The interesting thing about social media is the breadth of areas within an organisation that it can touch. Unlike some marketing initiatives, which are all about a campaign, social media tends to be more about the relationship and the dialogue that customers (and potential customers) have with a company and each other in relation to a company.
These touch points might be in the corporate communications department, the call centre, sales, customer support, the list goes on. Social media is a two way channel of communication … like the phone. It requires both a proactive approach and the ability to respond rapidly to events as they unfold. It requires the ability to listen to conversations that you might not previously been aware of and it involves empowering but managing the voice of your employees in the social media space.
For many organisations this is scary and the last thing that they want is to engage in a conversation with a customer who might say something bad about them. In many cases, it seems easier to do nothing at all rather than navigate their way through a series of complex decisions that make the legal department turn blue. The truth is however, whether you are part of the conversation or not, people are talking. Whether you want to participate is really about just how deeply you want to bury your head in the sand.
Assuming you are ready to start the conversation, the next step is to figure out a strategy and what tools you should use to do it. This can be extremely confusing and frequently, the ROI is difficult or impossible to directly measure.

The financial services and insurance industries are amongst the most sophisticated digital marketers in the industry however they also face some of the greatest challenges in social media. First because they are the big targets for complaints and secondly because they are traditionally some of the most conservative in terms of risk aversion.

Magda will be leading a really practical session at ad:tech on how to use all the tools that social media has to offer. It promises to be a really interesting session.

What do you think? Is this something that marketers in Australia still need to learn about? Are there particular elements of this that are more pressing?

I was on a panel at Ad:tech on Tuesday talking about ‘The Importance of Digital Strategy’. A pretty broad question I know, almost like the importance of digging foundations for a massive skyscraper. But with the help of Kate Tee (Diageo), Stephan Gervois (NRMA) and panel leader Ben Cooper (The Population) I like to think we managed to put together something that was of interest. Thank you guys, it was a pleasure.

One of the things I wasn’t quite ready for was the sheer vulnerability you now have as a speaker these days. Not only do they rate you with a little black box, you have to sit there thinking, ‘shit am I going to get in the neck from the Twitterati just because I said if you have thousands of followers it doesn’t mean you are engaging’. That aside I thought it did enhance the experience overall, even if 90% of people were in the classroom and 10% were behind the bike sheds saying that Sharon from class C5 had big ears.
Anyway with it all still fresh in my mind here are my thoughts.

Keynotes
Nick Brien from Mediabrands was excellent and probably the best presentation of the whole two days. I particularly like his view on the R word. Not recession but reset. This is the opportunity for brands to start doing things how they should be done.

The Social Media Debate wasn’t much of a debate, but Jenny Williams did a very good job of leading the discussion. Very interesting to see how they plan on engaging brands now and in the near future. I particularly liked the idea of approaching them for their capability around the whole package rather than just as another ad channel. I think that was the guy from Bebo.

The other ones from Kodak and BBC were a bit disappointing, the former the evolution of Kodak, the latter a bit too much of a sales pitch.

Panels
Integrating social media into your marketing plan
Well articulated although I was a bit disappointed with the case study used. IMHO it didn’t really demonstrate a good use of social media. It was essentially a Facebook app, a voucher and some banners. It also felt like a bit of a sell from McCann who couldn’t help but tell the audience that no one else in the room has done such a great Facebook app like them.

Specialist vs. Generalist: Uncovering The Best Of Both Agency Relationships
Probably one of the only panels I saw that really started to disagree with each other. There was never going to be an answer on this but I enjoyed Mike Zeederberg from Profero and Fionn Hyndman from DGM duke it out.
Fionn: “You wouldn’t go to a GP if you had something severe that needed treating would you”
Mike: “You would if you wanted a long life, good health and well being”

Effects Of Transparency: Cash For Comment And The Dark Marketing Debate
An entertaining show put on by Julian Cole and some good case studies of failures. Probably didn’t really get going until the audience questions but full marks for bringing the 50mins to life a bit. I was flagging a bit by this stage of the day.

