Social Media Marketing Recap from SES NY

I wanted to report back on the Social Media Marketing panel session that I sat in last week while at the SES NY Conference. This was the first in their "Social Search" track that were all scheduled for that day, Wed., 3/19. It was one of my favorite sessions at the conference so I wanted to share with you what some of the experts on the panel had to say about Social Media Marketing. I can't cover them all here, so I'm going to have to limit it today to just a few.

The Social Media Marketing panel Included some top names in the industry such as:

• Conn Fishburn, Director of Social Media Strategy, Yahoo! Inc.
• Don Steele, Director of Digital Marketing, Comedy Central
• Chris Winfield, President, 10e20, LLC
• Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder & President of Strategic Alliances, BlogHer
• Chris Beland, Partner, Director, Interactive Marketing & Social Media Practice , Ogilvy Worldwide

First Conn started off the panel with his presentation titled "The Rise of the People". He shared with us that there are over 800,000 people online on a monthly basis which is expected to grow to 2 billion by 2012. He shared with us that Yahoo!today is thinking about the evolution of media...what's it going to look like five years from now as we move from mass media to "me media". Brands and people are now in a constant dialog and he noted that 76% of Americans mention brands on a daily basis with equates to about 10 brand mentions a day.

Here's a list of Conn's Rules for us to Play in the Social Space:

1. Brands need to listen to their customers and hear what they are saying about them first.
2. Then become part of the story. A great example is Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty in which they first did a global survey and then tapped into a cultural truth which they supported.
   
3. Always bring some wine...act like you're going to a dinner party and don't come empty-handed.
4. Be good to your mother...treat your audience as if you know them, sit down and have a conversation.
5. Think holistically...not just one channel. Integrate social into the marketing mix.
6. Realize that social media is here to stay.

Chris Winfield's presentation focused on the benefits of tagging and bookmarking for marketers in the social media word. He reviewed the most popular sites which included Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Digg. This was a great review for me because while I regularly use Del.icio.us I didn't realize the differences between all three since I haven't used the other two much yet.
You can learn more about social media here at the 10e20 Blog. Here's also a few tips to follow from Chris:

1. Promote great content.
2. Build your networks.
3. Contribute to the communities.
4. Make the sites work together.
5. Have good hosting (in a case study he reviewed Digg.com sent 20,000 unique visitors in 24 hours to one site)

Jory spoke about "Managing the Unavoidable...Building a Brand in the Blogosphere" which she reviewed with us a few great BlogHer case studies which support this. She pointed out that blog posts on the Internet last. When doing a Google search a blog post or two will come up most the time in the top 10 results. She gave us an example of a post she wrote 2.5 years ago about a bad experience she had with Chase Visa when someone had stolen her identity and was charging up a storm on her credit card. When she originally wrote the post it started coming up in the top search result listings for Chase Visa and even today, after 2.5 years, it still comes up as #25!

So, Jory's point is that you can't get rid of us bloggers, we're here to stay. She shared with us this myth about blogs that so many marketers fear is that if they release their brand to the Blogosphere, all hell will break loose. One nasty thing said about my product and poof—I’ve committed brandicide. So if you can't beat them, why not join them, right?

For book publisher Harper Collins BlogHer created a blog outreach program to help raise awareness for a new book launch and sent 50 of the books out to bloggers in their network. Now, not all 50 wrote about the book and those that did write did not all have positive comments to share. However, sales of the book did increase during this time period and the conclusion was that at least they're talking about it in one way or another.

Another example was for Dove and their "Sleeveless" promotion that they did at the BlogHer Conference in Chicago last July. I was there for this event and did what Dove was hoping for and wrote about their promotion here on my blog. I did get some free samples of Dove's new deodorant, but more importantly I remember being invited to come to the party wearing something sleeveless, and by God most of us women did. It was all about the experience, not just getting free product samples.

GM did something similar also at the BlogHer Conference. They originally wanted bloggers just to write about the new Saturn and had content on the car prepared that they wanted the bloggers to say. Jory said, no, you don't tell bloggers what to write. So, instead Saturn brought a bunch of cars over to Chicago's Navy Pier where the BlogHer Conference was being held and let people test drive the cars. Many women wrote about their positive experience with the cars and a couple even uploaded video testimonials on to YouTube. 

Jory left us with these few words of wisdom about blogs:

• Avoidance is not a strategy
• When in doubt, ENGAGE!
• If touchy feely just isn’t in your DNA, play defense

So, I walked away from this session feeling pretty excited about the opportunities in front of us to really integrate social media into the marketing mix and had information I could take back to my readers and clients. In fact I realized that the term Social Media Marketing itself was something that all of a sudden I'm hearing quite a lot...at the conference and also online.

Cathy Taylor, who writes the Social Media Insider Blog for Media Post, wrote a post last week while I was at the conference titled "Maybe Advertising in Social Media Should be an Oxymoroan" which got quite a number of comments. I've always felt that placing ads on blogs and on social networking sites isn't the best use of the media. Instead developing an interactive promotional campaign and integrating that into social media I believe is smart marketing.  The panel at SES, as well as Cathy and I, all seem to agree upon is that social media is all about the conversation and the relationship! It's not what I would call advertising.