Social media insights from SoCon2011
I was fortunate to attend SoCon2011 last month in London. It was a packed day of great speakers who all provided a really fascinating insight into future social strategy and trends. Orators came from Qype, Last.fm, Dell, Nokia, NixonMcInnes, Warner Music, The FA, Wunderman, Steel, IBM, Brilliant Noise, SEOmoz and Microsoft.
I take no credit for this blog as it is a blatant verbiage of what was said, but hopefully the speakers in question won’t mind me paraphrasing their thoughts and knowledge.
The first thing that I picked up was the effort and commitment shown by the larger firms who are currently benefiting from the social space. To make it work they are employing dedicated teams of people to monitor and interact with their customers through the medium.
To manage the paradigm that “an organisation now talks individually to millions, rather than to a singular audience” takes a lot of work. To be effective in meeting customers’ expectations on a one-to-one basis, organisations such as Dell and Nokia have invested heavily and are embedding the touch points brought by social channels, across their businesses.
The adage that it is about customer service is broadened with conversations extended to sales, product development and internal needs such as recruitment. These organisations are not funnelling social through just one internal department but directly to those staff who can respond effectively and within the timescales dictated by our ever rapid world.
Monitoring performance of a business through the sentiment of social conversations is also being introduced, with screens displaying real-time tweets etc being positioned within the internal teams. These are the people that can actually affect a corporation’s service delivery in the eyes of their customers and hence this joining of public feeling to the “workers” is a fascinating concept.
In addition, there was much discussion around the “world changing” opportunities of social to reinvent traditional models of business. Sites such as kickstarter, kiva and quirky are being quickly adopted as new ways to raise finance, loan rather than donate, and launch a product. How the traditional corporate world competes or embraces these fast, innovative models is open to debate and is an interesting topic.
Thanks to SoCon2011, new to my vocabulary is the concept of the dependent and independent social web.
The dependent side is the social giants of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and 4square etc. These players seek to control and redefine our social experience (some would say to their own ends) and there was some controversial conversation around brands building their web presence on “Mark’s land” (this referred to the trend for Facebook sites rather than building communities and traffic within your own domain). Although having thousands of fans and likes can seem appealing, there was concern over the loss of control and potential backlash as Facebook et al, seek to change the rules on how corporate messaging in their medium is exploited. In addition, the ownership and external use of user profiles and analytics around those brand pages may in future be uncomfortable for some organisations, who find themselves trapped in Facebook due to their current commitment to the website.
So in contrast we were asked to also consider the independent web. This kind of aligns itself to the same concepts seen in our retail landscape. Small niche websites centred on specific topics/interests with vibrant, diverse and meaningful communities. This as opposed to more generalist sites covering all: Think “out of town mall” against “independent outlet” in Camden or Brighton.
The message was that perhaps more meaningful dialogue and value can be drawn from working through these channels rather than sitting your brand alongside all the others on Mr Zuckerburg’s table.
Other topics of interest included a concept that we value our social data/comment far less than other outlets. Social media is treated more lightly and we will all have a much weaker password than our online banking. We happily post on our wall personal yet contrived stuff to our average 130 friends. Yet we only have close friendships with probably five or six. It was clear that the dynamics of social still needs to play out. The ramifications of our actions are yet to be fully realised. Facebook’s new timeline will be a constant reminder to past mobile uploads that many will want to forget.
As one speaker said, we are in the infancy of this new connected world and most of what is happening is experimental to set the standards and protocols of the future.
Another general theme was that real life is about engagement and social is just a reflection of this. Once we had a shop keeper and now we have a call centre, so it is not hard to understand why a direct response from a big corporate, to my gripe or question, is treated so favourably. Advocacy of brands has always happened, but now it can be encouraged and more importantly measured and monitored to the nth degree. People can like my post which is the same as a laugh or a smile face-to-face in the pub.
As our lives go digital then social is giving others (marketers) the opportunity to listen and fashion their own objectives over our behaviour and interject as needs be.
So a great day, social is bigger than porn in web usage and there are more devices now connected to the internet than people on Earth. The internet was all sorted in 1945 (Vannevar Bush’s Memex – check it out) and I know the relevance of 4,170!
Thanks to John Horsley for organising the event and again, apologies for not referencing the sources but it all blends into one. See http://socon2011.com for the speakers who were all great.