The Relevance of Twitter
Gavin Heaton and Mike Hickinbothan from Telstra/Bigpond were both very good and were the only ones that took it out of the ‘what is Twitter’ territory into the ‘why it’s relevant’. Jye Smith did a good job leading the panel and getting amongst the audience.

How to engage consumers online?
I really liked the case studies particularly from Clemenger and Edelman, although it was too much like a presentation of work than a discussion. It was however one of only a handful of sessions to actually show digital creatively and the effects of it living outside of the web.
In fact thinking about this, if you rounded everyone up who attended, took their brains out and put them all into one person with a massive head, it would walk anti-clockwise all day long. The first questions from the audience in almost every session were ‘How much did it cost?’ and ‘How many sales did it generate?’

Online Metrics: What, How And Who Should Care
A good panel, that gave a good insight into what is important to their businesses and very well moderated. I did feel leaving like it was all about just measuring sales, reach and frequency. If everyone measures the same things don’t we all just say the same thing, to the same people in the same places?
I would have liked a rogue in here to push a few buttons. Brian Fine of STW Insights did briefly ask the panel what was the difference between their metrics and KPIs although it wasn’t quite picked up.

Measuring social media
This had a very good panel broaching a very difficult subject. Very different from the session prior in that people like Stephen Collins emphasised the need to be people focused and consider quality objectives and qualitative methods, not just the numbers. Iain McDonald led the panel well, although I would say that I sit next to him.

http://thecommunicationsroom.com/2009/03/12/thoughts-on-adtech-sydney-2009/

The dust has now settled a little on last week’s Ad:Tech conference here in Sydney and I have had a chance to catch up on some work, reading and even a little writing.

There have been some great summaries and wrap-ups of the event – which has been very useful – particularly as there were three concurrent streams running at any one time. So, despite missing out on two-thirds of the conference, I can still glean a little of the proceedings thanks to the blogs and Twitter streams of other attendees. (Neerav Bhatt has a great overview of the Twitter stream and Jenny Williams sums up the even on the Ad:Tech Brain blog.)

Both Ben Shepherd and Mark Jones provide great overviews of day one; and Carl Moggridge breaks down the sessions.

For my part, I thought that the keynotes could have gone deeper. Nick Brien from MediaBrands took the big picture approach and got the day rolling. He suggested that “Marketing 3.0” required adjusting to some new realities – but did not take the opportunity to delve into the agency world to suggest how these new realities may play out. I did think this was where the speech was going, but I was wrong. However, he did remind us all that “Promotional driven marketing opens conversations and broadens appeal of your brand” – something that is too easily forgotten in the rush to produce the next glossy TVC or shiny website.

On the second day, Kim Niblock, MD of BBC.com promised much but ended up delivering what was mostly a media kit for their new site. They had done some nice work on attitudinally profiling their audiences – but that really was to be expected from a quality outfit like the BBC. It will be interesting to see how robust this commercial foray will be for the BBC. I am sure the ABC will be watching closely too.

The social network panel with representatives of all the major platforms were interviewed by Jenny Williams. I don’t think I was alone in feeling that Facebook, MySpace, Friendster et al are all beginning to transform themselves into 1990s style portal publishers. Jye Smith suggested that social networks should pay more attention to the thing that made them successful in the first place – the people who use them. As the session closed, I asked whether we would see any differentiating innovation in terms of the platforms or whether they would continue copying each other’s features and functions. And in the last few days, as Facebook’s attempt to out-micro-blog Twitter rolls out around the world, this question seems more pressing than ever. I have a feeling that we will all tire of this cannibalistic behaviour sooner rather than later.

The panel discussions were opportunities for a little more depth. And while there were initial misgivings around the balancing of the conference agenda, it soon became clear that the social media stream was worth it’s weight in gold. Each of the sessions were packed out, often with standing room only.

The digital strategy session ended up being more about the execution than strategy; and the Johnson and Johnson case study while solid, ran in 2007 and felt out-of-date.

