Social Fresh Charlotte Recap

On Monday, I had the great opportunity to attend the Social Fresh conference here in Charlotte. First of all, thanks to Sports Media Challenge, my company, for paying for my ticket and also to Jason Keath for bring SoFresh back to the Queen City for the second time. I tried not to tweet much during it since I can’t stand when people send hundreds of tweets from a conference mentioning who all they met and what everyone was saying. So, instead, I’ll give you a nice little recap with a few of the highlights. Word on the street is videos and slideshare presentations will be uploaded soon, so I’ll be sure to post links as I come across them.

In each time slot, there were two panels/presentations, so a few won’t be covered here (although I wished I could have been in both at times), but on with the goodness.

Bert Dumars, VP of E-Business and Interactive Marketing – Newell Rubbermaid (slides)

This was the first and one of my favorite panels, mainly because he talked a lot about how social media shouldn’t be approached in the sense of “hey, we need a social media strategy, where do we start.” Rather, think first about your overall brand strategy, and consider which aspects of it would lend themselves well to social media. As Mr. Dumars said, “You don’t need a social media strategy, you need a brand strategy that leverages social media.” (Great quote, huh!?) Brands that have failed in the past didn’t do so because they sucked at social media, but because they had a lame brand strategy. So, the progression should be:

• Define the target market
• Establish brand’s positioning
• Determine what needs are unmet for consumers based on their insights
• Determine the critical parts of the purchase decision tree and how they translate into key consumer touch points (these touch points being platforms where your fans/consumers are active)
• Establish the marketing plan based on the prioritized consumer touch points.
• Develop social media tactics that are aligned with the brand positioning and extend from the marketing plan objectives and strategy

Also, you may want to check out Sharpie’s community site called “Sharpie Uncapped,” as it is a great example of using a community to give your customers an avenue to express their passion for a brand.

David B. Thomas, SAS and New Marketing Labs (as of September 1)

First, big props to David for his new position with NML, I’m sure there some exciting things down the road for him and the rest of the NML team. David’s presentation was on “Structuring for Social Media Success: Integrating Social Media Without Adding Headcount.” David talked about 3 key steps to building a social media strategy. These included:

Build Awareness Internally

• Find the right people within your organization to become your champions
• Invite skeptics as well as the evangelists
• Remember how you felt the first time you got into SM. It was scary, you were confused, so be patient in teaching others.
• Figure out what’s important to emphasize to your employees and coworkers

Build a Framework

• Put someone in charge
• Create guidelines (be clear and concise, and encourage others to communicate on behalf of your organization)
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. It’s easy to silo social activities, but everyone loses in this scenario, so make sure there are open lines of communication across departments and within them.

Build a Strategy

• Define success. Discuss what the desired end result will look like? Then, back up and figure out how to achieve this.
• Map social media to your goals
• Give your people the right tools. Whether these be monitoring tools, content publishing tools, or whatever, make it easy on them.

Greg Cangialosi, Blue Sky Factory (slides)

Since Greg and the rest of the Blue Sky Factory team typically talk about email, it was interesting to hear him discuss how they use social media to grow their business. Probably the stat of the day was that they generated 22% of their revenue through social media. 22%! Not too shabby. While his entire case study of Blue Sky Factory was quite interesting, the most important point (which isn’t new, but still valuable) was don’t be about the sale. Blue Sky Factory did this by not approaching social media as a marketing medium, but rather a content producing medium. So, instead of actively trying to sell their product, they focus on writing daily blog posts, creating useful e-books, and creating other social content that simply ensures Blue Sky Factory is top of mind when customers think about email.

Amber Naslund, Radian 6 (slides)

I really enjoyed meeting and having the chance to chat with Amber at SoFresh, as I have a ton of respect for her and the folks at Radian 6. Amber was the keynote for SoFresh and, unfortunately, Jay Baer, her partner in crime, wasn’t able to make it down for the event to present with her (you can look out for a new book written by them in the near future!)

Frankly, there was a ton of great content in Amber’s presentation titled “The Now Revolution,” about how our business world is moving towards real time, yet our businesses are still trying to catch up to this “Now” revolution. I’d recommend you simply checking out the video of her presentation, but here are some of the key takeaways:

• The notion of being real time (participating in open, reciprocal communication online) needs to be built into our corporate cultures. This requires 1) A solidarity of purpose internally 2) Demonstrated trust for those on your team (empower them to feel comfortable responding on behalf of the company) 3) Diverse people and ideas and 4) Establishing effective rewards systems.
• Our hiring practices need to change to reflect these changes. Employees are ambassadors for our brands, yet we don’t account for that in hiring.
• Customers don’t care if the complaint that they send in a tweet isn’t in the respondent’s department, they just want it fixed.
• Some key attributes to consider when hiring employees are: curiosity, enthusiasm, innovation, motivation, collaboration, humility, and awareness. Another big one is translation, being able to both understand and communicate with C-level folks, but also to communicate that to the folks on the front lines and the social media newbies.
• Who owns social media shouldn’t matter. What should matter is how nimble your organization is to respond and act quickly, which comes down to how you’re wired. This means you need good social media guidelines and training/education programs in place for employees.

Random Event Tip: Sometimes, it may be worth it to just skip out on one of the panel sessions to chat up some of the folks at sponsor booths. There are some pretty big name people at them often times and this is a great chance to get their undivided attention. During breaks, there is often lots of noise, people waiting in line, and distractions that can get in the way. So, if you hit them up during a panel (you know there’s usually always one time slot that is a little lacking) you could really get some solid networking and conversations going.

Again, great stuff all around from the panels (much more than what was covered here). Anyone else that went to SoFresh have any thoughts or comments?

Some other great recaps can be found from John McArthur, Wray Ward, and Stacey Alexander.

On a final note, it was great to meet some of the following people who I had both talked to on Twitter quite a bit before, as well as some who I’d never met until this event, and they’re definitely worth a follow on their blog and/or on Twitter: Logan Stewart, Simon Cole, Katie Morse, Lisa Hoffmann, Chris Moody, Mike Mahoney, Jason Yarborough, Gwynne Murphy, John McArthur, Ted Shelton, and Jeff SanGeorge. Also, always great to see folks like Jason Peck, Genevieve Jooste, Eric Fraz, Eric Boggs, Adam Covati, David Horne, and others once again. Until next time…

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