The fishtank at Raddisson Blu Hotel, Berlin. The venue of the iStrategy event. Photo by Patrick Veenhoff

Last week I visited the iStrategy event in Berlin and promised you my notes from keynotes and panels taking on there. This is my coverage of the second activity of day #1 at iStrategy: a panel session that briefly goes into the upcoming Social Media developments.

This was a panel discussion, led by Nils Andres who is the CEO of a brand and media lab that brings innovation and novel thinking to brand management. The panel seats were taken by Anders Kyhlsted (co-founder of Booli, a Swedish real estate search engine), Cesar Mascaraque (MD of Ask Jeeves) and Thomas Marzano (Creative Director at Philips).

The social media shuffle

To get discussions going, Nils shared his views on the social media shuffle that’s going on at the moment. He starts saying that so far over 70% companies haven’t been very successful with their social media initiatives. A brief overview of how companies can integrate social media developments into their digital brand strategies:

 Start internal
 Act fast but start listening to your customers
 Allocate budget for follow up
 Early availability over correctness
 Don’t overcomplicate the concept
 Concentrate on you advocates
 Intrinsic motivated fans are important, fans earned do have more value than purchased.
 Be relevant offline
 Social media is a marathon, not a sprint. Take it slow. It will not give immediate success.
 Criticism is not your enemy, your fear could be
 Make sure you have support of top management and legal
 Cooperate with your fans
 Be careful in reacting, pay attention to your employees how to reply
 Listen, react, share, learn, engage and loop

Brand behavior is key

Then panel comes in. First Thomas Marzano, a true believer of user centric design. According to him it’s about all experiences of a customer when they touch with your company. You need to orchestrate this. So be relevant offline, deliver when it matters. Anders Kyhlstedt comes in and stating it’s about building relationships, we just can’t use cold email or
shotgun marketing anymore. Thomas makes a point about company wide social media behaviour. Your company is an online personality! Nils is adding: first take care of good products and good services, put your energy there before start to influence and engaging with your customers.

The panelists Anders Kyhlsted, Cesar Mascaraque and Thomas Marzano. On the left (standing): host Nils Andres

Start influencing

Thomas then tips the essence: we still do what we have been doing for ages, only the means change. Focus on people, not the means. Nils brings up that you can’t control what people are saying about you. What you can do is organize that speech. Cesar adds that amplification is not your fanbase, it’s their fanbase that drives genuine ROI. Not the number of fans is the most important, it’s how about what they say about your company. Be happy with a small fanbase that’s active. Nils jumps in and comes up with percentages: 1% is real active and creative, 9% are editors and the other 90% are passive followers.

Thomas concludes: don’t think you’re not in social media. You’re already. Start influencing.

Update: panel slidedeck

See a PDF copy of the presentation by Nils Andres here.