Julian Cole and Fake Julian Cole stirred up the audience with some theatrics and audience-directed questioning in the session on “dark marketing”. Of course, the question was raised around the use of fake virals – and the recent work for Witchery by Naked. While the panel seemed to think this was not the way to go for brands, I tend to agree with Iain McDonald:

There are better, bigger, broader opportunities to engage consumers using social media that can still be authentic, mysterious, realistic. Yes it’s a creative challenge but if we can start to get this right there are big wins for consumers, clients and agencies alike.

Jye Smith, Laurel Papworth, Mike Hickinbotham and I spoke about the relevance of Twitter. It felt like it went well, but time flies when you are in front of a room of people … and it felt like we were out of time before we really got going. Jye facilitated the discussion well – diving into the audience to take questions and keep us all in order. Mike stepped us through some of the approaches and lessons they learned from launching the @BigpondTeam on Twitter – fingers crossed his presentation will be shared at some point.

Iain McDonald, Stephen Collins, Lesley White and Katie Chatfield created a powerful buzz when talking social media measurement. “Data is everywhere, but insight is rare”, suggested Katie, while Lesley explained that there should be a focus on the rants vs raves in any conversational analysis. There were some great points made by all the speakers and Katie shared this fantastic presentation on the tools and techniques that any digital strategist will love.

Overall, this felt like a great conference. There was plenty of good discussion and the panels worked well (for the most part) – and the vibe was strong. There were a couple of talks that were borderline pitches, but they were in the minority. I would have liked to have seen more detailed cross-over discussions between traditional advertising and social media – it seems that there are two distinct points of view with a chasm of understanding separating the two. Perhaps then we will see the type of fireworks that we really do need to see to move the industry forward in a meaningful way.

http://www.servantofchaos.com/2009/03/a-personal-take-on-adtech-sydney.html

Today was interesting. I only really saw 2 sessions aside the one I was involved in but I did a bit of watching and tried to capture the overall sentiment from the event.

One thing I have taken out is there is still a monster divide between the ‘technologists’ and the wider ‘advertising’ industry. It’s almost a land grab and I think it’s getting worse. There is so little consideration paid by the digerati to the wider world of communications both advertising wise and non advertising wise that it creates a silo mentality and a feeling that ‘digital is number 1′. IRL (in real life for the non awesome) guys this won’t work … integration is required and I, for one, question how many of you will go with this when the words ‘crowdsource’, ‘the conversation’, ‘dialogue’, ’social graph’ etc are often muttered but never defined nor tied back to business objectives (which are, you know, the reason why clients (ie those who pay us) use communications channels)

Another thing is the digital industry aren’t particularly good generally at answering questions thrown up from the audience. It’s all very prepared. I asked 4 questions over 2 days and none were actually answered. Maybe some should consider politics!

Twitter and Social Media was definitely the main theme but I question how much said around both wasn’t hot air. Yes, social media is important but I feel so much of the conversation around it is so ambigous and macro that it’s almost like people are making it up on the spot.

I think in hindsight Liam and I were a little wrong around the structure of the conference and the mix was about right - so congrats to Jenny and Beth around this. I spoke to a lot of people today and they were happy with how the event flowed. The crowd was incredibly diverse so the agenda needed to be diverse too.

To be honest, I was a little disappointed the panel I was on had to start late due to the previous one going overtime by 10 minutes. I love hearing Laurel Papworth’s voice just as much as she clearly does (don’t worry Laurel, I enjoy the sound of my own voice too) … but it was a bit rude considering it was the end of the day. Once we got cracking I felt we covered some interesting terrain around the importance of professional content and media brands.

The last click attribution session was interesting in parts. Jenny Bewes from Vodafone was exceptional on stage and it was good to get candid conversation from a marketer around the wider mix and how digital fits into all the broad touchpoints from POS to CRM to TV, newspapers, call centre … just great. Michael Buckley from Amnesia was going very well until he started talking about media consumption as a % and media spend % and then he lost me - I hate that comparison as the only media that is disproportionate in terms of more spends is newspapers … but I think perhaps I misunderstood him. I wanted to ask him who he thinks should be tasked with making the wider world aware of click attribution or misattribution but the session was over by then. Michael - that said I thought you were good and it was great to have a smart, clever media guy involved on a panel!

