SES NY 2009: Day Two Session of the Day - Marketing Jive by Jody Nimetz

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SES NY 2009: Day Two Session of the Day

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Well Day Two of Search Engine Strategies New York is complete and I must say that the morning sessions were much better than the afternoon sessions. A couple of the better sessions included:

Social Media Marketing for Brand Building

How are smart companies using social marketing tools to promote brands and reach out to customers? Is it possible to do so without investing a fortune?

Speakers included:

Dave Evans, VP, Digital Voodoo
Hollis Thomases, Founder, WebAdvantage.net
Harry J. Gold, CEO, Overdrive Interactive

Not sure if a lot of people were out enjoying the New York nightlife after day one of SES, but the first session that I attended on day two was sparsely populated with less than 50 people in attendance, although it filled up after the session started. I thought that maybe it’s that everyone is getting tired about talking about social media (which seems to be a common perception shared by many that I spoke with).

I must say that I find it annoying on how people come to these sessions and are so disorganized. Getting their laptops out, cell phones ringing, digging through their bags to find a pen... Sheesh, drives me nuts.

Dave Evans was up first and discussed the importance of knowing your objective and your audience. He started off by describing the purchase funnel and how you can use social media to actively measure and listen to your audience. I really liked what Dav had to say. Some of the points he mentioned included:

He discussed social analytics to gain info about the audience
Business Objectives – provided examples of how companies are using social media for everything from HR to team member education
Described some relevant uses of social media (facebook, twitter, Y&R video and community example)
Integration is critical – social media support the conversion process; its one component of your marketing toolbox
Showed Brooklyn Museum example (flickr, twitter etc)
Discussed touch points -> viral examples
Leverage your blog
Do not use social media to spam or splog
Made the comment jokingly, “One of the promises of social media is that in 10 years we will have no crappy products”.

Hollis Thomases was up next and she discussed:

Discussed twitter for brand building
Twitter is the 3rd largest social network (Facebook, MySpace)
Estimated 5000 new twitter accounts everyday
Most users access via mobile
Asked shouldn’t you be where your consumers are?
Twitter is not for everyone or every brand, but everyone is a potential listener as a result you need to be aware of your tone.
Corporate or casual. Research is showing that people prefer something that is more personal.
Who will Twitter? – hiring a community manager or employees, or CEO?
User name is important preserve your brands http://twitter.com/yourbrand
Twitter strategy should scale with the size of your business – single, multi-twitter or enterprise-twitter strategy
Success story: Whole Foods – interact with their followers to get feedback from their target market… like a focus group; free research
Success story: Multi-Twitter – comcastcares for rep. management
Success story: Enterprise – Zappos allowing employees to communicate with customers
Example of how Exxon was hijacked onTwitter
Described some tools including:
Tweetscan
Tweetbeep
Twilert
Twollow
Twitterless
URL shortening solutions such as ow.ly, cl.ig, tr.im etc.
Build your follower base – wefollow.com, justtweetit.com, mrtweet.net
Engage your followers – twtqpon.com
Initiate discussions around your brand
Don’t be afraid of negative commentary
Respond in a timely manner
Don’t toot your own horn so much
Don’t link spam
Avoid auto direct messages

Harry Gold was the third speaker and he talked about:

Social media can help build life long connections
Social media is about socializing; embedding your brand into the places where people are already congregating and sharing thoughts. It’s about joining that conversation.
1 person joins and 50 find out, 80, 000 join and 4,000,000 find out
Brand connections to brand evangelism allows you to make peer brand impressions
Facebook Zara fan example
Social media can be overwhelming
Leverage components that apply to you
You need to weave the social Web
Social content + social networks + blogosphere to build your social media platform
Facebook fans pages Harley Davidson example

The other session of the day that was appealing to me was Advanced B2B which I will discuss in another post. As mentioned the afternoon sessions were week. In fact in one of them (which I won't mention by name) four "online experts" could not figure out how to get the slide deck to work. As we say in Canada, it was a little "bush league". Hopefully the sessions will be a little more consistent tomorrow.

Labels: SES NY 2009, social media