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.

The last two days I’ve been around at the iStrategy event in Berlin. Lots of global companies attended as this event to share their knowledge and experiences in the area of social media. Digital experts spoke about the rapid growth of social networking and mobile web and merging this into innovative and creative online strategies. How to navigate through the marketing mix and forge ahead of the competition.

I’ve picked up a lot of good learnings and insights during this event. This first blog is about the Coca Cola presentation on day #1 of this event. It’s a roundup of speakers, what they brought up and all tweets by other delegates. Thanks to all for their live tweets, good to recap what’s been on during the event! I will be covering other presentations during the coming few days. Think this summarizes at least the speakers and workshops I’ve been to. Feel free to comment or leave your views.

Going from traditional campaigning to constant engagement

The Amazing World of Coca Cola, read more.

The first day started with a keynote by Michael Donnelly, he’s the Group Director of Coca Cola’s Worldwide Interactive Marketing. Selling one of the most popular drinks ever, Coca-Cola could easily rest of its laurels, but the company is constantly evolving and transforming itself. Have a look at this infographic showing The Amazing World of Coca Cola.

Michael took the attendees through Coca Cola’s ways of working in marketing and social media in a very open presentation. He thinks there are no real experts on social media yet, everybody is still exploring and learning. Interesting view he flagged up regarding the change of traditional marketing/advertising : we’re going from campaigns to constant engagement. The social space gives the possibility to leverage sustainable relationships. With campaigning you’re putting energy and budget into something that exists for a couple of weeks and relationships you build are gone afterwards. It’s silly to start from zero time and time again.

Social media management is a tactic, not a strategy

Social media management in a couple of bullets according to Coca Cola:

• It’s a tactic, not a strategy
• Keep it simple, don’t overcomplicate concepts
• Moderation is must (Coca Cola is using this Canadian moderation company for them)
• Always work with professionals
• Clear legal hurdles first
• Each new community is an entirely new market, treat is as such
• Listen, learn, scale. Again, again and again. You’re never there.
• How to embed in your organization? Have social media principles. Just guidelines, don’t write a book. Find the Coca Cola social media principles here.

Use existing platforms and bring all your activity together

Coca Cola is focusing on their fans in almost all of their marketing activities. They now “Share Happiness” next to their global sponsorship and advertising. It’s less about Coca Cola, more about their fans. Very simple. A good, viral showcase of this approach, watch here. To make use of their fan base all of their marketing activity sits on existing platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. With regards to Facebook, everything is under one Facebook page, even local initiatives. A good learning from here: make use of existing  platforms and bring all of your activity together, don’t separate it.

Update: Coke’s ‘fans first’ approach in social media | presentation