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Monthly Archives: June 2011
Takeaways from Social Media Influence 2011
On Tuesday it was the annual Social Media Influence conference in London, the third one I’ve attended and always excellent value in terms of the content and presenters.
This isn’t an attempt at summarising all the sessions, but rather a cherry-pick of the main points I took away.
First of all the issue of social media listening, monitoring and responding. Despite the many listening tools available it’s clear that big brands will face a major problem when daily ‘mentions’ run into the tens of thousands – even if you can filter through them to identify those needing a response, how do you then handle that?
Return of the right brain?
In a recent column in Marketing magazine (‘Marketing’s new mindset’) Andrew Walmsley brought up the left-brain right-brain debate. Marketing is changing, he suggests, from being a campaign-dominated activity to one of ‘continous activity’, thanks mainly to the rise of digital technology which allows for shorter feedback loops and the ability to act in real time. The traditional marketing tactics of repetition and persistence will slowly become obsolete as marketers are now able to measure results immediately and tweak their efforts accordingly.
Although the article claims that marketers “need more than logic to succeed”, it’s not clear what that missing quality is, other than the ability to “manipulate, analyse and understand data in a way that marketers never had to before.” Isn’t that still a reliance on data, and presumably the application of logic/reasoning to that data?
