#somecomms Conference, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester - 3rd March 2011

Notes

Rob Brown / @robbrown
• Ideas are borrowed and shared
• The social media revolution is as significant as the arrival of the printing press
• Social media in the UK is now mainstream: as of yesterday more than half the UK population is on Facebook
• Average Twitter user is 39 years old / Average Facebook user is 38
• If something is interesting it *will* be on Twitter
• The vital ingredients for a great social media campaign: strong news appeal, sharability, tapping into current national mood, speed of response, challenging convention

Mark Jennings / Fresh Networks / @markofrespect
• Location-based: Checking into a store/football stadium/whatever says something about you• Checking in around London, get people to chase the Choos• Social media campaign picked up by traditional media – important that this happens because it gets the attention of the people who you didn’t reach with your social media campaign• Good for brand-awareness – engage people in something fun• Audience – For people who don’t know much about location-based, Facebook Places will be the first place they’ll try it and when that happens it will be huge

Steve Waddington / Speed / @wadds• Blogging – high praise for Wordpress• Blogs give a website more dynamism, energy, keeps it fresh, sharable content and makes it better for SEO• 40+ employees at Speed have blogging written into their job spec. As a result of this, blogging is second nature to Speed staff• Critical thing about blogging – be authentic• Don’t blog if: there are legal issues around being too transparent, e.g., pharmaceuticals companies, or if you haven’t got your tone of voice right

Patrick Altoft / Dir. of Search at Branded 3 / @patrickaltoft / @Branded3• SEO• #Twittition is MASSIVE – in the UK evening (when more people are active in US) someone signs a #Twittition every second• Lots of automation – auto-tweeting, auto-following (2 Twitter accounts)• competwition.com

Paul Fabretti / Origin Creative /• Future of Social Media• Take mobile seriously – interact with website• Social search – Bing already integrates Facebook likes• Buying in a social way is huge – Facebook buying is huge – Facebook allows us to be more social than any other social media platform• Badgeville – rewards you with credit points which equate to currency (Next Web article)• Social TV – whole nations of people are talking to each other via Twitter while watching the same TV show #scd , etc. Programmes are starting to incorporate social elements• As for organisations using social media, remember, it’s not about shiniest new tool, more about understanding behaviours of audiences• Multiskilled staff are now required

Gez Daring / @gezd / KMP Digitata / Manchester Airport Campaign / @manairport• Who does social media sit with at Manchester Airport? Press office? Marketing? Answer is all of them• Organisations need a strategy in place to enable more staff to use social media• Use Twitter for: marketing; PR (breaking news to the Press before a press release is prepared, time-critical events like the Snow and the Ash Cloud); customer service; making friends• Having a presence in social media isn’t enough anymore – give people a reason to follow you, e.g. ‘RT this and you’ll go into a draw to win...’ What does your audience want? • DM ‘FLIGHT + [flight number]’ to @manairport and you’ll have realtime updates about your flight DM’d to you• Twitter – tone has to be friendly, conversational and informative• Support partner organisations – RTing other orgs increases trust in you because you’re not solely pushing your own stuff (self-absorbed)• Responding to negative feedback.. Immediately: ‘sorry you’re not happy, what can we do?’ then do it (online action > offline action). If you deal with the issue well, it’ll turn negative feedback into good PR because your response is seen publicly, RT’d, etc. Remember – people will expect you to respond via the same tool they used. Say on Twitter when you’ll be tweeting, e.g. 8am-6pm, and then bid everyone goodnight for the evening at the end of each day.• Tweets and RTs are faster than news so during snow and ash cloud @manairport became a real news source – to the point where TV news were displaying their Twitter feed live on TV• Twitter – don’t be corporate – talk about things other than your own stuff• Competitions – first to tweet correct answer or 5th person to DM correct answer (obviously auto-follow back has to be in place for that one to work)• What’s the point? Increase trust and awareness of your brand – say something interesting and it will get RT’d.• @manairport is successful because: they break news; they respond; they add value for customers; they have fun while they’re doing all this

Steve Downes / @stevejuice / Juice• B2B, social media is very effective• Quality, not quantity• An organisation’s digital profile is not just its website, or even just its website, its Facebook page and its Twitter account but everywhere that it is mentioned online(Wikipedia)• LinkedIn is the most important platform/tool for B2B organisations• RT influential bloggers – don’t just tweet your own blogs, etc.• Monitoring and measurement needs to start before a social media campaign is launched – set targets for each platform so you have something to aim at and something to measure success against

Simon Butt / University of Nottingham• Low budgets – politics in 60 seconds (YouTube) – challenge• Poverty in 60 seconds?