Monetising Social Networks … hrm … I’m not a believer in these slides and have seen them so many times. Also, Arrington isn’t still in Hawaii … he’s back at Techcrunch. I think saying Michael Arrington could create a Murdoch style empire is so off the mark it’s amusing … he runs a blog around start ups with around 1m users globally and an audience that isn’t really the most valuable around … do you realise the magnitude of Newscorp? The guy from Minti was interesting but I think most people were like ‘Dude what is Minti?’

Twitter stream - valuable but maybe too many back seat drivers. Struggled to take much out of it personally but I guess the irony is it’s easier to observe than really participate.

My key takeout - get clients to come next year. Adtech is GOLD for clients but I think sadly not enough were there. Lets find a way to get this content in front of them. I know for 2010 I’ll be recommending we bring along some of our clients at MAXUS as they will get a heap out of it. Beth - send me the dates when you can!

And thanks to everyone who came along to our panel - and thanks to Vivek, Duff and Julian

http://talkingdigital.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/adtech-day-2/#comment-386

1.    Social media is still clearly a subject that interests many people- The social media focused sessions would have held three times as many peoples interest as the others.  Perhaps because it’s new and people are still grappling with how to use it or perhaps because attitudinally, in terms of the way we communicate with an audience, it is the future direction of advertising.

2.    Twitter was the stand out star – The Twitter session itself which was packed to the rafters and received lots of great feedback after the event.  The second standout observation was peoples use of twitter at the event.  Some 4000 tweets (see the adtech stream here )  (standing room only) but because of the active twitter participation we saw by delegates. Lucas Ng put up a list Twitter Usernames .  We were not sure how the three tag system (#atsyd, #atsyd1, #atsyd2, #atsyd3) would work with the different streams but everyone seemed to adopt to on the day and feedback was that it really helped the folks at home follow along.  The challenge for next year (assuming twitter is still the tool of choice will be getting those conversations integrated back into the live conversation in the room.

3.There were alot of industry folks (as in digital industry) who participated either in person or virtually but while we are a growing group, I still wonder sometimes if we are just talking to ourselves…  The mission for next year is to get the traditionalists there.

General feedback I received at the event was good, have received lots of great suggestions and inspirations for next year also.  There are a number of blog posts up about the event and some of the speakers have posted their content.  I’m compiling a list of these for publication here so please let me know if you have posted anything and I will add it to the list which.  Also, feel free to submit it to the brain for the voice of the industry section.

We really want to know what you think, what you loved and what you hated and yes…we have noted the wifi issue.  Next year, we are hoping one of the big telcos will show us how to do it right :-).

Most importantly, we really want to know what we can do to improve so suggestions for next year PLEASE.  Make a comment, send us a post, lets chat.  I will be letting you know what we are thinking and how we are working with your ideas as we get things together for next year.

Thanks to all the speakers who put in the time and effort to contribute to the content.  Thanks to the tweeters who so wonderfully documented the sessions and thanks to the attendees for their time and active participation.

This is a video interview I did with Ben Mangold, Analytics Director with Mangold Sengers who is hosting the “Designing Data Centric Approach to Evolve your Digital Strategy” discussion on the ad:tech program.
Ben

The bottom line is that marketing costs money and everyone is looking to save money. The only way that marketers and agencies will be able to retain and increase their budgets is with hard, definitive proof of what’s working and why.

Many people have predicted that digital marketing will not suffer from the recession in anything like the proportions of the more traditional channels. This we hope is largely because of the infinite measurability we are able to achieve and the very specific tracking that digital enables.
Although many marketers still aren’t analysing at all, some are at least starting on the journey of analysis. Unfortunately once you get into it, you realise that we are capable of producing data at a phenomenal rate, and we have an increasing need to analyse this within shorter time frames. The most important questions then become: what to measure, how often and what tools should you use.

