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? Who is on hand to respond? This point was brought up at the start of the day by Azeem Ahar of PeerIndex, and it came up several times.
Matt McAlister of the Guardian group showed us a beta version of a location based search service called nOtice, which not only tells the searcher what's happening nearby in real time, but it contains a wiki element for you to modify any news story you find, by answering the questions 'does it matter?', 'will people care?' and 'is it true?' I liked that a lot - and did think that very little tabloid news would ever get published if it had to pass those criteria!
Lee Bryant of HeadShift gave a brilliant presentation on Social Analytics and Customer Insight, and he made the point that social media is moving away from the marketing communications department, towards becoming something that whole organisations embrace and take part in managing. He gave the example of Amazon, where 'pods' of employees (called '2 pizza pods' - because if you can't feed the team on two pizzas it's got too big!) are each responsible for their own parallel area of the website, seeing what everyone else was doing rather than working in isolation - "applying many eyes to action". Lee has since posted a great article on the SMI site, definitely worth a read.
Stuart Handley of Dell also looked at the online listening issue - of course Dell is famous for its Global Listening Centre, covering 11 languages and all possible topics ... we learned that @dellcares deals with over a 1,000 customer tweets each week and has an impressive 33% conversion rate from detractors to promoters.
There was much talk of trust (how to develop it, are marketers abusing it, how it seems to go when money enters the equation) and the empowerment of employees to share the responsibility of contact with the outside world via social media - and allowing them to actually SEE what customers are saying.
I had to leave before the end and I gather I missed an interesting session on social content, there's a good article on the SMI site by Bernhard Warner entitled 'Publish or Die - Why brands need an edtorial strategy' which looks useful.
There were many good contributions throughout the day and I particularly appreciated the wisdom of Azeem Azhar, Matt McAlister of the Guardian, Wayne Gibbins of Viadeo, Lee Bryant, Stuart Handley, Chris Reed of Brew Digital and Neil Chapman of Alpha Voice Communications. Thanks Guys.
Oh, and it was great to meet Neville Hobson finally after following him on Twitter for a number of years!
Photo credit: Rebecca Hollis
