Social Media: my conference take-aways

Another day out the office (I attended Interiors Birmingham Expo last week) and this time for The Future of Social Media conference, hosted at The Cumberland Hotel, London. Social Media is something that has varying degrees of understanding. I’m sure even the the Social Media pros still debate the true definition. Rohit Bhargava summed up Social Media neatly in a couple of words – demystifying the often over-complicated versions:

“Social Media is where people are sharing information socially like comments, discussions, photos, music, etc (not just blogs, twitter, YouTube)”
Rohit Bhargava, SVP Marketing, Ogilvy

As usual I took notes, but in the end I’ve decided to write this post on *just* one of the presentations – actually a workshop – from the conference. Kevin Lawver, Chief Architect, Music Intelligence Solutions entitled: Making Marketing More Human Through Technology

Making Marketing More Human Through Technology

Here are some of my take-away’s from Kevin’s presentation:

• Social Media is a “Silly Term” – all media is social, all media begs commentary
• Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) – was a prophecy, not a manifesto
• Social Media is about the all the conversation
• Social Media is about: Following them , starting them and joining them
• Every online community is a tribe
• Feed reader – get it. It’s the fastest way to scan and track the right conversations
• Google alerts – important
• Twitter: The web’s dinner party
• Constant partial attention phenomenon
• Starting conversations: get a blog – validate humanity

On Twitter:

• Don’t just broadcast
• Be useful
• Don’t follow everyone
• Don’t be annoying
• Do follow those who follow you
• Offer support where you can
• Follow: @garyvee, @zappos, @twalk, @railsmachine, @halcyon
• Twitter’s not for marketing – it’s PR. Some argue that Twitter is Marketing and some argue that’s they’re both (My tweet and the subsequent responses from @EEPaul, @BenLaMothe and @kaigani)
• Don’t inflict rules for bloggers in corporate environments – they’ll do their own thing.

The future:

1. Reputation – biggest missing piece out there. Creating ‘Reputation Models’
2. Aggregators – people love these. FB’s wall is interesting
3. API Traps – need to make sure that they’re around for soem time – if they go down what happens?
4. Activity Streams – slow uptake, but people love it.

The Presentation:

Tags: conference, fosm, Social Media