Social Media Lastest Trends – UTalk Marketing Digital Brand Strategy Summit

I was skeptical that UtalkMarketing could match my first Utalk event experience which was a great event I attended in April this year.   I should not have been. Once again, they pulled together a carefully edited selection of leading practitioners in the digital marketing sphere and provided  them a platform to share their view of the digital landscape and  inspire us with their top thinking and great practice.

Social Business

The focus on this summit was Social Business which the promotional literature highlighted as “the hot topic amongst thought leaders around the globe.”  The emphasis throughout the day was to look beyond the tools and the platforms to the techniques. As several of the presenters highlighted, humans are essentially social beings, and there is nothing new in the fact that people influence each other.  We don’t need a digital platform or any technology to do this. We have been doing it for thousands of years. However, with the multitude of digital social media platforms at our disposal, that amplify the consumers voice, we are able to listen on mass to what people want, and communicate how we intend to help them get it with a rapidity never before experienced.

Strategy and Measurment

There were a couple of key social media campaign questions that formed the cornerstone of every successful campaign presented at the event.
1)Do have a strategy on what you want to achieve ?
2)Will you know when you achieve it?

They may sound shockingly obvious, but clearly answers to these fundamental campaign questions were lacking in all of the examples of disaster and bad practice that were also shared.

Social as the Primary Channel

Joshua March, Co-founder and CEO of Conversocial illustrated how social business is transforming the way some of the world’s biggest brands are managed. “Social media is fast becoming the primary communication channel online,” Joshua stated, citing a number of examples where customers are  speaking  directly to brands via social media sites. In a large analysis of their clients,  23% of the posts on brand Facebook walls were related to customer service or help, and that trend looks set to grow. But more significant is the number of people who listen in on those conversations. Audience reach is the key metric here, not likes. These conversations on Facebook are as much a part of your brand as anything else you publish or make available. Brands that attempt to publicly resolve customer issues raised on Facebook rather than just divert them to call centres are the real winners in terms of how the large listening audiences perceive that brand. “Brand,”  as Joshua so eloquently demonstrated “…is no longer what you say- it is what you do, ” warning that unless brands embrace social business best practices they risk loosing control of their brand.

Mobile Social

Tom Rainsford, and his frankly awesome beard,  stole the show in the morning with his presentation on how Giff Gaff the new kid on the block in the mobile phone operators set about creating the ultimate low cost social enterprise for it’s members.  Giff Gaff have taken social enterprise to an inspiring level facilitating most of their customer service through Giff Gaff Members who participate for credit or cash back. Boasting openness and transparency,  impressively low mobile running costs plus a 90 second online response time to customer service queries, we were all left asking why we would bother with any other UK mobile network.

Social Media Monitoring

Matt Gierhart, head of social at Ogilvy action, specialises in social media monitoring. He had an interesting visual take on social media. He showed us a slide of the universe making the point that like social media, the image represented such a huge volume of information it was daunting to know quite how to understand it or what to make of it.  There is so much data, what should we measure?  Social media monitoring is the process of mapping out beneficial patterns. He also argued that people don’t talk about brands online… they tell us their stories ( in which good and bad brands feature).

Online PR and Social Media

Russell Marsh, group strategy Director at RAPP UK, walked us through how they helped Euro Tunnel deal with the PR and social media backlash from last winter’s Eurostar delays due to “ The wrong type of snow” .  Euro Tunnel clearly had a problem that wouldn’t end even when the tabloid headlines abated.  I loved his analogy of Google being an elephant who never forgets.  Once content exists in social media it is out there…. but you can bury it with positive sentiment, and that is exactly where RAPP went with their come back campaign. RAPP created an inspiring campaign based around a social media  promoted competition inviting customers to upload their own lamest excuse for needing to win an all expenses paid trip to Europe.  The campaign was a huge hit, and nailed the campaign objective of severing the online association of Euro tunnel with lame excuses. As a result of the campaign,  anyone who searched on the terms for “Euro tunnel”  or “lame excuse”  would find the trail of positive video content put there by these competition inspired brand advocates, effectively burying the seemingly insurmountable mountain of negative content from last winter’s difficulties.

Is Social Working?

The star performance for the day in my opinion was from Emily Dent, Director at Nielson UK. Emily took a sobering look at Social media measurement. Attempting to answer that killer question… “How exactly do you know it is working?”

Emily’s view is you need more than the blunt metrics proliferated by automated tools to fully understand and harness Social media for business. It is not enough simply to try to clock volume and sentiment.

What we need to look to is share of voice in relation to sales achieved, message reach so we don’t just measure how many are talking but how many are listening, and Advocacy. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all represent a glorious tool bag that can do some incredible things, but we need to look beyond the tools to employ them to achieve actual thought out  strategies that get the desired results. Social media gives us the biggest focus group in the world  How you employ them and the techniques you use to harness this groups potential will depend on what strategies and objectives you set out with. Showering us with key Nielson research stats, I particularly enjoyed her analogy that Prince William and his wife Kate are displaying the ideal brand model in terms of their brand growth and longevity.  “Beyond the wedding, they keep arming people with more great stuff to talk about,  Their story is ongoing…This is what all good brands should strive to achieve” Since word of mouth drives 20% – 50% of all purchasing decisions share of voice in social media is a critical success measurement for most marketing campaigns. But above all I think the key take home I got from Emily Dent’s presentation was that brands need to focus on the objective they want to achieve, and not just hair off after the latest digital “ shiny thing”  be it the App, the QR code or the Facebook fan page that their CEO or board has recently clocked and feel they should have to keep up with the competition.

The day was ram packed full of great case studies, insights and marketing inspiration, all delivered with pace, variety and finesse so hats off to UTalkMarketing for a great event.

© ciaraniow for Target Internet, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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