National Sales and Marketing Congress 2011 (NSMC) – Day 2 Field Report

Day 2 of NSMC 2011 is underway! Damien Cummings and Vaasu Gavarasana opened up the first half of the day. And from the way things are going, tons of great insights are on the way. B2Bento is here to bring you updates of Day 2 straight from the sidelines as they happen.

*[Final Update]* That’s it folks, the 2011 National Sales and Marketing Congress is wrapped up! Thumbs up to the organizers, speakers and participants who made it happen. Can’t wait for next year!

Digital Marketing Sessions (Day 2)

[Recap from 4:00pm] “Building Towards Social Business – Five Digital Trends to Retain Your Customers”: John Kerr, Regional Digital Director, Edelman Digital Asia Pacific

Who is best-placed to capture the emotion? Technologies get the attention, yet they’re fleeting. Trends, however, develop more slowly and are often timeless.

Focus on trends: today’s biggest trends – Real Time / Social Business

“Social business means doing business in a more connected, participatory and socially responsible fashion. If done correctly, it benefits multiple stakeholders: your customers, employees, advocates, partners, etc.” – David Armano

“Social Media potential goes beyond marketing and campaigns. The future is Social Business.”

2011 APAC Digital Trends to Watch

• Attentionomics
• Social Broadcasting – in the future, expect brands to recognize, respond and reward
  Best Practice: Cross-platform content and engagement – Keep content fresh and original. Powerful listening posts. Engage where the consumers are. Enable fans to share content with friends (mobile applications, incentivize sharing)
• Digital Curation
  Best Practice: Own your zone. Identify under-served niches and meet them. Frame up issues and discussions, editorialize. Make curation collaborative and social.
• The Integration Economy – social media efforts no longer exist in fragmented, non-formal initiatives but will begin to integrate into more holistic trans-media communications.
  Best Practice: Centralize processes and technologies. Guided by policy and playbook. Create a culture of internal engagement. Modify existing processes and protocol. Opportunities for eCommerce.
• Everywhere Becomes Socialized – Location
  Best Practice: Blend local, social, photo and mobile. Optimize LoSoPhoMo for multi-platform distribution. Combine offline and digital engagement. Reward status. Be conservative on privacy and rationale – explain the benefits in clear language.

Best PR program in the world? NAB – “The Break Up”

[Recap from 2:15pm] “Maximizing Search and Social Media Mix”: Wayne Eo, Managing Director, OOm Singapore

Social Media Marketing – Where is SMM Going?

“Social Media Forecast to support 1/3 of Customer Issues in 2011.”

Facebook has taken the world by storm – 750 million users. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. More than 25 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo)

Twitter – Twitter’s web platform only accounts for a quarter of its users – 75% use third-party apps. Twitter gets more than 300,000 new users every day. There are currently 110 million users of Twitter’s services.

LinkedIn – There are more than 70 million users worldwide. 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a recruitment tool. LinkedIn receives almost 12 million unique visitors per day. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn.

YouTube – still the most powerful video platform on the web today.

Blogs – 77% of internet users read blogs. There are currently 133 million blogs listed. Blogging supports SMO and SEO: 97% more inbound links from companies that blog

Search – 93% of worldwide consumers use search engines to find and access websites. Search has evolved from plain listing to universal search with images + rating.

How social media affects SEO today: Quality over Quantity. Re-tweeting relevance. Facebook Authors. Blogging/Commenting

SEO + Social Media = New Search: Reputation (Link) Building Strategies become crucial. Blogs = Inbound Link increase. User Generated Content

Search and SMO Converge: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube … feed search. Rise in social media on-site search. Real-time search (Google)

Keyword Strategy: What is the Brand Value Prop? What are we selling? What do you want the audience to say about us?

Social Media Strategy: Determine brand perception. Determine Success – shared content, quality followers, comments, targeted engagement. B2B vs. B2C – different strategies. Plan frequency, content type, target characteristics. Create unique brand proposition. Plan SM buys, viral campaigns.

Key Points on using SM for SEO

• Adapt keywords in profile, info, job history, skills
• Add URL and keywords to updates
• Encourage sharing/re-tweets

[Recap from 1:00pm] “Social Analytics: Measuring What Matters”: Anol Bhattacharya, CEO, GetIT Comms

Social Media touches every facet of Marketing. In this part of the Day 2, B2Bento’s very own Anol tackled fascinating but not so typical metrics parameters such as the gap between brand position versus perception as well as competitive buzz metrics benchmarking.

• Branding / Positioning / Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Lead Nurturing
• Customer Service

Brand Perception – Keyword Mapping.

“Branding is a set of keywords in your prospects’ mind.”

Basic Metrics

• Reach – numbers game (how may Followers, etc.)
• Buzz – same as Reach, still numbers game (# of mentions, etc.)
• Influence – “Not all social media users are made equal.”
• Sentiment – “The biggest loophole of all social media monitoring tools.”
• Engagement – # of interactions, speed of response, # of issues resolved

Tools of the trade: Depends on your needs and budget. But at least have one. (ex. JamiQ, Meltwater Buzz, Brandtology, Radian 6, ViralHeat, ThoughtBuzz, etc.). Geographic relevance is also critical.

Example of Sentiment Analysis: SingMood – measuring Singapore’s emotion through Twitter.

Competitive Benchmarking – You have to benchmark against competitors.

Example: Video Conferencing (Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Avaya, etc.)

“Don’t just jump into the social media bandwagon naively.”

Analysis / Metrics before you start in Social Media

• Prospects – Where are they in social media? Use Outbound Analysis (integrated with your CRM – this indicates “Presence” only) and Inbound Analysis (this helps you determine “Intent”).
• Mapping Influencers – Who are talking about your products? Who are talking about your product category? Who are talking about your competitors? Where are the social media watering holes?

