[Report] Highlights of the Social Media Week New York

These notes on the Social Media Week New York were taken by Christian Leman, a French start-upper now resident in Austin, TX.

Social Media and the Conversion of the Urban Brand – Panel hosted by the NAMD

The National Alliance of Market Developers (NAMD) and Black Entrepreneurs in Tech Alliance (BETA) hosts a discussion focused on the boom of « conversational marketing » tools within the social media space, with a focus on minorities, especially African-Americans.

– Afro-Americans are under-represented in the tech community (no data provided): education issues are presented as main reasons; several organizations (for-profit and non-profit) now offer tech oriented training for minorities;
– Apparently, for now, marketers still seem to target audience based on likely interests, rather than social media behavior;
– African-American #1 specific social media behavior trait seem to be the upload of pictures from mobile; no data provided.
– Site recommendations: General Sentiment is a sentiment analysis company that produces comprehensive research products to help marketing, sales and communications executives; Quora, a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it.

Sessions hosted by DMCNY (Direct Marketing Club of New York) at Pace University

This half-day DMCNY seminar will show you how leading marketers and agencies are delivering bottom-line profits from their social media programs – and changing the face of direct marketing strategy.

How Social Media Redefines Everything – Drew Neisser – TheDrewBlog.com

– Social media is not another marketing channel, it is a shift in marketing: from talking to helping, from selling to listening;
– Social media really matters because trust is eroding everywhere (in average, 2/3 of people don’t trust their banks) – by far, people primarily trust people they know (77%) “people trust people”. They are eight times more likely to buy a product recommended by a friend than by visiting the company website, five times more than advertising;
– Social matters because consumers are harder to reach, but they are responsive; “fans” are even more likely to recommend products/services than to buy themselves;
– Social media can also kill a brand, product or innovation (see Sun Chips compostable bag); what should you do if it happens to your brand? “you fight social media fire with social media water”;
– Twelpforce at Best Buy: training employees to social media tools to let them handle customer service online.
– Site recommendations: Prezi creates astonishing presentations live and on the web; SproutSocial Social Media Management Made Easy;

The Science of Social Media – Randy Hlavac – Professor at Northwestern

– Developing a new digital model based on the traditional IMC model (Integrated Marketing Communications)
– 1st step: target social : two types of target markets:

• “Triggers”: event driven markets (consumers looking for solutions for wedding, babies, relocation…)

• “Passion”: lifestyle driven markets; consumers defines themselves as fans and/orexperts.

– 2nd step: social EKG (Electrocardiogram): measure how social the brand currently is? Do they offer a compelling experience? (using social media monitoring systems)
– 3rd step: think social: buzz gets created if brand is engaging and exceptional.
– 4th step: go social: have a strategy to cover the entire social media pyramid of tools :

• Profile based (FB,…)

• News based (Digg, Reddit,…)

• Media sharing (blogs, YouTube,…)

– 5th step: measure social ROI: build cost/revenue model, launch pilot to confirm assumptions.

Tip: to avoid the traditional frustrating process “fill a form > provide info”: 1. Let the user drive the process; 2. Only, ask questions relevant to the topic
Tip: as a brand, you don’t need to create 100% of the content provided; you have to be great at directing users to great content.

Navigating the Privacy Piece –Teresa Munyon and Neil Capel

– Direct Marketing industry in the USA is trying to define/enforce code of conduct related to private data to avoid new regulatory constraints; already, some publicly available records can no longer be used for marketing purposes (car related information, credit card related information,…);
– Key direction: collect only data that you need and keep only for as long as you need it;
– Ideally, sites should offer a clear opt in/out option “do not track me”
– Regulations between US and Europe are very different; but, actually, real business practices are not that different.

Street Smart Social –Steve Goldner (Hachette Filipacchi Media USA), Jon Accarrino (Dir of Social Media – definition 6), John Baker (JWT), Franck Radice (definition 6)

– If you want to draw attention online, ask a question.
– Who should run the social media department in a company? Marketing or Communication?
– Trend: marketers should invest more in “influence marketing”. Influencers are not always popular, Lady Gaga is an example of someone who is both.
– Trend: predictive search are being used more and more: it is the use of social media metrics to predict phenomena
– Trend: privacy will become less of an issue, as people are going to be used to being more transparent
– Trend: content is not king, conversation around content is king.
– Global social media campaigns are extremely difficult; while brands can launch campaigns per region, they cannot prevent reactions/comments to be generated from anywhere.

Social Strategy Cage Match: Offense VS. Defense – Session hosted at JWT

As social media marketing continues to evolve, we’re seeing shifts in the way brands approach the channel as well:

• some are playing defense – monitoring existing customer conversations in social media, responding to some and promoting others.

• other brands choose to play offense, giving employees and customers the tools that let them create new stories and spread the word.

Both approaches are valid parts of a social strategy, but which one yields better results?
Two teams of industry experts will battle it out to find out which social media strategy reigns supreme. Participate in our interactive debate featuring some of the heaviest hitters in the social media industry, and learn valuable tips for building out your own brand’s social strategy.
Speakers:

• Brian Morrissey – Digital Editor, AdWeek

• David Berkowitz – Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i

• Ian Schafer – CEO, Deep Focus

• Ana Andjelic – Senior Planner, HUGE, Inc.

