#smlondon

Last week’s #SMLondon Live event hosted at Rich mix in Shoreditch saw several hundred social media managers, marketing managers, community managers, social media strategists from agencies and brands alike pack into the trendy London location armed with numerous mobile and tablet devises, spare chargers and some thought provoking questions for the speakers of the day.

For me, the three key, and re-occurring topics and trends to come up were data, community building and social stakeholders – Aligning social planning with all key business stakeholders, and moving the function beyond marketing to really start to add value across the business at all touch points.

So, 3 nuggets from the Day:

1) Data:

Pearl of ‘data’ wisdom of the day came from Twitter’s @TariqSlim. Alongside an impressive intro to Twitter’s latest ad units he tabled Twitter’s  #EverydayMoments - https://moments.twitter.com

 This tool is an interactive visualisation that shows tweets about everyday moments in the UK & Ireland over a typical week.

For our teams, who are working across various FMCG snack food products it was surprising to see the conversation around chocolate for example, explode after 8pm.  No more assumptions from our community managers that the best time to join that conversation is in the post work lull at 2pm – This data, although still in BETA, and with a limited repertoire provides some tangible insights into consumer behaviour to help us refine and target our conversations, ensuring maximum relevancy and engagement.

  2) Community Building:

Nancy Kinder from FeverBee spoke around how to grow a community.

 A women after my own heart, her opening slide focused on the need for research, research and research and putting the ‘would be community’ at the heart of the planning phase.

   3)      Social Stakeholders;

The guys from SocialBakers presented a session around the evolution of businesses to meet today’s social challenges (and how their nifty tool is helping some of the world’s biggest brands do this).

The stand out point here, was about defining a channel strategy, based on the business objectives first.  Again nothing new, but great to see it being championed.

As a channel, social is now, like it or not, fully entrenched within all key areas of business from customer service and sales to marketing. The channel choice can no longer be made based on what’s new and shiny or where people will expect the brand to be. It needs to be a strategic decision, made top down by social specialists who are working closely with key senior stakeholders across the board to create commercially viable social presences.

If it remains firmly within marketing, the true potential will be increasingly hard to unlock and the value of social near impossible to articulate.

  All in all a good day with some smart people. We’ll look forward to #SMLondon Live 2015. 

Carli Goodfellow - Director of Digital Influence

Salesforce is a big hit. They’re a global CRM company listed on the NYSE who came first on Forbes ‘Most Innovative Companies 2013’ for a second year running.

It’s a convoluted cloud-computing company to examine. Look for a simple breakdown on Wikipedia and you find the caveat “This article may be confusing or unclear to readers”.

At a recent Social Media London session, @MarianCramers gave us a quick rundown on the ‘Marketing Cloud’ product she works on at Salesforce. See this youtube video on it. 

You’ll have to look through the Salesforce website to delve into their offering, as it’s huge, but what I did find was that there is a lot a social media person can take from their success stories and case studies. With a massive spectrum of clients (GE, Virgin, Ford, and pretty much everyone) and the acquisitions they have made (Radian 6 just to name one), there’s a lot of pies for a multitude of fingers.

Social Media London’s May talk was about the #SocialMedia efforts of small business insurance firm Simply Business with Jasper Martens.

The first thing to notice was that he had patent leather indigo shoes.

Is that the display of a man who wants to click his heals to find his home on social? If it is, he’s being very practical about it, working with a crew of helpful sidekicks, travelling the yellow click road of authentic links.

To be clear, there were two points:

Be true to your brand. Know your values and what you stand for then support that with simple truths that reflect your brands beliefs on the platforms that suit your values.

Make big content pieces peppered with bite size content and post regularly on the carefully chosen platforms.

Since Google’s Panda and Penguin validation iterations, the Simply Business social approach has mollycoddled content and link creation, encouraging Google to recognise them as authentic, and earning a push up search rankings (even outranking Mashable on the ‘Social Media Guide’ search term!)

This drive for authenticity is reflected in the titles of their staff; digital expert, coordinator, analyst, communicator, product expert. These role titles are the actual contribution from each person getting good work done, without the need for a social media ninja or a content marketing evangelist.

To follow the yellow link road…

You’ll need to have heart:

Write about topics that you and your team would like to know more about

Make sure you respond to comments on the guest sites

You’ll need brains:

Simple observations have been Simply Business’ best assets, difficult subjects didn’t fare as well

Follow a process – Have a content meeting. Write a piece on a timely topic. Send it to editors with the hope of getting a link from them

A Google+ page and filmed Google hangout will please Google (always good for ranking) and give you video content for YouTube if you use it

Infographics are interactive and have to be embedded when used by others, which will link back to you

Time your various posts (they only use Hootsuite at the moment)

You’ll need courage:

Go Big! Their eight big content pieces have generated 840,000 visits to their site in a year

Decrease your spend with your PR agency to cover costs

When trying to convince others this journey will get their business the traffic they seek, show them the numbers of the natural search and SEO as current quotes levels. Let them know big content campaigns don’t actually cost that much to produce. Do something safe for them and see the increase in traffic.

If they want to focus on sales and acquisition, click your heels three times, tell them they’re living in black and white, and technicolour is the only way to go!