Day 1 Write Up – #iStrategy Conference London

The iStrategy Conference is taking place over the 22nd and 23rd May at the home of Chelsea FC, Stamford Bridge. It boasts a fantastic line up of the most innovative speakers in social media and looks at the digital strategies needed to maximise your social media growth over the next 12 months.

My Key Takeaways From Day 1 of iStrategy

The Social Media Brandsphere

Brian Solis, Altimeter Group | @briansolis

All media strategies will now focus and pivot on engagement and clicks to action (frictionless sharing)

The medium is no longer the message (don’t place too much emphasis on the platform but instead focus on the message)

The evolution of social media is progressing at a rapid rate

Lack of fan engagement is a reflection of how businesses nurture social communities – it takes purpose and commitment

Likes and views mean nothing without an experience or outcome

When brand posts constantly it’s overwhelming to customers and they feel spammed, not engaged (this is the biggest cause of lost ‘likes’ on a brand page)

Think beyond content calendars with your social strategy (and do your research to share information that’s not in the public domain)

Brands that create, post and share compelling content get the most from social (context, not content is king)

Now is the time we are seeing the rise of connected consumerism

Social media is an emotional landscape

Think through click to action and redesign the experience and click path for social – this will create a meaningful, interesting experience that people want to share Facebook is going mobile (half of users view on a mobile device) – hence the Instagram acquisition

The message is the medium now

Medium’alism – is when there is to much emphasis on the platform and not enough emphasis on the message

Social media and total internet usage are continuing to grow rapidly

Mobile and QR codes represent huge new opportunities

Great content is consumable. However great social content needs to be consumable and shareable Keep headlines to under 140 characters to encourage easy sharing

Remember RRS as even the best tweets last around an hour or so (relevance, resonance and significance)

Social must be measured by resonance but also reach and ultimately outcomes

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel

Mobile-First: Exploiting The Potential Of The Mobile Economy

Panel Session with Alison Fennah, IAB | @IABEurope, Adam Graham, Weapon7 | @AdamGraham, Wayne Morris, Maxymiser | @mvt_expert, James Davlouros, MasterCard | @james_davlouros, Brian Solis, Altimeter Group | @briansolis –

We all know mobile is growing at a huge rate

Put the consumer at the heart of content creation

There is a lot of data online on your consumers and what they want, use these social insights to create shareable content for mobile

Get this data and insight from your web analytics software Harness social insight to improve user experience

Think about the location and the mobile elements when creating content

Set clear KPI’s specific to you and your engagement goals for mobile, not your competitors

Smartphone are only used 40% of the time as a traditional phone, the other 60% is used for activities such as social engagement and other capabilities

Whether your B2B or B2C think of the people at the end of the experience (the consumer)

Ensure you have a mobile website, regardless of whether you have an app or not Apps and a mobile site should be seen as complimentary is the

Social Signals Training: Top Training Tips For Maximising SEO and Social Synergies

Adam Skalak, iCrossing | @adamskalak

We are seeing the growth of social search, who you know changes what you get

SEO has traditionally been technical, on page, content and reputation

Reputation has traditionally been links, whereas it’s now links and social signals

Social signals can be qualitative and quantitative. What matters are the qualitative measures, I.e. the authority of the people sharing your content and the people in your circles

Don’t focus too heavily on quantitative measures

Bing uses Twitter and Facebook as a direct connection, and publicly available Google + data

Google use all direct Google + data as part of their ranking algorithm and publicly available data from Facebook and Twitter

Google + involvement is essential for SEO on Google

Link Google + to your businesses places profile Organic rankings with +1 annotations see a 5%-20% uplift in CTR Organic listings with +1 shares can see a 20% ranking improvement

Create both essential content (service descriptions) and shareable content (infographics, white papers, etc)

Use OpenSiteExplorer.org to identify the most popular content on a site, and optimise it

Facebook is going to hit one billion users in the summer

Segment content by audience, i.e. information (existing and new customers) and promotion (which sites will share your content)

Once you’ve created and published your content, promote, engage and monitor the signals

Monitor via Analytics the users hitting your site on the keyword ‘not provided’ and also users with a Gmail address (typically 10%-15% of visitors)

Ferrari and Starbucks are two of the most popular social brands

Links will remain the main ranking factor for a couple of years yet, especially in industries like finance; however social signals will continue to become more and more important

Always add social sharing buttons to your website

Protect your Google+ space and be active Use social reports in Google Analytics to track success

Ensure search, content, PR and social teams always work in collaboration

Twitter: Turning Followers Into Profit

Bruce Daisley, Twitter | @brucedaisley

Twitter see themselves as an information network, not so much a social network

You may not have a strong relationship with people you connect with on Twitter

On Twitter you connect through interests

40% of Twitter users never tweet, 60% tweet, 100% listen

Twitter now has 140M+ users

Twitter has 10M+ active users in the UK

Twitter is mobile first; 80% of active UK users use Twitter on a mobile

They plan to monetize the platform through advertising (promoted ads)

They see a 1:3 engagement on their promoted ads

Ads can be targeted to people that have displayed an interest in the DNA of your brand

Engagement rates on Twitter are 1%-3% as opposed to 0.5% from traditional display

Competitions that require a simple RT can get up to 25% of viewers to RT. For example the launch of #wispagold did this and gave away boxes of Wispa Gold to encourage users to share

Use a hashtag for your campaigns to hold a conversation together and get something trending (however trending is unlikely due to the stature of the high impact top 10 stories)

Average email takes 2 days to be opened The average text message takes 4 minutes to be opened

Twitter bases it’s success on this effective means of communication with 140 characters, not dissimilar to an SMS at 160 characters

Starbucks gave away free latte on a Wednesday and 70% of people who saw the tweet retweeted it to their friends, giving huge brand exposure

