Social Fresh Notes and Presentations

I had a great time meeting some new people and hearing some smart ideas at yesterday's Social Fresh conference in Charlotte. Thanks to Jason Keath and the rest of the crew who helped make it an awesome conference. Here are 3 of the presentations I attended, along with some notes I took on some things I wanted to make sure to remember.

A Digital Journey - Keith Burtis

Notes/key points

• Never approach a network or individual with a greedy, one-sided agenda
• Passion can be a magnet in getting people to join a community
• Scale and build community one relationship at a time
• When customers can interact with people creating a product or service, the perceived value is almost always greater

I met Keith later in the day and he is a great guy-very easy to talk to. He's obviously done a fantastic job at putting some of these principles into practice to help him and others excel in business and in life.

Social Media Integration - Greg Cangialosi

Notes/keypoints

• Technology is really just an enabler - it's always about people at the end of the day
• Social Media Adoption Curve
  • Education
  • Observation
  • Broadcast
  • Participation
  • Relationships
  • Collaboration
• Email is currently the glue of the social web (love this metaphor. Very accurate)

Social Business By Design - David Armano (keynote speaker)

Notes/key points

• Control doesn't exist. Brands can only hope to be good facilitators. Facilitation leads to engagement
• Examples of social business - Comcast (ComcastCares Twitter account), Starbucks (they let their community's ideas drive development of promotions and rewards. This is exactly what sports teams and many other businesses should be doing).
• Social media has the potential to affect all aspects of business. Soon brands will stop saying "we are doing social media" and will start saying "it's how we do business."
• Pretty much this entire presentation. Seriously. Great stuff, David.

I've been reading David's blog, Logic + Emotion for at least three years now. When I started blogging in early 2006, his blog was one of the first I read regularly. In fact, one of David's awesome diagrams inspired this post article that said I was still unsure about Twitter in December 2007.  It was great meeting him briefly after his keynote, and I look forward to seeing what he and the team at Dachis Group do with social business design.

The Basics of Social Media ROI - Olivier Blanchard

Notes/key points

Olivier has written about social media ROI extensively on his blog. Here's the basic process he discussed.

1. Establish a baseline (year-over-year growth, monthly growth) before social media vs. after
2. Create activity timelines - keep track of all important marketing efforts (press releases, attending conferences, videos, blog posts, whitepapers, etc)
3. Look at sales revenue (# of new customers, total customers, revenue per customer, etc)
4. Measure transactional precursors (brand mentions, website traffic, etc)
5. Overlay timelines/activities
6. Look for patterns
7. Try to prove relationships

This method makes a lot of sense. However, I'm not sure how you handle it if your company does a lot of different forms of advertising (print, billboards, radio, etc). Trying to find/interpret overall results could be pretty challenging if you're unsure about how you're other marketing efforts are performing. Plus you have to look at how employees are performing, as they can have a big impact on the direction of your company, so it gets even tougher. But just because I don't know how to do it, doesn't mean there isn't a way. :) Props to Olivier for making this presentation fun and coming up some very interesting thoughts about this subject.

I definitely enjoyed hanging out and learning at Social Fresh and look forward to keeping in touch with a lot of great people.