Jo-ann Fortune, Creative Planner
We social media types have notoriously short attention spans – it comes with the constantly changing territ…
If you suffer with the same affliction, but just have to know the buzz from Socialbakers’ Engage speakers, cut straight to the chase via the links below.
1. Strategy & planning
2. Creativity & content
3. Customer Service
4. New platforms
5. Reporting
Or ignore all your digital distractions for just five minutes and read the whole article. It’s the new thing.
Sabeen H. Ahman of Publicis, formerly Associate Director of Social Strategy at iCrossing US, urged us not to overlook the individual when using big data to get to know our audience.
When building up personas to define who you’re talking to and what they find interesting, you can learn a lot from studying the profiles of your most engaged followers.
The message I took from this? Don’t just reserve social stalking for old friends and exes.
Sabeen also wants us to put a human face to our brands – quite literally. Once you’ve developed your ‘Tone of Voice’, find an appropriate celebrity who you could imagine delivering your social media updates and stick their photo on the wall to test copy. The example she gave of Morgan Freeman would certainly help edit out those OMGs and LOLs.
Global Director of Social & Search at LEGO, Lars Silberbauer Andersen, received one of the biggest rounds of applause of the day with the brand’s ‘Kronkiwongi’ video-activated social campaign.
What is a Kronkiwongi, you ask? Well exactly. But kids know and can all build one.
The insight in his brief was that 98% of us are creative geniuses at age 3, but only 2% retain that as adults. Ergo children think differently; their minds haven’t yet been made up about what is and what isn’t.
But it was Lars’ mother who we have to thank for the Kronkiwongi campaign, which has seen thousands of parents share their kids’ creations on social media.
In an eleventh hour phone call Lars asked “what did you do when we were kids to get us to be creative?” “Well that was easy”, she replied. “We just asked you to build a Kronkiwongi”.
This point about understanding your audience and tapping into real human behaviour was backed up by Shira Feuer of Disney.
Rather than going for the generic messages, she encouraged content creators to listen to what people are really saying and thinking about how can they say it through your brand voice. What will they relate to so much they’ll have to share it?
A simple image of Winnie the Pooh – “oops, I ate too much again” – did the rounds on Facebook much more than a “Happy Christmas” graphic would.
Gert Wim ter Haar of KLM explained how KLM airlines has made social media a “one-stop shop” for customer service, aiming to solve problems natively without sending customers to different channels.
While this could cause logistical, legal and ethical problems for many brands, the messages I took was to ask ‘what can we do?’.
KLM show estimated response time in their Twitter and Facebook header images – a simple idea but one that could serve many brands and customers well.
And ‘how can we do it differently’?
With their Lost and Found Dog KLM turned good customer service into an exceptional experience that was both PRable and social share-worthy.
Press play – I challenge you not to smile:
The new platforms everyone is talking about – this week at least? It’s got to be live-stream video apps Meerkat and Periscope (swot up at Computerworld).
But YouTube star Bethany Mota isn’t one to jump on the bandwagon, saying that with only limited time and resource she concentrates on the platforms she’s built her success on until her audience demand changes.
Not an excuse interviewer Josh Constine of Tech Crunch was willing to accept from brands who, to paraphrase, “have a lot more time and money so should try it all for fear of being left behind”.
I have to say this isn’t my experience of working with brands. With the source of social budget still so confused – does it come out of the digital, marketing, eCommerce or PR pot – and many budget-holders still questioning ROI, budget is often limited and resource even more so. Social media doesn’t move quite so fast that you’ll miss our completely by taking a more considered approach.
Publicis’ Sabeen H. Ahman words will also be a comfort here: “Don’t beat yourself up because you can’t ‘do an Oreo’”.
This one well-timed tweet was only possible thanks to a team of a dozen people working together in one room – with representatives from art, copy, media buying, brand and legal. A major challenge for smaller brands on smaller budgets who don’t have complete company buy-in around social media.
Facebook’s new products also got a fair bit of air time.
Business Insider and Social Bakers shared stats on the rise of Facebook’s native video.
Apparently, Facebook video posts exceeded the number of Youtube videos shared on Facebook for the first time in November 2014. And as video accounts for just 5% of all posts on Facebook, could be a way to cut through the clutter.
If you believe that media publishers are always ahead of the curve, you’ll be interested to hear that 11% of their Facebook content is now native videos. And that The New York Times, National Geographic, BuzzFeed, The Guardian and BBC News are among the launch partners for Facebook Instant Articles for iPhone: Articles that load natively without sending users to another site.
Finally, some straightforward but important messages from Socialbakers founder Jan Rezab on reporting and getting social media buy in from the powers that be:
Don’t keep data in silos – bring together those ads and media and content and engagement insights.
And give your boss the right metrics. Engagement rates give a much clearer indication of social success than impressions and it’s in this engagement that the real insights lie. Are people doing what we want them to do? If watching a video are they getting to the CTA? If not, why not?
It’s only in insights and data that we can make informed decisions to improve performance.
