Recently, our social media director, Becky Brown, participated on a panel at the Economist Social Media Conference in Paris. It’s ironic in that these social experts, who live and breathe in the online and blogosphere space, still take the time to get together face-to-face in the old fashion way. This continues to reinforce in my mind the power of co-mingling and blurring both traditional and innovative marketing and communication activities.
The conference, while including social luminaries from around the world, stimulated an interesting discussion around the state of social in Europe, the economy, and the evolving social landscape and the impact of legislation and governance on social properties and activities. Becky did a great job of sharing some of the key takeaways for her team, and I’d like to share them with you all.
- Organizational structure and “who’s on first” is something many organizations still struggle with. Many organizations have aligned social media within corporate communication or PR, but at Intel we’ve aligned social as part of our media efforts because we believe that media (paid / social) work best when done together. There’s a tremendous amount of innovations we can drive leveraging the power of paid media with social communities.
- Digital Publishing. There is NO brand doing digital publishing, this was highlighted by the Economist team both at dinner and later in the sessions. This point excites us at Intel. We’re working on an innovative new project that will change how we curate, share and create content.
- What’s up with Google +? While it’s new, it’s gaining attention because of the differentiation for brands with their Hangouts and Circles. Intel has a page, and we believe this is a first mover and leadership opportunity for us.
- Metrics and analytics. This topic continues to be on everyone’s mind. Becky spent some time sharing the work we’ve done at Intel across our models of VPS (value point system) and SVPS (an extension of VPS for social). Traditional brand measurements companies (like Nielson and Milward Brown) are migrating but it’s a slow process.
- Media integration is critical and often an area over looked due to resourcing and budgets. As a nod to Intel, it happens to be one of our strengths and the Intel team works seamlessly across paid and earned media. Many of the brands in Europe work on a shoe string budget and disconnected to their media integration.
- Tools are critical to scale and to take your social efforts to a level of strategic focus (listening, proactive outreach, speed and agility, etc.)
- Going back to basicsgenerated a lot of discussion. Thoughts surfaced around how we’ve gotten a little enamored by the slick new toys, and the reality is that social is… just a conversation. One of the speaker’s stated that “he’s just a customer service guy at heart”. While we think about how to entertain, we need to remember that we have an obligation to participate in the simple conversations of answer and helping our customers. From an Intel perspective, when we develop things like a new holiday shopping guide, and provide information that helps consumers make the right technology choice, that’s an important part of our role.Let’s keep learning and sharing with each other. The marketing landscape is changing so quickly and increasing in complexity. As professionals, we have much to do and have an important responsibility for sharing and helping each other.