The Social Media track is where you will find me today, although most of what I will hear today is stuff I already know but I hope to impart on you the wisdom of how to effectively research and address an effective Social Media campaign.
The first Social Media panel of the day is moderated by Pauline Ores of IBM and features Erik Qualman of EF Education, Brent Csutoras, Benjamin Bratton of Yahoo! Inc, and Vanina Delobelle of Monster Worldwide.
Up first is Vanina of Monster talking about what they are doing in Social Media.
Vanina is showing a graphic breaking down the various forms of Social Media and they are as follows
- Social Networks – Facebook et al
- Forums – self explanatory
- Microblogs – Twitter, Plurk
- Mutlimedia Sharing – YouTube, Revver
- Diggs – Digg.com
- Blogs and Livecasts – WordPress, Yahoo Webcasts
- Virtual Universe – Second Life et al
She is making the case that Social Media is a great way to connect with people, brand positioning, ability to generate site traffic, enlarge the target segment and increase the user experience
Social Media can also leverage current marketing results, get better brand awareness, get brand management, get better user stickiness, get better quality products and get more sales.
Vanina is speaking about the requirements of Social Media;
Social Media is Global but that actually means local because we deal with communities and we need to be close to them.
She is speaking that community managers need to get more focus
Working in Social Media needs to be consistent. Your efforts should not only have a great start but it should also last
Your content also needs to be focused and relevant to your online community.
The great thing about online communities is the ability of users to drive the content by sharing videos, commenting on blog posts and generally keeping the conversation going.
Qualman is up next with some case studies from EF Education and an application that they made for Facebook
Global Footprint is a way to tell people on Facebook where you have traveled. A great little tool that has been copied a few times. Another app called Where I’ve Been was recently sought after by Trip Advisor for around $3 million. Yes, you read that right – $3 million for a Facebook app.
Qualman is siting Portal sites in the late 90s as failed Social Media. Portal sites used to be a place where you could pay your phone bill, for instance, but you could also check weather, sports et al – Think My Yahoo!. These failed because users only wanted to pay their phone bill and nothing else.
Social Media needs to be addressed by companies as a viable way to get their message across plus Social Media ranks high in search engine results because this content is always changing and search engines love to love new content
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com