Oh. Em. Gee! It’s the last session of the lasts day and I’m both sad and excited at the same time. Sad that I have to leave my cool new friends but excited that I maybe actually get to eat something today. Because I haven’t eaten since, well, I don’t even know. I’m sorry, tummy. And to make matters worse, the session room smells like pizza. I have witnesses.
Up on stage we have Lisa Buyer moderating speakers Gini Dietrich, Greg Jarboe, and Rob Key. I had a chance to meet and chat with Lisa yesterday afternoon at the Hilton’s Bridges Bar. Lisa’s awesome. [The other Lisa. Not me. Too many Lisas]
Okay, let’s go.
Gini is up first. She makes people stand up. She then lists of social networks and only lets people sit down if they DON’T have one of those accounts. I openly growled at her. It’s nothing personal, Gini. Don’t poke the overtired and malnourished blogger.
Once she lets us all sit down, Gini says that 85 percent of people expect to be able to converse with companies online. People are not market research and demographics anymore. One-on-one relationships with people is now much more powerful than any kind of external mass messaging.
Instead of PR canned messages and click brochures of what you THINK people want to know, people want to see INSIDE the company and get to know the people who work there. Zappos [ooo, our first Zappos mention!] built their culture on Twitter. And that’s what Amazon bought when they bought Zappos for a gazillion dollars. You only have the perception of control. Customers are talking (good and bad). Jilted employees are negative. Stakeholders have a voice. And they’re telling their circles of trust. You have a chance to participate in the conversation.
Times are a changin’ and it’s time to get on the bandwagon. It’s really important to understand how the social media tools are going to affect what we do in our jobs every day. The way that media is changing is – newspapers, as we know them now – are dying. Journalists are getting sources for their articles from the comments of other articles. You should be running a response campaign. She says it’s really important that companies do that. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that makes a heck of a lot of sense. No longer do you write a news release with the inverted pyramid. It’s now how do we optimize it so that even if no one picks it up from the WSJ or NYT, it’s still helping our rankings.
Through social media, PR has a seat at the proverbial table. In the past you couldn’t measure PR. She remembers sitting at a boardroom table for a very large client with her big clip book of stories. They had lots of stories and mentions, but business was down. She couldn’t tell that through the clip books because you couldn’t translate the story to sales. Now you can. You’re no longer an expense, you’re an investment.
Awesome.
Next up is Greg Jarboe.
How would you describe your company’s social media activity?
- 25 percent are heavily involved
- 61 percent have experimented with social media but have not done that much
- 13 percent of companies don’t do anything
Only 33 percent spend more than $5,000 a year on social media marketing. If you’re spending NOTHING on your social media campaign, than what are you doing? If the Holy Grail in social media is an ROI, if you spend nothing and you raise a buck…that’s technically an ROI. That’s where most people are it – they’re dabbling. We need to encourage people to not just do social media, but to invest in it. And that’s hard because it didn’t exist before. There’s no internal champion yet.
There’s a clear need to understand the butterfly effect of social media. Weird things are happening upstream that are affecting what happens downstream.
Most marketing textbooks still use a communication model from 1948. We need to unlearn everything that we learned. He mentions a flow chart by Harold Laslow that is in every marketing textbook he’s ever seen. Shockingly, it’s out of date and we shouldn’t still be using it. Social media is changing our world view. We need to re-map it and show the executives what the new map will look like.
Social media started impacting search engines back in early 2006. He talks about how YouTube came up to conquer and embarrass MySpace Video. There are now almost more searches in YouTube than Yahoo and Bing combined. YouTube enables users to discover and share compelling video content. It was a one-two punch that the engines didn’t offer.
Flap of butterfly’s wings in social media sets of hurricane in search
- In May 2007, Google begin its move to universal search by integrating a few types of social media content – YouTube and Flickr.
- In December 2009, Google started including live updates from Twitter and fresh blog posts in its real-time search results.
- In February 2010, Google also added some Facebook pages to its real-time search results
Conduct a Google search and you often find social media content.
PiperSport spent $40,000 on social media to launch their new plane. They wrote a press release and did all the “normal” things. But then they spent $40k on YouTube, Facebook and on Twitter. Most of the money was spent on people doing social media. What did they get?
There was no Web search interest in PiperSport before the launch. Google Insight for Search shows PiperSport was not a search term. They now have 10 of the 10 first page listings thanks to blog coverage, media coverage, etc. You can use social media to create search terms. Videos on PiperSports Channel have been viewed 61,051 times. It’s nice to know, but you can’t deposit it in the bank.
PiperSport has 8,652 active fans on Facebook. That page didn’t exist two months ago. Among their 117 followers, they’re mostly reporters and journalists. They’ve sold a dozen planes at $120,000 a piece in 8 weeks. Social media doubled the revenue they would have seen and they did it for $40,000 of investment. They got out $1.4 million.
How to Calculate Return On Investment
- Learn how to calculate return on marketing investment. If a company spends $40,000 on social media and it delivers $1,440,000 in incremental revenue, then the ROMI is 36x.
- Use YouTube has part of your social media marketing strategy.
Next up is Rob Key.
We Believe
Social mean is NOT about
- A Twitter account or the new “viral video”
- Only technical issues
Social media IS about
- driving real sustainable across the enterprise
- Creating agile companies to effectively compete in the real time world
- And engine for organizational transformation and requires an expansion of the role of marketing within the organization.
- Social business design, not just tools.
We believe brands are only beginning to scratch the surface of social’s eventual potential. There IS a proven blueprint to get from “here to there”.
It’s about the Enterprise: Select Use Cases
- Reputation Management
- Crisis Management
- Customer Service/Call Center Reduction Costs
- Innovation
- Product Lifecycle Management
- Demand Generation
- Media planning
- Campaign Effectiveness
- Compliance/Legal
- HR
- R&D
- Search, etc
Social Media starts with listening and conversation mining. Understand where the unstructured conversation is happening. Who is influential and who is not.
Rob mentions two kinds of listening:
- Conversation Monitoring: Mostly customer relations
- Conversation Mining – finding the meaning in the conversation
The movement in terms of listening is about the hierarchy of analysis. There’s data and then there’s intelligent data. There’s a fancy pyramid graphic that goes with it but…you’re so not getting a handwritten picture on the last session of the last day. Sorry.
You have to move fast enough to take advantage of the data coming in. That often means a business redesign so that you’re equipped to handle it.
He advocated creating consumer voice profiles to define who you are in your space. If you don’t contribute to the definition of who you are, others will continue to define you. Language is critical. By having a conversation, you can get to know word clouds to help you learn their common vernacular and the new words that are emerging. You can use this to inform your search campaigns and how to talk to people in your communities. It will help you provide value. You better understand the terms they’re using.
Inform Media Planning: Consumers experience brands. They don’t care if it’s mobile, social, etc.
Reputation Management/Framing – a frame in social media consists of a schema of interpretation – that is a collection of anecdotes and stereotypes – that individuals rely on to understand and respond to events. Things do not have meaning among themselves. If you present something as funny, people will think its funny. If their friends present it as offensive, they’ll find it offensive.
And we are OUT! Thanks so much for hanging with us the past few days. Hopefully you found the coverage useful and learned a lot. If you’re looking for the complete archive from SES NY 2010, check it out.
