Last Friday we spoke at and attended the latest NMA Live event entitled ‘Social Media – Implementing an effective strategy for your business’. A quick half-day event to give guidance around all things social to 200 delegates, it was interesting to see what was discussed during the speaker slots as well as the panel discussion at the end.
With a different social media event seeming to happen every day and learnings being thrown about at every corner (or in every tweet/blog post) it was interesting to hear the main advice from the five social experts available on the day:
Chris Buckley, Head of Agency, Headstream
David Parfect, Group Head of Agency Sales, Facebook
Sophie Brendel, Head of Digital Engagement, BBC
Alex Pearmain, Head of Social Media, O2
Conor Ryan, Co-Founder and COO, Betapond.
‘Relevance’ seemed to be the word of the day for me. It came up in every presentation and regularly during the panel discussion. Relevance in terms of focusing on your brand and business objectives, relevance in terms of collecting those audience insights, relevance in terms of targeting those most significant (influential) to share your engagement, relevance in terms of creating appropriate content that drives value for the community, etc.
This is all pretty obvious stuff but it’s amazing how many people and brands still get this wrong. Social, unfortunately, isn’t only about you, the brand. It’s primarily about your community and what they want. Similarly, just because you are doing something on Facebook or Twitter, does not automatically mean it’s social. Conor Ryan said it concisely: “Turn a transaction into a social transaction”.
The panel discussion ended with lots of questions from the audience around location, augmented reality, possibly already outdated (?) QR codes, and Near Field Communication (NFC). This is clearly where social, and marketing as a whole, is going; something I think it’s fair to say we are all pretty excited about. And just to tie it all up, of course using location-based insights appropriately will ensure that we can make all our activity even that more relevant to our all-important community.
