So I walk into the office on Monday morning, not in the mood for work.
I have my morning Lucazade. I log on to facebook and notice a colleague checking in at Social Media World Forum on Gowalla.
75 minutes, a frantic cab ride and a full access entry badge blag later, we're sitting in our first forum.
The bad bits first
Unfortunately I want to get some negative comments about the event out of the way so I can relax into the rest of the posting.The location was to small, the WiFi dropped out the whole time and listed speakers we replaced with second rate speakers. I can go on and rant a bit on each point, but why? I enjoyed most of the show.
Now to get on to the good
The best thing about #smwf? The people I met, the bloggers that blogged and the tweeters that tweeted... There were times I felt we were all in a Social Media type "Group therapy".
The most surprising presentation?Sarah Cullen, Head of Events and Engagement at Asda.
Yup you read right, ASDA talking at a Social Media event, hence the "The most surprising presentation". Sarah spoke how ASDA is using social media to promote the brand not only to the consumer but to internal staff as well.
I was very fascinated by something called "the green room" which is basically a employee portal that is publicly available. It host numerous videos of staff neigh colleagues, as ASDA terms them, presenting the latest offers and staff training.
Fascinating stuff, yet somehow evil in its engineering.The most avoided question
The one question that seemed send any presenter into a fit of avoidance:
"How do we measure the ROI of Social Media".Ok admittedly this is a difficult question to answer, yet a few people actually made a decent go at it.
Kerryn Dinsdale Senior PR Manager, Barclaycard owned up and said straight out:
"We do not measuring social media ROI, We rather focus on delivering the message"After absorbing it all, the best answer I could distill out of the waft was:
the best way to calculate ROI is to drive social Media trafic to traditional quantifiable marketing channels.
Presentation that made you feel like you've been hit by a truck
Hats off to Dirk Singer, his presentation was loaded with goodies and he delivered it as if he was drowned in redbull. I don't think I have ever scribbled as fast before.His statistic laden presentation on "The future of newspapers in an online world" can be found here. Not a single mention of tablet's or iPad's, kinna makes me wonder if he is missing a trick. Over all a very good speaker, if a bit on the fast side.
Biggest fail
Chair Paul Armstrong, Director of Social Media at Kindred kept on calling X-factor, British Idol, second only by Martine Edgell from Mercedes Benz with her comments: "My boss does not understand what I do" and then "Don't worry he's not here"which was immediately tweeted, hashtagged and blogged. But don't worry her boss is not on twitter.
Then again it wasn't until your mother started commenting on your facebook status that you realised she even knew how to turn on a pc
Sigh... its always the people who should know better that makes the fail list.
Slickest Presentation
There were many that were really good, but the one that comes to mind is Adam Graham founding partner of the digital agency, Saint. You too can relive the excitement of Adam's presentation The Future Of Social Media And Its Implications For Brands. Now on slideshare.Most prolific tweeter
Was by far dani_dutra She constantly beat me to some juicy tweets.Backchannel
There was a rather large backchannel at the event, well seeing that it is SMWF its not surprising.Some chair's and presenters listened and handled the backchannel admirably. I would really like to see future presenters / presentations leveraging and serving content to the backchannel.
It's a powerful channel that when nurtured can spread the message of any speaker to the four corners of the world, no matter how small the event is.
Best sound bites
Most of these came from twitter so apologies if source is not included- "Control is so 20th century"
- Saint Agency's 4C's of brand social media: Culture, Conversation, Collaboration, Compensation
- Users engage first and refer second. So make sure your content is engaging enough to push referrals.
- Biggest mistake in B2B SM, not having employes authentically connect to customers.
- The more social media feature you add to a network the more sticky the network becomes
- Biggest challenge of social web today is sentiment analysis.
