BRAND LESSONS: Grammy Awards 2011: Creating Events Like You Would A Wedding by James Andrews

A successful integrated event has a story arc and build up similar to a wedding. How do you combine blogging partners, influencer networks, social media and analytics to create a winning program? This workshop uncovers the 2011 Grammy Awards and how Social People developed a “Crescendo” like approach using social media and influencer to propel this year’s award show in the most successful in last 10 years.

How to use an event to create an awesome social media experience. 

Need to find “niche” bloggers. Each blogger would cover the event based on their point of view. The bloggers should have their own followers. Bloggers area treated as professionals and have open access. 

The key is the events before the event. Need to create conversations before the event around certain themes. 

Take your event live

• Live Video can drive social conversations around your event.
• The online community can integrate with the offline community.
• Not all live video is interesting so think about “producing” content.
• Does your live event need an event curator?
• Plan your tech needs in advance.
• Live content requires promotion (pre/during)

Sharing the Data Post-Event

• Get the information socialized in a timely fashion.
• Find which analytics are important to the organization.
• Create a “teachable” moment via data findings. 
• Is there a PR story around the analytics?

How To Train Your Employees In Social Without Losing Your Mind by Lisa Hoffman, Duke Energy

Training your businesses employees in social media is much more than explaining 140 characters are in a tweet and you should reply to more often than you sell. No matter what size your business, you are introducing people to a new ecosystem of communication that has real consequences. Sometimes big consequences, for better or worse. Every business needs to understand the basics of how you can better equip your marketing and non-marketing employees to support the business online.

Lisa first asked Why would you want to develop a training program?

To explain Risk and Opportunities. Need to show pitfalls and encourage them to use the tools correctly. 

Your training needs to start with policy and guidelines. This is the place to start. The policy is to not only protect the company, but it encourages employee encouragement. 

Keep your training Simple

• Actions in the “real world” can turn into Social Media nightmares.
• Employee Ambassadors are important!
• Online spokesperson needs extra training. There guidelines need to be more specific so they are comfortable knowing their boundaries.

How to Write Results From Your Blog at Social Fresh 2011 by Derek Halpern, Social Triggers

Summary: Look – creating a blog is easy, but building one that attracts leads and makes sales? That takes some finesse, and now you can learn all about it during this presentation by the expert marketer Derek Halpern, the founder of Social Triggers. A blog is a landing page. The more you treat it as such, the better results you will see.

Derek kicked it off strong talking about businesses can’t pay the bills on “likes”. Businesses need to convert visitors to buyers. 

Framework for Successful Website

First of all you need website traffic

1. Content Based on Research – You need researched based content. People love research.
2. Content Based on Results – Customer Results, Your Product Results.
3. Content Based on Controversy –  People love a good fight. No matter what industry you are in there’s a fight going on. You need to write about it! 

Behind the Scenes Content – ex. How the business works. What tools do you use?

Advanced SEO and Social Integration by Roy Morejon and Brandon Uttley, Command Partners

Roy and Brandon are two of Charlotte’s top social media gurus. There presentation is on: There are a few ways to think about SEO and how it connects to other pieces of your marketing strategy. Increasingly, social media and SEO are becoming more closely aligned. A lot of the work we do in social get rewarded with more exposure for our businesses in the search engines. Even Google is making big efforts lately to focus on higher quality content and content that people react to in positive ways. How we rank in search engines can be an integral part of our inbound marketing system.

• Content Marketing is the backbone of all social media and search engine optimization today. 
• Social Sharing is Driving Growth
• We are in the midst of a massive shift online from search and intent to social sharing.

How do you compete with strong sites? A fresh burst of links may provide exceptional value. It will allow a page to overtake a high authority website for a short or even a long period of time. SEO is an amplifier and catalysts to social media and content marketing.

Where to Start?

• You need to make sure your website is suitable so that google can see your website properly.
• Google now has social analytics. Need to use the Beta Version of Google Analytics. You can see Social Engagement, Social Actions, Social Pages. For more information go to http://bit.ly/gasocial
• Google Profile Integration – Google allows you to see what “they see” in regards to content you are sharing. See google.com/s2/search/social.

What’s Working? Most Important Social Media Factors

• Trust Factors – Everything you do online should be done to increase the trust others have in you. 
• Google – Social Authority – An author’s authority on social networking sites is influencing traditional SEO. Social shows authority, not relevance.
• What are the Social Signals? How Google and others are quantifying social networking authority as a ranking factor within traditional search engine results pages. 
• Facebook Optimization - Fill out all page profile information completely. Because of Facebooks Social Graph all information on Facebook has the potential to be indexed. 
• Twitter - Tweeted links get discovered and indexed quickly.  Tweets from high-authority accounts get lots of RTs act as links (Google & Bing)
• Slideshare - Slideshare is great to use. Very good for long-tail keywords. Multiple opportunities for keyword placement. 

Lessons From B2B Social Media by David B Thomas, Radian6

Many times B2B social media has unique challenges and long sales cycles. When we focus on social for B2B, we learn that there are some differences, small and big, that we can all learn from.

B2B Social Media is Important! There are longer sales cycles and more influencers in the process. The sale will be higher dollar and there will be a higher value to the relationship.

• Importance of the Social Graph – Data that search engines serve up to you will be determined by people that you are connected to in social media. 
• Reach is Still Important
• Content Rules – Important to share information that is useful, timely and relevant to your influencers. 
• Emotional Aspects of Purchase Decisions – Social Media helps you form an emotional attachments to your possible customers.
• Everybody Loves a Good Story – Engage people with interesting content.
• The Bs and Cs are all People – Everybody want to be informed, entertained, engaged, etc.

Take Aways