Panel session – Evaluation and ROI• Think first: what’s the ‘R’ and what’s the ‘I’?• Decide what you want to achieve/measure and use appropriate tools for each specific job• @robbrown: Use Tweetdeck to measure and Meltwater Buzz (paid-for)• @gezd: Google is starting to archive tweets so they’ll show up in searches• Twitter counter – measuring historical followers• Understand each tool’s built-in measurement tools (Facebook Insights, Twitter, etc.)• @wadds: Counting RTs is ok but it’s just a proxy for the outcome and you have to be able to measure the outcome• AVE has been discredited• None of the tools are perfect yet but you tend to get what you pay for• You *have* to have people to apply human intelligence to get useful insights• @stevejuice: in stats, we take it for given that a representative sample if accurate enough to give us a useful picture but for some reason with social media, we’re obsessed with measuring every single bit of data. Plans to get people whose jobs it is to do this with samples.• Define your outcomes for the outset and measure using the most appropriate tool• Is everything conversation now or is everything media now?• Charity – Forever Manchester: build a following/community with people who will become the next generation of stakeholders/givers/customers – this is long-term investment (this is difficult to explain to Trustees!)• For charities, value of social media is direct contact with givers/volunteers/MPs/opinion-formers

British Library / Crowd-sourcing Soundmaps / @britishlibrary @UK_Soundmap• You need to be where the people are: Twitter, Facebook, blog and integrate Web 2.0 into website• By opening up with social media, we’re able to exploit more valuable, professional knowledge than we would ever be able to employ• Crowd-sourcing transcriptions, geolocation data, OCR corrections• Audioboo: YouTube of the spoken word• Archiving sounds by crowd-sourcing

Alison Hook / Coventry City Council / http://Facebook.com/coventrycc• Facebook page - 4th Jan 2010: 527 fans > snow > 18th January 2010 – 11,000 fans (now 17,000 fans)• Used 3 people to run it – one to listen to the radio (news source), one to do Facebook and Twitter (and someone else)• On busiest day, over 200 comments on Facebook in 30 minutes• Radio began to use the Fb page as the source of news• coventry.gov.uk/socialmedia• Flickr – Holds stock photos and images, photos tagged with location• YouTube – Favourite other videos people have made (so you don’t have to produce your own!)• Chief Exec tweets and blogs• Plan for negative feedback? Let it happen and deal with it properly afterwards – the benefits of opening up to positive/negative feedback far outweigh the problems caused by it

Jordan Stone / @jordanstone / We Are Social• Case study – Marmite XO• For a successful campaign, participation needs to be a badger of honour• Tapped into the Britishness of Marmite with an event, asked people to submit evidence (photos/videos) of their love of Marmite to win 200 jars of prototype new flavour. They also had to get their friends to vote for their submission

Chris Reed / @chris_reed / Seventy Seven Social• Case study Nintendo• In digital, brands now have to compete with porn and kittens – not just other brands (@JamieC)• If I tell my friends about you on Facebook, it’s because I love my friends, not because I love your brand• Find your audience’s passion-points

Panel session – Future of social media• Social media will become *media* - the term social media will go away• Who owns social media? No-one and everyone – in last 6 months we’ve finally started to get away from the ‘I must control this’ mindset – not just PR team but PR, HR, even the bloody cleaners.• Freely available wifi / Internet connection needs to improve a great deal and it will• Semantic web• Don’t let our obsession with measurement hold us back when it comes to innovation and creativity• To achieve the necessary buy-in within an organisation, for social media to work in a meaningful way, it can’t sit only with one team, it has to be extended to all staff• Facebook will be whatever you want it to be – an online community that suits you on an individual basis, whether that is work, friends, family, work, shopping, whatever• Facebook’s always been good at keeping the really nasty stuff about the Internet out