Guest post: My Visit to SMiBCon

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Social Media in Business Conference (#SMIB09) at the Strand Palace Hotel for LBM. I am a Masters student who has chosen a topic on digital presence and trust regarding individuals, but I find there is a lot of crossover between what individuals practice and what businesses practice. I had been very much looking forward to attending since the line up of speakers looked excellent and the topics looked interesting and would be a great addition to my research.

Photo courtesy of Benjamin Ellis via Flickr

The day started off with a few words from our MC, Daren Forsyth, who asked who in the room was from a business that was looking to get into social media. I was surprised to see that only handful of people in the room raised their hands. I looked around at the faces, many I recognized, and realized that the day of speakers might be a day of preaching to the choir. **Sponsor iPadio recorded each of the presenations and has provided an audio embed on the SMIB website.**

The morning’s theme was “Social Media in the context of Marketing and Public Relations” and Neville Hobson kick started the topic by highlighting some of the well-known cases where social media was used to hurt (United Airlines) or help (Domino’s) a brand. In both of these cases, low budget equipment and the internet were used, which means anyone can do it. Businesses cannot disregard what is being said online. They must realize that “it’s a one media world” and find out “which conversations are defining your brand.”

Following Neville was Katy Howell. I thought her pyramid showing how to funnel your community to build favorability based on awareness, which leads to sharing, and results in advocacy was well supported by her case studies from Bailey’s. She and the next speaker, Eaon Prichard from Geronimo, both mentioned the power of peer-to-peer recommendation. According to Eaon’s stats from Marketing Sherpa, 87% of people trust a friend over a critic, which makes P2P media more powerful than a company’s owned or paid for media.

Then, Mark Redgrave of OpenAmplify got up and demonstrated how his company uses symantic technology to help a company understand the conversation, find what’s relevant, and act appropriately. It can help monitor brand safefy (is it good of bad content to interact with); give insight on your brand’s reputation (how do your consumers feel?); intent (triggers); and audience (understanding influencers by topic).

American, and Southern gent (he said y’all!!), Trey Pennington followed and advised to “avoid the black hole of social media: the ROI question.” So if there is a need for ROI, it means there is a problem somewhere else in the company. Find the problem and then address it to create a solution.

SMiB sponsor, Edelman, sent Tim Callington to speak. He said that conversation and collaboration makes customers and brands influential. He used the Left 4 Dead opposition campaign and the Walmart sustainability outreach as examples of how social media has influenced businesses in two very different ways. His advice was that businesses should behave responsibly, accountably and openly by engaging their stakeholders.

The final speaker of the morning was Maz Nadjm who walked us through what he has learned from running Sky’s community. Put the user first: single approach, safe environment, legally compliant, deliver moderation, target users – creators and spectators. By covering those bases it speeds up the social media entry and has increased Sky’s engagement by 200%.

A panel Q&A ended our morning session. The panel received a question from a small business owner who wanted to know whether social media was a fad, if it was worth the money and which platform to jump on. The response was that social media is not going away. People will talk to people and they will continue to talk to people–regardless of whether you are there engaging. It was also suggested to not focus too hard on the platform; focus on the influencer and it will get where it needs to go.

The afternoon sessions was on: “Applied Social Media in Business” – monitoring, measurement, development. First up was Jon Ingham who talked about your business as an orchestra: HR, PR, marketing communications, social media, management, organisational development, facilities design, and leadership. All of these must harmonize in order to achieve results. Charlie Osmond later added that the key opportunities to social media are insight, innovation, advocacy, transparency, increased sales, and support. But we should remember, we “are not monitoring’s bitch!”

The fabulously frank Joanne Jacobs snapped us out our post-lunch lull with a clip from Wall Street. “Greed is… good,” says Gordon Gecko, but “Gecko is dead,” asserts Jacobs. She also delivered the much tweeted statement for the day that “social media doesnt make money — it saves money.” Oliver Blanchard also chimed in with a similar sentiment that there can be great cost savings in providing customer service via social media, and this helps with revenue. He also said that social media ROI is over-rated. Ged Carroll from Ruder Finn called it ROE, Return on Engagement, which seemed to be a better guage of measurement, along with hitting benchmarks and spotting opportunities.

Microsoft PR Manager for the UK, Steve Lamb, contributed some great points about PR and its role in controlling a message. PRs can only write nice things in they have the access to the right information and tools, but there is a fine line about they approach people who are passionate: do not spam them! Steve used an example of the brand he liked, so he tweeted about it. Soon after, he started receiving messages from the brand and as a result he is going off of them. Know when to engage, because the wrong engagement can harm.

Benjamin Ellis brought out some great points for new businesses who might not be sure about the benefits of social media. Crowds can hatch good ideas, and crowd sourcing for smart solutions is like unpaid outsourcing. He also talked about decentralization and how the information degrades as you pass through layers, but social media helps flatten it out. By aggreatation, you will be able to see all the answers. Ben also brought up a point about giving away free stuff online. So many brands are doing it, but what happens when they stop giving free stuff: they lose their audience. Brands should not reward for behavior they dont want to reinforce.

The final speaker of the day was SEO smarty Judith Lewis from i-level who gave a talk about search results and the importance of knowing what is being said about you, but also how search results can affect or confuse your audience. You need to be unique, valuable and identifiable.

After another short panel that included an incredibly off topic, and dare I say off-color, question that ended the day with passionate statements, it was off to hotel bar to wind down from a long day.

I have been debating on my overall opinion of the event. I’m not quite sure I would buy into (meaning actually paying for) another social media conference unless it offers very new information with actual examples that show what works or doesnt work and why. I think this particular conference had a real opportunity to teach businesses who are new to or wanting to get into social media. It was too bad that there were not more people there to learn.

