Corporate Social Media Summit – Part III

ViralBlog were kindly invited to join the Corporate Social Media Summit hosted in London on the 28^th and 29^th of November. This is the final part of our full coverage of both days.

During day 2 we saw industry leaders from Brandwatch, Siemens and CME discuss some of the hottest topics within the industry right now.

Our report of day two is kindly brought to you by our reporter on the ground, Tom Ollerton – Associate Director at Skyve.

I was unable to catch the first two presentations of the day but I had interesting conversation from the client side perspective with Elizabeth Sanderson from Leeds County Council Marketing Dept on the morning’s speakers.

Sarah’s main take away was that of brands taking on the job of social media themselves and not passing the responsibilities to agencies. She was disappointed on how little closure there was on the subject of ROI and that most of the speakers said that brands should “have a go” and also the conference did not clear up the question of how much resource should be dedicated to a social strategy. This didn’t effect the fact that most conference attendees were positive about using social but not sure exactly what to do moving forward with governance being a real issue and not knowing what to do in the case of an emergency or backlash.

James Simpson General Manager, e-Channels UK and Ireland made an amusing analogy that social media was like organising his 18 year old’s birthday party. What he meant by this was that you can organise and decorate the venue but whatever you do, don’t dance and don’t talk to anyone! He also encouraged the conference attendees not to try and re-invent the wheel with social as organising it isn’t so different to traditional channels. James was also keen to warn of the hidden cost of social media because although entry is cheap, the upkeep of continued conversation has a significant price attached to it. The main upside of successful a social media strategy for James were customer satisfaction and insight.

It was refreshing to hear that Giles Palmer CEO at Brandwatch used the classic @garyvee your mum video to put across the point that social media ROI wasn’t an exact science. He also felt marketing depts should own social media as they are closer to the brand in a way that an agency couldn’t be and that social should be used this way for customer service.

I arrived to chair the questions from the room after Allan Schoenberg, Director, Corporate Communications, CME Group’s speech but with the surprise cancellation of Gail Lyon from Siemens I was sent an email saying “We’re starting without you” so somewhat embarrassingly I sneaked on to the panel after it had started.

The CME Group and their social media strategy were unknown to me having worked with global consumer brands on the whole at my time so far at Skive. But it was great to hear @allanschoenberg, a veteran of successful client side social media present on how it worked for them.

Allan kicked off with “There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” Oscar Wilde

This quote is the foundation of Allan’s social media theory. Basically if no one is talking about your brand, no one has an opinion about your brand. And if they don’t have an opinion about your brand they are just as likely to choose your competitor over you. But if people are talking about your brand even if it is negative then there is an opportunity for your brand to get involved in the conversation and amplify the good and answer the bad.

ROI – for Allan this acronym stands for “Return on Influence” or that the true measure of your social marketing is the reach and depth of its influence and not its direct link to sales. CME’s social strategy brings this approach to life by following four strands:

1) Brand enthusiasm: Turn followers into “fans”

2) Loyalty: Build on service; go to our customers

3) Advocacy: Educate and maintain support

4) Monitor: Issues management in real time

Interestingly Hootsuite sits at the centre of all their social activity giving them a centralised point to interact with their social channels but also to give them actionable insight and metrics into what was working and when. The metrics of this success was largely divided into two camps “attention” metrics such as “likes” “followers” “Comments & Trackbacks” and “influence” metrics such as “social content analysis” “Google page rank” “Know your influential third parties” and “Web traffic analysis”

Allan was keen to demonstrate how his team’s social strategy started with setting clear goals such as “Increase the amount of positive conversations and building influencer relationships” this would fuel activity defined by metrics that covered “Page rank, journalists/outlets, blog links and web traffic”. An “evaluate and repeat” section would follow which would look at “content about CME Group, activity on StockTwits, and website

content from influencers.” Given the nature of the business it is important that regular content is sourced from 3^rd parties but also that it is verified but also repurposed in a story form that was palatable for their audience.

Schoenberg’s presentation showed that CME truly have a grasp of the true nature of how social media works and they were not seduced by social channels. In conclusion was that we are increasingly getting buried under data that will require a flexible and context giving CRM to bring light to it especially in light of realtime data becoming more available. And unfortunately there is no silver bullet and in fact there never has been.

That concludes our coverage of this two day event. We would love to hear your thoughts if you attended this conference or if you noticed anything interesting from our conference. What are the key topics within social for your brand?