ROI – The Holy Grail: Conversion Metrics: Sales for B2C / eCommerce. Lead Generation for B2B

Social Analytics – Google Analytics

• Advanced Segments
• Campaign and URL Tagging: Create Goals. Create Short URL. Tag your URL.

Facebook Analytics

• Insights: Likes, Interactions
• Web Analytics for Landing Page
• Apps for Lead Generation

Click here for Anol’s slide set

[Recap from 10:45am] “The Digital Transformation: How Marketers Can Transform Their Brands Online”: Vaasu Gavarasana, Digital Evangelist, Asia Pacific, Yahoo!

“Transformation is taking what we know and re-arranging it to have new meaning.”

The Strategic Role of Content – Stimulating Demand and Building Brand Saliency, Online

What is “Scheduled Consumption of Media”? – Traditional media like newspapers, tv, radio, etc. This is the kind of media that we all grew up with. Today this is all changing. Media today is now 24/7/365 and device independent!

“People who are not in the media business are getting into media. Take a look at Amazon.”

“Marketers use media to get messages across.”

Changing Media – Playing Games Together! New Family Time Together!

Since consumers today are “always on”. Are brands “always on”? “Always On” not a key challenge!

Key Challenges for Marketers:

• Is GRP pressure sustainable 24/7/365 for an “always on” consumer?
• Are budgets available to constantly fight consumers’ creative fatigue?
• How can we stimulate demand on a continuing basis?
• How can we drive brand loyalty?

Current Brand Communication Process: media bursts. The interruption model. All of these need to change.

“Digital Marketing today should not be an afterthought.”

Key Consumer Gap: The world of scheduled branded content is limited by supply.

Solution: Re-think the Context of Content.

Brand Content à Integrated Digital Content Strategy: Banners, Microsite and eCommerce, TVCs, Search, Social, Blogs, Articles, Videos

Insights on Content

• My Inner World – For product categories that are inner directed and have no external manifestation, the content relationship is with categories (ex. Health, Finance, Entertainment)
• My Outer World – For product categories that help portrayal with the external world, the content relationship is with Brands (ex. BMW, Prada, Rolex)

The Engagement Model

• Online – Media Role: ever present online for the “always on” consumer. BrandCom role: Nurture relationships ++
• TV – Media Role: Rapid awareness. BrandCom role: Image driver

The Digital Landscape today:

Search. Content. Social. The answer should not be OR but ALL. These three should be integrated.

POEM Media – Paid, Owned and Earned Media

[Recap from 9:00am] “Social Media Marketing and Realizing ROI: A Dell Case Study”: Damien Cummings, Online and Social Media Director (Consumer and SMB), Dell

During the early days of social media, Dell had what they referred to as “Dell Hell”. They were performing badly. In 2006, Michael Dell came back and wanted to change things. Dell now has a listening and content strategy as part of it social commerce strategy which revolves around its 5 social media pillars.

Social Media Strategy – 5 Steps to Social Media Leadership

1. Content and Listening: SNS Blogs and Twitter – Blogs, Facebook, RenRen (best practice example: RIM – BlackBerry)
2. Build Fans and Followers through Social Networks – Twitter, Facebook, RenRen (best practice example: Coca-Cola, Starbucks)
3. Online Video and Viral Marketing: New Product Launch and Key Brand Campaigns – YouTube (best practice example: P&G, Old Spice)
4. Social Commerce: Including Dell.com Improvements and Dell Swarm Group Buying (best practice example: Groupon, eBay)
5. Social Media Training for all Employees

Social Media Listening Command Centre

• First Centre in Austin Texas
• Soon to be launched in Singapore, China and India
• Using Radian 6 (but considering Brandtology, Meltwater Buzz and similar services)
• Monitoring 25,000 daily conversations

Example: “Gorilla Glass” on Dell Streak 5 – The “gorilla glass” on Dell Streak tablet phone is breaking. Complaint mentioned Starhub and Dell and highlighted that the “gorilla glass” is not under warranty. Dell and Starhub immediately looked into the case.

4 ways to build fans, likes and connections

• Paid advertising contributes up to 75% of your Fan/Like acquisition (Facebook). – use ads to drive traffic
• Around US$1.10 per Fan acquisition.
• Relevant content, incentives and CSR keeps Fans, Followers, Connections engaged.
• Acquisition changes depending on the number of existing Fans, Followers, Connections (early stage vs. category leader: 1million +).

Video: User Generated vs Agency Produced

Example: Gadget Unboxing videos (295,217 views) vs. Agency Produced videos(7,429 views) – both Alienware

Social Media has empowered customers. Companies don’t have full control over their brands in social media.

Social Commerce Group Buying via the Dell Swarm brand – Groupon component

Dell Swarm Platform Positioning – Group Buy Focus: S&P and End-of-Life

• Large discount expectation
• Social, WOM and Buzz generation
• Upsell/traffic drive to Dell.com

Next Steps for Dell Swarm: Geo Expansion à Partnerships à Mobile and Social Integration

Twitter: @DellOutlet 1,570,397 followers. $15m+revenue à demand generation tool

Social Transformation: Training all of Dell’s 100,000 employees in social media.

• Social Media policy in place
• Robust training program in place: getting started in social media, brand mgmt in social media, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RenRen and Sina (China), Blogging and Community, Internal Social Media
• 9,000 employees already trained.
• Will fundamentally transform Dell.

Dell’s 5 Social Media Principles:

• Protect Information
• Be Transparent and Disclose
• Follow the Law, Follow the Code of Conduct
• Be Responsible
• Be Nice, Have Fun and Connect

“Social Media amplifies people’s opinions. If you want to get best results, identify key positive things and amplify them.”