Thanks again to Andy from LBM who gave me the ticket to attend. Thanks to the SMIB09 Sponsors: Edelman and Viadeo, with special thanks to Ipadio for picking up the WiFi tab after hearing the general cries about it not being freely available at the venue. To all the speakers, thank you for your time and insights. For more information on the event, please click a link below.

SMiB09 Presentations: Slideshare

SMiB09 Photos: Flickr set

What Google said: http://bit.ly/2B91f5

Next year’s event is being held on the 21 May 2010 in London and you can secure your tickets by registering here.

LBM Poems

A little while ago I discovered that LBM regular Godwyns was a poet, writing somewhat fruity verses on his blog Fictional Writings. Now before you read on, I should add a parental advisory warning, like I say it is a bit fruity.

Anyway, thanks Godwyns for writing our very first LBM poem..!

Coitus blogging

A gathering like a hatched plan
to mate and mingle
colours, creed, opinions, subjects.

Perverted with differences
like dissimilar cocks’
races foiled on the world

blogger sounds like blowjob
whores of different trade
agents of all

the Doggets, Verve, Diago
alleys or brothels?
Hotels or offices

easy access to the preys
the audience and customers
clienteles with no ID

but freedom we promote
knowledge we pursue
informatiom we spread

a community desired
like the host of unallocated heavens
like the chariots of imagination

next meet, more free drinks?
newer faces, more ideas
sponsors wanted!!!

I did say it was fruity…

Guest Post – The Future of Social Media

On the 29th January 2009 Internet World ran a one day conference hosted by the “social media elite”.

For those of us working within the social media sector the hot topic at the moment is how can we effectively measure and monitor the impact of specific social media campaigns? This is currently the sectors Achilles’
heel and I hoped that Vicky Brock the board director from the Web Analytics association would help shed some knowledge on social media best practises etc.

Initially I was a little disappointed that she did not delve into a list of tools that she currently uses to benchmark, monitor and track her own social media campaigns. However Vicky did pull a fluffy white rabbit out of her hat when she informed the floor that the World Bank had released its open source BuzzMonitor code on their CRS site. This was a subject that I knew nothing about. We at Nitro Mobile have since downloaded the code are looking to build upon its infrastructure in the next month or so (I will let London Bloggers know once the tool has been completed for you to have a play with).

Cesar Mascaraque the MD from Ask.com Europe brought some interesting key points to the conference. This includes stating that he sees a future in vertical search and that he is currently looking to purchase vertical search engines in key sectors.

All of the speakers without exception were excellent and many highlighted interesting points as they delved into their own compelling case studies. However many of the discussions were extremely basic and rather then looking at “the future of social media” we were often left reminiscing on what has already been. It also really grinds my gears when a speaker asks the floor to “put your hands up if you are on Twitter…….OK, OK….. put your hands up if you are tweeting now…”. Two separate speakers started their presentations with this statement!

In reflection, the event was informative and I think that everybody who attended came away with a better insight into how they can apply social media marketing more effectively. From a personal perspective a few key points aided my research and made the day well worth attending.

Written by James Norris, Strategist at Nitromobile Ltd

Guest Post – The Science of Blogging

The kind offer to post here (thanks Andy) is very timely for me. Recently, much of my energy has been abducted by a challenging blog-related issue at my new job. One of my new charges – the crowdsourced scientific publishers – Faculty of 1000 – want me and a colleague to tell them what to do about blogging. You’ve heard the story before: they’re pretty sure they should be active residents of the blogosphere, but couldn’t easily say why, much less how.

The team is perfectly placed to shine in the blogosphere, having as they do the keys to some really rich content in a specialised field (Biomedicine). However, speaking to a few of them, it didn’t take many grins, frowns and sucked teeth to discover that amongst them is a scarcity of paid-up believers, an encouraging number of fence-sitters who seem willing to be convinced, and a handful of true doubters.

It seemed quickly obvious that the “How” will never be of interest if not pre-empted by the “Why”. In order to win over a small number of the team to becoming our keen bloggers, we need to justify the effort, and this proof should be founded upon a few digestible benefits, backed-up by real examples. I see these benefits being:

• Getting into dialogue with an influential audience

• Exposing and immortalising your current thinking, rather than letting it be lost

• Feeling the personal rewards of the very exercise of writing

• Presenting the otherwise unknown human face of the organisation

The How – the sustainable process – will only work if we can evangelise each potential new writer to the mindset and culture of blogging. I want to find, a few weeks down the line, people writing posts and commenting on external blogs without prompting; enjoying doing so. We’ve invested in some complex, enterprise-level platform with which to manage our blogs and I pray it will be easy to use, otherwise it will be a huge task to empower our writers to get going. Once they start I’m sure some support will be needed at first but I hope to let go and watch them run with it.

With the likelihood of starting with a negligible audience, there could be a feeling of “what’s the point?”. With the sensitivity that comes with corporate publishing, especially when it’s this specialised, editorial inertia could grind us down. Lastly, few time-poor executives find it easy to generate interesting commentary regularly or, worse, may feel compelled to post “safe”, self-promotional company news which no-one wants to read.

The plan is to invite anyone interested to a workshop, which my cohort and I will host once he joins me from his previous post, being, thankfully, a blogger and scientist in Oz. By sticking to good reasoning, presenting examples, and if the tools are usable, I can’t wait to see each new blogger finding that enlightening moment when a well-placed comment evolves into a conversation with someone they respect.

That’s our starting point, in summary, in theory, with faith. Fingers are crossed. We’re writing the workshop at the moment but this is all new, certainly to me, so we’re working it out as we go. If you’ve done this before, or feel like you should have, speak up. In any case, I hope to report back once we’re on the other side.