Attended a super cool and fun panel at MRMSeattle .
It consisted of Brandon Pierce from Facebook, Josh Mattison from Federated Media, Torrey Lincoln from LinkedIn and Wade Rockett from Weber Shandwick. HollyBrown from MRM did a great job with the event. Here is a quick recap of the event and my takeaways –
First a little story about my experiment here – Twitter is many things to me,. Most of all, it is a storytelling tool and a note-taking tool. I LOVE tweeting valuable notes at events I attend because it leads to such awesome conversations with people. However, I also figured that I need to capture these on my blog so they could live longer – and live in context.
SO, I am trying this little experiment – Taking pictures of my Tweets on my Iphone and compiling it into a Whrrl Story. Then, including it on my blog for anyone to see if they like. Let me know what you think about it. I will call them Twee-shups 
You can look a the tweet stream above for notes and comments, but some takeaways –
1. Facebook is great to get conversations going WITH brands. And for brands to watch sentiments of people (fan pages).
2. Combination of Ads + fan pages can be a very effective but low cost strategy for marketing brands on twitter. We heard the story of a small camping company that saw a LOT of success.
3. Josh from Federated Media talked about Federated being both a publishing company and a media company. He talked about how you can have sponsored conversations on blogs versus just a product review. As in, if you have to promote you vacuum cleaner, sponsor a conversation on cleaning. This, he said, is far more effective in creating a continued conversation about your product and not just blog mentions.
4.Terry from Linked In said “linkedin is really on to something”. I had not really thought about Linkedin a lot, but the growth they have seen in the past few months has been amazing – 1 million accounts added every 17 days + , 25 M searches per week. He said they adding a lot more conversational tools and ads on Linkedin are a lot more targeted due to how much Linkedin “knows” about you.
5. Social Media Strategy HAS to
- be cohesive
- involve the longer term
- has to be supported by the internal org structure
- has to fit the landscape ( as in break the silos inside organizations)
6. There is a lot you can do with very little money. Get creative with youtube promotions, iphone applications for events and so on. But be sure to define your goal first.
7. Pay per post model does NOT work.
Everything the panel was saying alluded to the fact that the people you enlist the help of online to market your brand have to be an extension of your brand. They really have to be “brand ambassadors”.
Influencers influence only when they are genuine and can sustain an ongoing conversation about a brand. They influence when they can make a brand a part of their story in creative ways.
Choosing and finding your influencer is really hard. But well worth it.
All social media platforms are different. If you are present on them, you better engage. If not, just stay out of the platform. Not engaging is worse that not existing.