Analyse, Engage, Promote

Categories: social media

Guest post from Gareth Pryce, Social Media Monitoring Co-ordinator

Socialbakers Engage, London 2014 is an annual conference that brings together over 500 digital marketers from over 41 different countries to hear insights from experts and some great strategies to achieve even better results on Social.

The day was split in to three main parts

  • Analyse
  • Engage
  • Promote

Though perhaps paid ads are not so relevant to our work here at ONS, there was much to be gained with regards to Analytics and Engagement from experts including Rod Strother (Lenovo), Yossi Erdman (AO.com) and David Isherwood (Renault).

The focus of the day was set by keynote speaker Jan Rezab, SocialBakers CEO and Co-founder, stressing the importance of firms moving from a place of just “Setting up” Social Media for your organisation to becoming “Socially Native” – the goal being to fully integrate social media in to business practices.

Throughout the day there were plenty of relevant case studies demonstrating proactive, opportunistic and reactive approaches to Social Media and also some interesting challenges – not least how Dutch Airline KLM evolved their Social Media strategy from an experimental stage, before the crisis of the Iceland Volcanic Ash cloud crisis in 2010 forced them to respond on Social – there began an evolution to 130 dedicated Social Media employees responding 24/7/365, with an average response time of 20-25 minutes.

So plenty of food for thought and some keys from the day were:

  • Where would you position yourself in terms of becoming a Socially Native organisation?
  • Build an insight driven Social Marketing organisation – become more insight driven – how can we use the insight we have to drive our Social Media activity?
  • Content Excellence is much more important – our content has to be better because natural organic reach is falling.
  • “Number of” metrics are not such a valuable measure of how you’re performing – you need to look at the overall picture and take other insights in to account when reporting.
  • Social customer care becoming increasingly important – Be authentic, credible, honest. Speed is everything in a crisis. Be as thorough and transparent as possible.

Catch up on a great day with videos from the conference and take a look at some great free resources to see how social devoted some of the world’s biggest brands are.