I just got back from the Social Media Strategies Summit on Las Vegas, a great event put on by GSMI. Our VP of Strategy and Account Services, Paul McClay and I
presented on “How to Create Content That People Want to Share” to a highly engaged group of people that are all doing some amazing things in the social media space. We talked a lot about how creating shareable content really starts with understanding your audience, understanding their persona, and realizing the core needs that sharing content really helps to satisfy. We used some great examples where we have been successful with this like HBO’s Trueblood campaign, Coke’s Happiness Machine, and our collaboration with Facebook on the Timeline Movie Maker project.My main take away from this conference is that there is still a great deal of resistance to the idea of social media being effectively used as a core communications tool in a lot of larger organizations. People in this field still struggle to get the budget, commitment, and trust from their organizations to effectively wield the tool. There was a lot of conversation around the role legal reviews play in trying to protect companies who are in his space.
One of the best analogies I heard was from Jason Seiden from Ajax Social Media, who equated the current social media revolution to the period following the invention of the Gutenberg press…a time of significant change in how people communicated, how information was distributed, how we consumed information, but also a time of much uncertainty, doubt, and fear. The analogy did a great job of demonstrating how that fear of the unknown and fear of change in people’s roles and responsibilities is very similar to what we see today with social.
Jeffrey Hayzlett did a very inspirational key note, reminding us that as marketers, it’s our JOB to push our companies to the edge, and reminded us it’s legal’s job to keep us from
falling off that ledge. Hayzlett’s stories of his time at Kodak also did a great job of demonstrating how we, as marketers, still lose sight of the forest for all the trees. The other hot topic of conversation continues to be around measurement…how can companies measure the impact and ROI of their social media efforts? What are the right KPIs for measurement? How do you target the right audience to the impact of your efforts? Is ROI even the right measurement to be using? I’m not sure anyone came to a consensus as there was much debate over the many theories and approaches put forth by the presenters.
All in all, a great conference, that filled the tank of inspiration and was a great setting collaborate with others in the industry for new perspective and fresh ideas.
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