Reggie Brandford/CEO, Virtue
Wener Brell/Chief Digital Officer, Red Bull Media House
Eric Hippeau/CEO, Huffington Post
Mike Lazerow/CEO, Buddy Media
Mike Jones/CEO, MYSpace
Jenny Zeszut/Chief Social Strategist, Lithium (part of the acquisition of Scout Labs)
Moderator: Greg Stuart/Global CEO, Mobile Marketing Association
Social Media at Red Bull is about constant permanent conversation. It’s not about setting up a department with 100 people who are doing it – it is about the entire organization doing it.
People who are working in Social Media at the companies that are doing it well – Red Bull, P&G, Starbucks, etc. – have real people trying to respond with a real voice to everything. The mining of the social graph allows brands to respond to what is relevant.
Nirvana is not that you have enough people on the teams to respond – but that your customers are so engaged that they influence the conversation. Brands will start to own their audience networks and start engaging with them on their own terms.
For RedBull social media was a god sent gift. If you decide to engage you have to know the consequences and know there will be bad comments.
How do you quantify value? How much review have you driven divided by the people coming in through twitter. But it’s not the best approach to the medium. Earned/Owned/Paid – yes you can measure. The tools are in their infancy. In 2 years this will be the most measured marketing techniques.
The social page evaluator to show you what the CPM value is of your fan pages. Scaling the listening is easy – how do we scale the engaging? To scale there you need bodies – people to talk and engage. It would be a disaster if you outsourced your customer engagement.
RedBull – the worst thing they could do would be to scare the clients away. Social media is not about giving it to interns, it’s about training the organization in how to respond and how to deal. It’s not feasible to have everyone in one department. Give them tools and train them on the voice. But the organization needs to be trained in how to make content for the social space (AMEN).
Image posts are 82% more effective than text – so train your people to use images. Consumers’ favorite thing about a brand when they engage online is when there is a typo. It makes them believe it’s real!!
Wener suggests that social media is spoken about as a constant when actually it is a wave. We are riding a great wave with Facebook right now, but when it dies down we will need paddle out and find the next wave.
Shenanize 