1651 - Sean: Community is still all about content especially in B2B. Effort put into seeding content is especially valuable, possibly inducing a hockey stick growth.

1653 - David: any tip on social media? Sean: The magic of idea storm is not the site, but is the business process behind the scene to close the loop on the feedback. What can we learn from Microsoft? Red ring of death for Xbox is a significant PR disaster 2 years ago. Xbox froze up on Christmas Day, after lots of parents bought it as christmas presents for their kids. There was a lack of acknowledgement about the problem. A year later, Microsoft gave a radical 3 year warranty for the Xbox to correct the problem. It could have been done earlier to save a lot of money.

1659 - Francois: TiVo. What they did that they realise that their users were hanging out some where that they didn’t know. Hanging out on a 3rd party site that TiVo users created. So you don’t need everyone to come up to your site to engage the community.

1700 - End of day and Cocktail Reception!!!