I finished my Twitter coverage of Social Fresh Portland (because I was locked out by too many tweets!) with the Branding within Social Media Panel, with Kim Brater of Ant Hill Marketing, Steve Parker of Levelwing Media, Matt Singley of M80im, Kristy Bolsinger of RealNetworks, and Andrew Sinkov of Evernote.  Fortunately, although Singley threatened to liven up the panel by making it "pants optional," the whole panel staye fully clothed as they gave the audience some great advice.

The first question was about how branding is defined in each of the panelists’ organizations and translated to social media. Sinkov said at Evernote, they ask themselves, "what is the impression we want to give people?"  Their answer is that they want to be a company that people trust and believe in.  In Brater’s mind, your brand is your business.  Bolsinger said that she considers social media channels to be a way to strengthen their brand and make it something "living."  She encourages using the same brand and message across all channels in marketing, including social media.  Social media can also help to define your brand, because through engagement, you can learn what your customers think your brand is.  Singley said that while he promised not to use these buzzwords for the remainder of the panel, it’s true that branding is about consistency and engagement.  To make sure everyone was listening, he suggesting using liquor to transition the Old Guard to this new media.  More seriously, he said that one of the main questions he gets about using social media is how you can effectively measure it.  He said that he responds by asking how you can measure the effectiveness of a conversation or a relationship – you can’t.  Social media requires a leap of faith.  For bigger brands, this can be a little bit easier because they’re used to being sued for being transparent.  For smaller brands, this might be more difficult.  But Singley pointed out that it’s more about opportunities lost because of not being a part of a conversation, and those brands that ignore social media will lose.  He did agree that at some point, it’s necessary to show the value of social media and Bolsinger said that ROI can be more about what you save the company than what you bring in.  Singley added that persistence and education is how you get people on board.  An audience member asked if there was value in trying to measure the effectiveness of social media. Singley said yes, but he has yet to figure out how.  "Metrics are a necessary evil of agency life," he commented.  Bolsinger commented that if there isn’t a lot of differentiation between your company and your competitors, social media can be a way to differentiate.  Depending on your brant/product, you can show how social media has a better return on investment than traditional channels.  For showing how pervasive social media channels are, the panel recommended Do You Know 4.0.  Brater also recommended looking at Olivier Blanchard’s presentation on ROI in social media.

Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Branding within Social Media

Another great session at Social Fresh Portland was the afternoon panel on Corporate Blogging with Mike Volpe of Hubspot, Kristy Bolsinger of RealNetworks, and Andrew Sinkov from Evernote.  Starting the panel off with a bang, their first question was “should you, as a business, be blogging?”  The short answer was “yes.”  The long answer was “you’re an idiot if you don’t.”  Sinkov said that blogging is an incredibly important part of getting your company’s voice out there.  The panel discussed whether blogging should be considered a part of social media, or in its own category, and Sinkov commented that it’s a “long form of social media.”  Volpe agreed, saying that a blog should be the first step in social media, before Twitter or Facebook, because you’re not that interesting without it – it’s your social media home base.  They took an informal poll of the room showing that pretty much everyone in the audience had a corporate blog. 

Volpe pointed out that blogging is not about you or your company, it’s about your customers.  And if they segregate, you should similarly have separate blogs.  Bolsinger cautioned that from an SEO perspective though, they should all be on the same site.  Sinkov added that the more content you put on the blog, the more you see spikes of people coming to it.  So as soon as you have good content, put it out there, don’t wait for it to stack up. Bolsinger said that in her case, she does have a calendar of certain types of posts, which helps to get people coming back and set audience expectations.  She suggested Outspokenmedia.com/blog as a great blog to be reading to help audience members learn how to blog better.  Continue Reading Re-Cap From Social Fresh Portland: Corporate Blogging Panel

One of the sessions I was most excited about at Social Fresh Portland was the keynote speech by Peter Shankman of HARO – "It’s Not Social Media – It’s Simply Life."  Shankman’s speech had a lot of great takeaways, and focused on the four rules he follows in business and in his life: 1) Transparency 2) Relevance 3) Brevity 4) Top of Mind.  He started by saying that the smart ones are all saying the same thing – social media isn’t going away; it’s entering the lexicon. 

