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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Rob Arkell
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