London Calling

Following up on our sponsorship of the AMA’s digital marketing day last week, Georgina Turner shares her personal highlights from this year’s social media sell out event.

The day opened with keynote presenter DK, founder of MediaSnackers, starting the day by challenging delegates to reposition the way they use these highly conversational tools as part of their communications mix.

Social Media is “not a mountain to climb but a wave to catch” he claimed, and how right he is. The whole point of catching a wave is if you miss one, there’ll be another along in just a minute, so it’s not like Social Media is an all or nothing effort, and if you’re not ready for the big surf you can always dip a toe in the shallows. Come on in folks, the water’s fine.

Still, multitasking your way through a digital landscape can leave anyone with a brand new raft of questions to answer. For instance we all know the main sites now, but now venues and brand are increasingly getting on board what are their relative pros and cons, and how do you know which is the one your audience will respond most positively to? Perhaps the most important question for people on the day was how do you use these tools to portray your brand or organisation correctly?

The key point to remember is, Social Media is all about people.

Some might consider it corny, or even dangerous, to talk about putting individuals in front of  brands, but as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously noted, “A brand is what people say about you when you are out of the room.

Individuals are at the heart of these communication tools, and when they give our organisations permission to enter their world and interact in their personal space, we have to remember we’re in the room by invitation only.

However, once you’re there you have a great opportunity to tell your networks what is happening with you right now. Given the emphasis on real-time interaction and organic growth (just think of the way the retweet standard on Twitter grew entirely from users) it’s worth remembering that everyone else is experimenting with these tools as much as you are and strategies such as Do, don’t plan and Direct your message, don’t spread it, can often yield quick results which you can then keep modifying and learning from as you go.

So it was very much in this spirit that Rebecca from Pilot Theatre introduced me to AudioBoo, a sound sharing application on my iPhone that can be linked to your Twitter and Facebook sites. There, over our mushroom stroganoff, we recorded a conversation and posted this to the Pilot Theatres Facebook page and there I was having a conversation about SM, posting this to a SM host, and sharing our personal conversation about this latest emergent SM trend as part of the wider discussion.

An appealing factor about the wider Social Media discussion is that it’s measurable. Keynote Jim Richardson, Managing Director of SUMO and author of the excellent Museum Marketing blog introduced me to my new favourite measurement tool which focuses on the level of involvement of audiences and categorises the different types of Social Media users.

From this, if I could offer you any advice it’s catch the wave with your audiences, take the journey to find out what they are doing with your brand and then it’s up to you how far out you go and how long each wave lasts.

The best news is you’re already halfway there. We work in a creative and inspiring sector whose audiences are already actively talking about our shows, events and exhibitions. At heart Social Media tools simply expose the word of mouth that is already going on all around us and give us a new way to meaningfully join in with and learn from the conversation.