Shankman learned some valuable lessons at the start of his career, which he shared with the audience.  In 1995, when AOL was "the internet," Shankman was working with them and helped to found the AOL newsroom by asking "is there a better way to solve this problem?"  He said that they would go into work every day and try something new – if it worked, they did it again. If it didn’t work, they didn’t do it again – a lesson that’s applicable now in social media. Shankman commented that learning to constantly ask – "is there a better way to solve this?" – has served him well. He said that one of the best things you can ever do is to find a better solution to a problem, because if the solutions that everyone already had already worked, it wouldn’t be a problem anymore. 

Continue Reading Re-Cap from Social Fresh: Keynote: It’s Not Social Media – It’s Simply Life with Peter Shankman

The third session of the day for me was "Social Media for Small Business – A Fresh Conversation" moderated by Ryan Lewis of Bonfire Social Media.  He took an informal poll of the room, which was made up of mostly small businesses, with some agencies.  Since the format of the session was a roundtable, we went right into questions from the room.  An audience member asked, for a small business strapped for time, how do you find a balance between hiring an outside consultant to handle social media versus doing it in-house.  Another audience member responded with a success story of how doing social media in-house has really worked for them, with their preferred medium being Twitter.  There has been a lot of debate recently about this very issue, and I also fall on the side of doing social media in-house – when people engage with someone on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channels, even when they are engaging with a brand, they want to be talking to someone who represents the voice of that company, and knows the company well.  There’s an implied sense of trust that comes along with following or becoming a "fan" of something, and if those clients/customers find out that they’re dealing with a consultant and not someone from the company, that trust can be broken with serious consequences.  I talked about this issue in a little more depth with respect to ghostblogging.

Another audience member asked about who is using Facebook applications, adding that there’s huge success there for those who are.  Someone commented that Facebook adds a layer of demographic targeting that can be extremely useful, though it’s sometimes necessary to test different advertisements to find success.  Another audience member wanted to know if there was an average price point for the products that are selling, using tools like Facebook. He’s found that social media tools are better for branding, because he sells an expensive product.  He wanted to know if a company would be throwing money away if their product is expensive and so they’re only using social media for branding.  The room seemed to agree that the answer was no – even if the sales process is not happening through these tools, developing a reputation for a certain expertise is useful in leading to an offline sales process.  (*Applicable to law firms)

The group then talked a bit about whether Facebook or Twitter was a more useful tool for companies.  Someone commented that Twitter is a great tool for communications, but for indexing and critical mass, Facebook will become a much bigger player.  It was suggested that companies incentivize their fans to join their Facebook pages, which we’d heard in the previous panel.  Incentivizing them to become a "fan" of your company and product is one step, but leveraging this group to build a database is what’s really important.  HubSpot was mentioned again as a company who does this very well.  To get "fans" to sign up their email addresses and information with a company, an audience member suggested reserving some content for release when they give you this data.  Another audience member cautioned that some small businesses think you go right from getting someone to become a "fan" to getting a sale, and said that it’s important to remember to build the relationships further first.  (*Great lesson for law firms)Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Social Media for Small Business – A Fresh Conversation

The second session that I attended while at Social Fresh Portland was the “Social Media B2B Panel,” with Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory, Jason Peck of eWayDirect, Adam Holden-Bache of Mass Transmit, and Schneider Mike of Allen and Gerristen.  A lot of great information came out of the panel, starting with the first comment that “social media doesn’t just happen.”  The panelists agreed that companies need to put a smart person behind the tools, and get buy-in from everyone in the company, not just the executives.

For B2B companies, their goal is to make their customers more successful than their competitor’s customers.  To identify what they want from a specific social media strategy, they need to start with the bottom line in mind.  Cangialosi commented that social media is just an extension of every other area of the company, but that it’s largely happening out of marketing departments.  The panel advised that the marketing department should lead with their messages, but customer service should be involved as well, and whoever is responsible for CRM, for a more complete strategy.  Peck added that B2B companies need to have communication skills and subject matter expertise to effectively deploy a social media strategy.

Cangialosi said that the true promise of social media is when you can engage with people, which the legal marketers I know in social media would agree with.  When engaging, it’s important to be transparent in social media channels about why you’re there. If you’re not planning to use it for customer service, let them know, but expect people to ask questions anyway.  The panel also suggested working with a public relations team in advance to forecast out what prickly issues could come up. Continue Reading Recap of Social Fresh Portland: Social Media B2B Panel