- It's not alchemy: Social media won't turn a bad story into a good one
- Would apear the best way to calculate ROI is to drive social Media trafic to traditional quantifiable marketing channels
- Social media is pushed through from the top before strategies are ready
- 62% of users consult a social media website prior to an online purchase... Chris Tradgett- Buy.at
- Just because u are 22 doesn't mean you get socialmedia & should run the digital engagement strategy
- The "geeks and gurus" hype up social media while the normal people just use it
My favorite soundbite
The "geeks and gurus" hype up social media while the normal people just use it
Best use of the #smwf tag
Surevine latched onto the event tag and gave away a bottle of magnum champers each day to the best Tweet using the #smwf tag.I had a long conversation with them about this as I just could not understand what ROI they were expecting. They were in the SaaS part of the show and footfall was near non existant. So to be honest 98% of Tweeters at the event would not even have been aware of the draw.
The reason I'm classing this as "Best use" is that I thought this was quite clever to piggy back on the event's tag, instead of running the risk of failing quite badly by no one using a tag of their design.
Closing view
There was a lot of talk about "They telling us things we already know", that is true, however they put it in context!
Technology and sentiment towards Social Media is changing on a daily basis. So I challenge anyone to say they are an expert. When it comes to Social Media we are all beginners.
Events like SMWF brings us all together and puts social reality in to perspective. All in all it was a good event and I'll definitely be back next year.
Possible post of interest:
4 comments:
Johan, congrats on the first (mostly) unbiased review of the event I have seen. Most of the coverage has been too negative IMHO. Hard for me to believe that someone is such an expert they couldn't take something new away from 2 days of presentations and opportunities to meet vendors and network with other pros.
I also got lucky enough to see the presentation by Sarah Cullen from ASDA. I wrote on the topic of SM for internal employee communication back in January because I think it's a big missed opportunity for companies. I was so happy to finally see a company doing it in a big way. Let me know what you think of my take on the subject http://bit.ly/bveuVl
I have to disagree that the question of ROI was avoided. I saw a few presentations focusing just on ROI. Geoff Hughes made a pretty good stab at it. Personally I don't think it's that tough of a question if you make friends with folks in the finance department before you start the project. In fact I've been so frustrated with all the fuzzy talk around ROI that I tried to explain it in 140 seconds at a twitter event. Check it out and let me know what you think. http://bit.ly/bTO2IG
Thanks for the great coverage and I hope we get to meet each other in person at the next event.
Thanks Todd, I tried to get it up whole everything was still fresh.
One of my biggest issues in general with social media people is that everyone thinks they know it all, and as mentioned above, it is probably the fastest evolving, form of communications and anyone who is an expert today knows nothing when a new form or trend comes along.
Look at what happened with the "SEO Experts" when google's new algorythm, caffeine, came along. Suddenly no one knew anything.
I'll never say I know it all but I have spend some time professionally in the SM market and I had loads and loads of take away's, especially seeing how other people implement it and their views.
Yes I love the ASDA greenroom concept, I got trapped in it this morning again. For some reason it horrifies me, yet like a bad traffic accident I cant help but slow down to look.
I think its terribly brave to open up the inner workings to the public and I believe that's definably the future of customer centric businesses.
as to the ROI... yes there was some good answers but the ones that could actually quantify it was the people who pushed their social media streams successfully into traditional mensurable channels.
I'll be checking out your 140 second talk and posting shortly
yes we should defiantly meet up at the next event.
I disagree with Todd when he says the reviews were too negative. The show was a bit flat. More so because people can use SM to deal with the dull bits. I do want to thank Todd for the link to his presentation. Well worth the 140 seconds.
Johan - I enjoyed reading the review. It made the show feel more attractive than real life. Maybe this is what the world of augmented reality will be like. Stuff that is a bit dull seems better when you view it through filters.
John Corey
Excellent write up Johan, some of the nuggets you've posted about will help me seek out the content of the presentations that I missed now its up.
One of the biggest fails was that #SMWF clashed with South By South West, which is complete suicide if you are going to try and attempt to attract a global social media audience, and the sister event #CCC (Cloud Computing Congress) clashed with SecureCloud in Barcelona.
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