Useful Social Media Blog

You read that right. The Corporate Social Media Summit was such a big success in the USA, we thought it only fair to bring it over to the other side of the pond.

The European version’s taking place on the 17 – 18 November in London. There’s a brochure below.

The focus is the same – ie completely on how big business can use social media for marketing and comms. We’re bringing in some of the most successful European-based practitioners – like Opel, Vodafone, DHL, First Direct and Umbro.  But we’re also giving a European audience the opportunity to learn from the best, worldwide – like Dell, PepsiCo, Honda and Citi.

To find out more (and get an updated list of speakers, amongst other things) head to http://usefulsocialmedia.com/europe.

The Corporate Social Media Summit Europe

A social media consultancy – Simply Zesty – are opening up a UK office so have compiled a video on the state of the ‘social media market’ in the UK.

Really interesting – and a wonderfully good fit with the soon-to-launch European Corporate Social Media Summit…

Hi guys,

We recorded the whole of the NYC Corporate Social Media Summit from last month, and it’s available to buy from here.

I thought you might find it useful to get a sample of what you can look forward to if you decide to take the plunge.

So, below is a 3 minute selection from Esteban Contreras‘ presentation on Twitter best practice. In it, Esteban (who is social media manager for the electronics giant) discusses:

• Why your customers use Twitter
• Adding value and the 5 C’s
• The evolution of the role of social media within a company

Listen by clicking below:

Esteban Contreras, Social Media Manager for Samsung Electronics USA

It’s an interesting sample from the two days-worth of discussion. For more, you know what to do!

Hi everyone,

Today I thought I’d share some of the video interviews that Served Fresh Media conducted for me on site at the US Corporate Social Media Summit. I’ve picked three  - there are fifteen in all and I plan to get them all on here shortly.

I’ve chosen to kick off with a couple of interviews on ‘employee engagement’  - how a company can manage employee activity on social media without losing your best ‘accidental salespeople’.

The first interview is with Kelly R Feller, who is the senior social media strategist for Intel (and a thoroughly nice person). Kelly gave one of the most popular presentations of the first day, and her interview covers:

• the unique challenges that corporates are facing when it comes to social media
• the need for a community of social media practitioners within companies to share knowledge amongst themselves
• how big corporates can engage their employees and offer them the ‘rules of engagement’ on social media (with a rather scary warning about the SEC)

The second video is with Rohit Bhargava, who authored the fantastic ‘Personality Not Included‘ and played a big part in letting people know about the event through his blog – the Influential Marketing Blog.

• the distinct challenges facing global companies as opposed to smaller, local entities
• how if you silence your employees you lose your best ‘accidential salespeople’
• the key challenge from the employee perspective when they engage with social media
• how corporate social media will change over the next year

The third video’s a little different – it’s an interview with me. I cover the aims of the Corporate Social Media Summit, the plan for the next few years, and how we have used social media in our own marketing to get the message out there.

Continuing my approach of sharing the wealth, I’ve embedded below some slides from Stefan Heeke. Stefan is Director of Interactive Communications at Siemens – and spoke at the Corporate Social Media Summit USA.

Stefan’s slides go into detail on how the German giant use social media to enhance brand strategy – by identifying key audiences for their diverse product range and then listening (and acting on) their feedback.

Worth a look.

I’ve just been reading a slideshow that a Google staffer has put out recently. The basic premise is that Facebook does not accurately reflect ‘real social networks’. When you ‘friend’ someone on Facebook, they go into a big pool of all your friends. There’s no distinction as to whether they’re work colleagues or not and that can cause problems.

This great levelling of one’s social network into a homogenous mass not only has implications for the person running the social network, but the brand marketer looking to leverage social networking. The more targetted, the better – right? That has always been the way with any other marketing strategy, hasn’t it?

There’s plenty of improvements that social network designers could make – improvements that would have a real impact on the ability of the brand marketer to use said network for targetted marketing. We’re not there yet. There’s more to come.

And if this Google staffer is representative, it seems like they’re giving this some serious thought – which is only a good thing, right?

You can see the whole thing here:

Great video from Loic LeMeur on how the use of particular vocabulary is symptomatic of the wrong approach to social media.

If you’re talking about “impressions, impressions, impressions” and “campaigns, campaigns, campaigns”, you’re doing it wrong.