• Tom Ajello – Partner/Creative Director, POKE

• Chapin Clark – SVP, Managing Director, R/GA

• Mike Scheiner – Executive Vice President, Creative Director Integrated Branding and Digital, Porter Novelli

• Jim Deters, President, Ascendant Technology

• Mike Monello, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Campfire

Social Media Around the World – Hosted at the Art & Culture Hub at Hearst

Social Influencers around the World: A Virtual/Offline Panel – Fact: Russia has the #1 engaged social media audience in the world. Their top site is VKontakte, a Facebook/Youtube/Myspace hybrid you’ ve probably never heard of. Brazil is second, favoring Orkut. In India, they’re using Bubbly. What are these platforms and why haven’ t they infiltrated the US mass market? Will they? To what degree are these tools affecting culture, or is culture reflected in them?

During the second half of this session, Freddie moderated a roster of on-stage and videocast social media enthusiasts who are acting as “ change agents” in their own countries. Through first-hand storytelling and demos, these Gen Y influencers discussed how they incorporate social media into their daily lives; introduced us to social media sites, apps, and trends that are popular in their home countries but little-known here; and discussed the impact that these tools are having on culture. One panelist discussed the role of social media in the ongoing Tunisian revolution.
Speakers:

• Moderator: Freddie Laker, Head of Digital Strategy – Asia, SapientNitro

• Katarina Graffman,Owner & CEO of Inculture, Stockholm, Sweden

• Justin Barkhuizen, Ex-Director of Social Media, MediaCom

• Mark Leong, Digital Strategist, RAPP, Tokyo, Japan

• Zarul Shekhar, SapientNitro + TV Producer/Anchor Delhi, India, Manager of Digital Media

• Mehdi Lamloum, Digital Planner, OgilvyOne, Tunisia

Vision of Social Media in China – Freddie Laker

– A whole social media/internet world has developed in China with local versions of YouTube, Facebook,… it has reached such a point that it seems unlikely that western sites will ever be able to penetrate China;
– Government censorship does not seem to be an issue for the average Chinese; the digital culture is more excited about scandal, real-time living and fun than politics.;
– QQ, the leading Chinese social network, has released a virtual currency to purchase online gaming; it is likely to be accepted more and more as new means of payment
– The development of cheap smartphones is likely to induce an even larger boom in utilization of social media;
– China has today the largest internet population; by 2013, the majority of global internet content is likely to be in Chinese;
– There are several social networks (4 or 5) competing in China with no clear winner yet;
– The internet of things also seems to become a booming area where China may well become a global leader soon;
– With such a dynamic digital culture, it would be not surprising that innovations invented in China lead to new business opportunities in the USA
– site recommendation: chinasmack.com

Panel Discussion: User Social Media trends unique to other countries:

• India: online matrimony for arranged marriage is becoming huge in India • also, blind dating through online introduction is becoming very popular; social searches based on the traditional cast system or other social/ethnic traits are available and are heavily used • the New Delhi police created an online way to report traffic violation through upload of pictures from smartphones • India is really fad driven: local sites are very good at localizing features and games to make them more excited for Indian users • in a country where there still a lot of illiteracy, tools like the Nokia app to learn English through mobile phone has become very popular. Same for a voice based tweeter used by people who cannot write • update on prices for farmers through RSS and mobile phones as well as alerts for fisherman about weather/tsunami also help the average Indian.

• Japan: utilization of avatars/nicknames used to be very popular in Japan but is slowly changing: real names/pictures are now more frequent: this particular way to manifest identity in Japan used to make people searching very difficult • mixi is the facebook of Japan; born as mobile social network, it now counts 20+ million users compared to 2+ million for FB. It has a strong focus on blogging (>50% of Japanese people engage in blogging) and gaming.

• Sweden: fast shift toward online transparency: people used to be very concerned about privacy issues in Sweden, and are now very excited about sharing their life online in all sort of ways; people very easily talk about private issues such as sex online.

• Tunisia: Facebook fueled the recent “revolution”, and Social Media has become the media in Tunisia • Facebook is widely used as blogging platform • The recent revolution boosted adoption of social media in Tunisia. For the first time, all censorship has been removed on internet access; the same day, the #1 keyword search on Google was YouTube.

• South Africa: South Africa governement developed mobile social nets to connect/cope with HIV positive rural and urban people

After a significant experience managing IT projects in international groups (Arcelor, Danone) in Europe and in the USA, Christian transitioned to the high tech industry as CTO of Anysteel, a startup with operations in Europe and in South Korea. In 2001, he co-founded and eventually became CEO of Axessio, a 50-specialist consultancy for IT due diligences and technical value assessments. In 2007, he joined SoftThinks, a French and American software company, as COO. Now a permanent US resident, he is creating Axessio USA in Austin, TX. Christian holds a Master of Computing Engineering from Supélec(partner of Georgia Tech in Europe) and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with high honors.