Tweets have a very short lifespan, typically a maximum of a day

Always aim to gain endorsement and RT’s from high profile, key influencers within your industry to gain awareness and traffic

Social Media Marketing: What Works Today and What’s Needed For Tomorrow

Doug Laird, CMO, Wildfire | @DougBytes

Wildfire are the largest provider of social media marketing software with 15,000 paying customers and 300+ employees

30 of the worlds top 50 brands use Wildfire

Facebook chose Wildfire for social media marketing

Three types of media are ‘Paid media’ (TV, online, print), ‘Owned media’ (your website, Twitter profile) and ‘Earned media’ (shares) which Wildfire focus on building

Pick your favourites, quizzes and trivia to create the most social shares

Coupons, giveaways and sweepstakes yield the highest entry rates

From a Wildfire study quizzes, coupons and giveaways drive the highest conversion rates

They find 3% of campaign entrants will drive 100% of additional engagement

Fans are faceless – we need to shift from posting to faceless fans to real people

We can see this through progressive social profiling across all social networks and by monitoring behaviour

We target and acquire fans, engage them, then share and convert

Don’t send the same generic message to every platform, tailor your brand message to each social platform

Social powers the customer life cycle, from from initial awareness to support and loyalty

Social is ‘word of mouth’ at huge scale Word of mouth scored 92% on the Nielsen Trust Index

More Than Just A Resume – Maximising LinkedIn For Social Media Marketing

Neal Schaffer, WindMill Marketing | @nealschaffer

LinkedIn is a serious business network. Facebook is the fun network

LinkedIn is the 12th most visited site in the world Linked in has 38M+ European users

UK is number 2 worldwide with 9.6M users on LinkedIn B2B business has B2C components 28% of LinkedIn users earn 98k+ per year

LinkedIn was built on top of a search engine for user profiles

Lead generation can be achieved through search engines (groups, answers, profiles) and ads

Make sure your profile is 100% complete

Be real (full name). Be complete. Be branded. Be searchable (include relevant terms in your description). Be recommended (at least 3 recommendations)

Consider aligning your location and industry with those of your clients

Connect with all colleagues, partners, professional associations, classmates, friends, family and networking acquaintances

Use introductions, groups, status updates and InMail to gain new connections where appropriate, also adjust your contact settings to make it easy for people to connect

Common connections are important to add credibility, establish a robust base of connections

There are 1.1M LinkedIn groups

The biggest group has 650,000 members (job openings)

You can message all users in a group where appropriate if you have a group (don’t spam)

Group involvement yields business

No edge rank on LinkedIn so all status updates will appear to all users you’re connected too

Use ‘LinkedIn Today’ to see what’s being shared in your industry to get new content ideas

LinkedIn Ads have low CTRs but can yield high quality leads, as users are not specifically seeking a service like they would be when searching on Google

Point LinkedIn Ads to your company page to build brand awareness and a bigger following Integrated Tweets leads to more Twitter followers

Data and Creativity: The Near Future Of Display Advertising

Michael Steckler, Criteo | @criteo

200 billion hours a year are spent watching TV by US adults

The creative industry must use data and social insight to support

Display “If data is the new oil, creativity is the new drill” – Robin Wight Acquisition channels are mostly retargeting and up to 80% of post click sales come from active users

Become customer centric and dynamically segment your audience based on users engagement and only pay the right price for each user

Search takes ‘intent’ data and delivers a dynamic response. It can then be optimised

Display takes ‘intent’ data and now follows the same process as search

Criteo monitor browsers and track their user profitability, they then determine which personalised content to show them and provide product recommendations and display images

Display is personalisation at scale

Retargeting is transactional but also has brand building benefits

Price changes, recommendations, messaging (free shipping etc) and the power of the brand are key to an ads success In travel 55% of transactions were for products customers didn’t originally browse, they were complimentary and relevant

Sequential retargeting provides the ability to show different pricing and discount options to prospects depending on how engaged they are with your brand

A case study for Coast showed an initial return of £15 for every £1 spent, this increased to £18 for every £1 spent after optimisation EU privacy directive won’t affect Criteo/Display too much as they don’t collect personal data (PII) that requires explicit consent

The Social Club, With Adam Burns

Adam Burns, MeetTheBoss.tv | @adamrobertburns

Adam hosted a session with the first guest, Gillian Muessig, Former President, SEOmoz | @SEOmom

Gillian started SEOmoz with Rand Fishkin and over the past 5 years, the effective use of social has been a key driving force in the company’s growth Social gets interesting when you host the conversation and are the central point for discussions within your industry (for example on your website or blog), not when you get a certain amount of followers or build your individual profile

At SEOmoz their community manager informs the business on what decisions should be made moving forward through listening to social (I.e. New tools)

Some social media is hard to justify in terms of ROI. ‘Mozcation’ was a very expensive exercise and was an example of social not paying

Second guest, Kerry Bridge, Social Media Manager, Dell | @kerryatdell

Dell is a very social businesses

Dell train all staff on how to use social for business and encourage it

Dell get around 26,000 social mentions a day

They developed an internal platform to listen to what people are saying about Dell across multiple languages they keep user experience and the customer at the heart of everything they do

They also look long term with social, not short term

Third guest, Azeem Azhar, CEO, PeerIndex | @azeem

PeerIndex worked with Reebok to identify advocates of particular sports and used them to help promote relevant products (for example ultra marathon runners who use social regularly to review, try and promote running shoes anyway)

Identify people that are likely to talk about your product even before they’ve bought it

Engage with all users both positive and negative

Use social as a more economic support method over more traditional methods such as call centres

A final statistic:

“57% of companies who invest in social business outperform their peers” – IBM

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have anything to add, or why not follow Rob on Twitter for regular updates.

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