Hat tip – Social Media ROI (great blog from Olivier Blanchard)

Just back from holiday and thought I’d share some more media from the conference last month. First up, some slides from the wonderful Esteban Contreras, who is Social Media Manager from Samsung Electronics.

Esteban gave one of the most popular presentations of the whole Corporate Social Media Summit – and he put it up on Slideshare hours later. I’ve not been quite as fast, but you can see his presentation below:

Hi everyone,

I’ve just returned our inaugural Corporate Social Media Summit in the USA after an absolutely great couple of days. There was a fantastic community of social media practitioners in attendance and our speakers did a brilliant job of sharing insight, provoking debate and giving practical advice. There’s a (far) longer post on the way (with a lot of thankyous), but in the meantime, I wanted to share some links to other content people have kindly put up about the Summit.

First, a word cloud. This was generated from all the tweets about the conference tagged with #csm10 – our hashtag for the event. I’ve removed some obvious words, and the Twitter handles for some of our more frequent twitters (ServedFresh, GenuineJack, xmyaimistrue, Shashi, DBradfield in particular – thanks guys!), and some common words (for example ‘social’ and ‘media’). Good to see ‘great’, ‘like’ and ‘love’ so prevalent! Perhaps more usefully, interesting to see ‘content’, ‘employees’, ‘brand’, ‘conversation’, ‘measuring’ and ‘location’ making such a big splash..

Second, a couple of blog posts – both recaps of the conference. Shashi Bellamkonda, our hugely popular speaker from Network Solutions, posted a recap on Examiner.com, and Rohit Bhargava, the highly respected blogger and Ogilvy VP wrote up a longer post summarising key learnings from the two days. Rohit was a great moderator over both days, and his help pre-conference played a big role in making the event the success it was.

Third, some video. I’m indebted to Charlie and Chris at ServedFresh Media – who kindly conducted some great video interviews with key speakers from the event. You can visit their YouTube channel here.  There are 5 – 10 minute interviews on there with Kelly Feller from Intel, Sameer Vasta from the World Bank, Connie Burke from GM, and about 10 others (though that includes me I’m afraid).

Shashi resurfaces here, in his guise as live-event photographer. He took a series of photos over the course of the conferece – you can spot yourself, or just get a feel for the event, over at his Flickr stream here.

One of our most popular speakers, Esteban Contreras of Samsung (who gave a fantastic case study on how his company use Twitter, packed with advice and tips), recorded his entire speech. He has already posted the video online, accompanied by the slides he used on the day. You can see the whole thing on his blog SocialNerdia.com here. BTW, if you attended and you’re wondering about the rest of the slides – I’m on it. I’m getting them uploaded to a new site now and I’ll be emailing you with a link to them shortly.

Finally, Twitter. There was a veritable explosion of Tweets across the two days (and if you want to learn more about the PETA incident then it’s a good place to start), full of useful comment, and with links to opinion, media and other interesting titbits. The hashtag we used was #csm10. Hurry, Twitter don’t tend to keep tweets for long!

Anyway, there is more on the way, I promise. I’ll be back shortly with my own summary and key takeaways from the event, along with the final installment of my series of posts on the effectiveness of social media vs traditional marketing when promoting the conference.

Back soon!

LAST WEEK’S RESULTS

• 22% of our traffic from referring sites
• 34% direct traffic
• 11% search engines
• 33% ‘other’

Top 5 Traffic sources

1. Direct traffic (22%)
2. Google Ads (20%)
3. Organic Search (10%)
4. Free newsletter listing (4%)
5. Paid newsletter listing (3%)

Top 5 Social Media Sources

1. LinkedIn (that ‘eshot’ style message last week, and event listings etc): 7%
2. Blogs: 3%
3. Twitter: 0.5%
4. Document Sharing Sites – 0.5%
5. Facebook – 0.4%

All Social Media traffic amounts to 11.6% of total traffic.

Interesting Points

• I did noticeably less marketing last week (we’re getting close to selling out now, so spending time and money to bring in a load of people who we’ll have to turn away doesn’t strike me as too clever) – this has obviously impacted on the amount of people coming in as ‘direct traffic’.
• The big bump (from 6% to 11%) of traffic from ‘static’ marketing (I class this as listings, organic/paid search, and certain social media things (ie old blog posts/listings on LinkedIn etc) is because proportionally the numbers are given a boost because of the drop in new marketing (see point above). Absolute numbers aren’t much different.