Being Cheryl: Columbus Social Media and Random Humor

One of the most interesting parts of the Inbound Marketing Summit so far has been the “End of the Social Media Hype” panel with Chris Brogan of New Marketing Labs, Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, Paul Gillin of Paul Gillin Communications, Brian Solis of FutureWorks and CC Chapman of Advance Guard – moderated by Mike Lewis of Awareness.

Inbound Marketing Summit IMS09

Borrowed disclaimer from my PR 2.0 Panel post and the Listening and Monitoring panel post – I typed these really fast, so they might not be 100% verbatim. Don’t sue me. I tried. Here are some of my favorite answers.

ROI


Jason: A lot of people don’t know how to explain ROI on the social media side of things because it’s very, very difficult, even for smart social media people, to draw a direct, hard, black line from the thing you do on social media to the things you sell in your business. Social media is more about relationship building, it’s about the longterm with your customer.

Brian: I can show ROI all day long in social media because it’s about the questions you ask before you start engaging… it’s about time, it’s about resources – these are hard costs, and they’re all trackable. What you’re trtying to track, whatever the R is in ROI – its not elusive. Whether is PR, customer service, sales… The most measurable forms have social media have been rooted with calls to action. What do you want? A click, a view, a registration – once you design your programs with actions inside of it you change everything.

Chris: With ROI, what I look at is: Can I make more of something or les of something, can I reduce response time, can I add more sales to your pipeline.

CC: If youre not going into a campaign figuring out how to measure success, you’ve failed already

Paul: I wish we would stop arguing about ROI and just start doing stuff.

Transparency


Paul: We each have to define our own levels of what we consider to be transparent. We’re going from an age where everything was locked down and very fixed and limited to what information we released and allowed the public to see about ourselves and about our company – and now we’re enjoying this freedom… For businesses the key thing is that transparency doesn’t mean revealing EVERYTHING, like trade secrets… it means being honest, and if that’s a problem FOR your business, you have a problem WITH your business

Content Creation


CC: If you’re passionate enough to create content – texts, video, audio, picture – then there will be other people who are passionate about that content.

Jason: While there is a lot of crap content out there, those are people practicing making great content, and eventually they will be… it’s the process of doing it that makes you better.

Engagement


CC – Give your community something to do – it could be a contest, a facebook application, “hey we want your photos” – engage them. They’ve come to your fan page or your ning site or your community, give them something to do… ‘We have x # fans, we want to give them something to play with.’ It’s not rocket science, we’re all kids on the playground, if there’s not something to play with we’re gonna leave.

Jason. …and If you’re stumped on what to do, ask them what they want you to do. Ask them how they want to participate with you – they’ll tell you.

Best Quote Ever


Chris: Community is a priviledge, not a property.

Can we all take 30 minutes for a nap break? No?