Saturday, March 8th 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Tom Parish CEO, Tom Parish Inc
Brian Magierski Chief Dev Officer, BSG Alliance Corporation
Michael Smith Exec Dir, USAA
Ynema Mangum Exec Producer, BMC Software Inc
Rohit Bhargava SVP, Digital Marketing, Ogilvy
Why are CxO’s afraid of social media and social networking? How can they leverage social media with a social marketing strategy for business growth?
I think this panel was smart, but they didn’t really talk about metrics of social media. They didn’t really touch on how they track what they do at their companies (if anything?), so metrics weren’t really covered at all. The title was very misleading. We heard how to sell them, but not showing what it does after it is sold. There was even a question in the middle of the presentation to try and steer it back to metrics, but they still avoided it or talked around it. They just didn’t have anything real to say.
What is it about the CFO, CEO, why are they afraid of social marketing when there are no metrics?
Loss of control – how do you deal w/social media and control in a way you’re used to? You can’t!
The idea of impressions vs. engagements. I you’re looking for impressions – use a bad google adwords campaign. This isn’t effective. You want to measure time spent and who’s coming.
What is the big pushback? There are very different perspectives of social media looking at risks. What social media could do to the company. Brand control. HR is concerned about losing people. CEO: if i don’t do this will bad things happen to us? Is it in the company/shareholder best interest?
The control point is the biggy. It is a big loss of control. Old: you control message. New: fulfilling an experience out there. What is the harm? This is the direction things are moving and is how companies will compete in the future and you’ll need to embrace it at some point. The big issue is companies don’t normally offer a good company experience and by opening the doors all of that comes out.
Why? What Advice can you give a manager of a company with no social media experience?
Have people driving the community from bottom up and top down. The top down is important for meeting in the middle. The high ups need to be involved in the social media. Peer pressure is a last resort that works – find a colleague doing it and get them going. Teach them how to listen more effectively about what people are saying. Sometimes is is very eye-opening. They are already looking at traditional media is saying – why not pay attention to the social media – what real people are saying.
Is it important to self-assess your readiness for social media?
Phases 1. start listening 2. participate and listen 3. start leading (tools or platforms)
There are horizontal benefits in productivity when introduced internally. This shows that it could work externally as well. You have to be very confident in product/service before jumping in. Fix things first then dive into the conversation marketing.
What dept should be considered when thinking about social networking strategy?
Metrics will vary by dept. Marketing is much harder (hard to prove marketing). Watching blog articles or comments on the articles. There needs to be a new tool to measure social networking metrics. Getting smarter about what you measure. Very important things that can’t be measured. Count the number of times a product is mentioned in comments or if your message gets out in the “watering holes” of your product.
Questions:
How do you aggregate metrics or is there a score of their presence on the web for some sort of term?
-If you know where all of these are you an put these together for yourself. A social media report card of sorts by a vendor. You can put in all the places things exist and it will track it