It doesn’t stop there though, there are a plethora of analytics tools available but these also cost money and often measure different things making them hard to compare. Perhaps another question for this panel should be how to measure and justify the ROI on analytics tools themselves.

Let us know any other questions you might have around the subject of data analytics for the panel and we will be sure to include them on the day.

In the mean time, we have some interesting new speaker updates:
Fionn Hyndman, (CEO of dgmAsia Pacific), Jennie Bewes (Head of Online for Vodafone) Anton Sher (Director at Front Foot) and Justin Baird (Senior Product Specialist at Google) have now joined the speaker line up

Also, don’t forget about the competition we are running, submit a question for a panel and get entered to a prize draw, the winner will be announced COB Friday 20th February

Book for ad:tech here

Instant Messenger and SMS always seemed to be complementary to email – the quick chat if your chosen target was online and available at that moment of human interaction need. However if they weren’t there, then email was the logical solution. Heaven forbid a phone conversation – or even walking across the office or upstairs for a face to face!

Just as direct mail had to re-evaluate its role in the communications mix, the time has come for email to do the same thing.

Not only is this being forced by the ease of access through new channels, but equally the wear-out of email. Wear out is not necessarily from a no longer “cool/accessible/convenient” channel perspective, but also from the constant barrage of so called Lottery Success, Viagra (or is that just me?) and the volume of Spam.
Add to this email blasts (implies the wrong thing in itself) from organisations who have legitimately collected consumer data, yet now deliver messages no longer containing meaning, relevance or interest to the recipient.

All of this is playing a role in this time of “recipient consideration” and its impact on channel effectiveness.
From a transactional perspective – there is a comfortable and legitimate fit for email. The online ordering and purchasing cycle is not complete without it. As is registration and validation for a range of online activities.
Perhaps the financial consideration of email being cheaper than traditional direct mail has lulled marketers into a false sense of security.

As production and distribution is much quicker, cheaper and potentially environmentally less wasteful, email databases run the risk of being re-used with monotonous regularity – irrespective of the outcomes of the activity.

Additionally, measuring and reporting on the wrong things such as delivery success and open rates - not sales and leads – does not validate the channel.

Given the economic environment, perhaps even communications that cost “only a few cents” to deliver will come under the ROI microscope. Those activities focussing on greater targeting, more specific and differentiated messaging, with impactful creative and relevant offers coupled with commercial attributes in bottom line contribution will come into play.

The question now is what commercial role can email play or is it now purely functional?

All of the direct marketing fundamentals that saw mail come from the abyss and redefine its relevance in the mix sit there waiting for this channel.

Is that *ding* I hear the sound of the return of email?

One of the cornerstones of any social media strategy is the use of communities to bring people together either to share ideas or to generate content.

When thinking about a social network though, the question is often asked, should a brand build their own community or take part in an existing community like facebook or myspace…or both

Creating your own social network can help with branding, drive incremental repeat visitation to a brand site, provide a direct channel for customer feedback, and will provide a valuable source of insights into your customer base.

There are a number of white label social networks around that help brands get up and running fairly easily without the need to complex technical builds however, building a community is far from straight forward and requires a clear insight into why you are doing it, the different segments that exist in a community and how and why they would engage. It also requires dedicated resources to support the community, consistent focus and a certain degree of critical mass in order to be successful.

The mainstream social networks (myspace, facebook etc.) also represent viable alternatives to building your own. They are becoming more like media properties in that their main power is the number of eyeballs that they attract, the length of time those eyeballs stay on the site and the level of data that the network has on the individual enabling greater levels of targeting to build community rapidly.

While it would seem that most social media strategies need to incorporate a component of both, I am interested in hearing from brands and agencies that have been involved in attempts to build a community around a brand, either in a third party site or in their own environment to understand what the key learning’s and pitfalls are.