Social Media Marketing Summit: Brian Solis

As promised, I will deliver with more notes from the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference.  This was the second talk of the conference promising to tell attendees why social media is the new and much better PR and how to garner attention and then make the most of it.  The featured speaker was:

• Brian Solis, Founder and CEO, FutureWorks

I’ve heard of Brian previously and had the pleasure of meeting him upon my arrival at the summit Wednesday morning.  Incredibly nice guy – I later found out through Twitter that it was his anniversary and he’d still agreed to come talk!  And it was a great lesson on social media as public relations.

Brian shared some pretty well-known charts he’s created, which we even mentioned in our panel as well since they’re so provocative.

Bullet Point Review!

• PR people are the most popular at any company.
• Social media is like a renaissance of sorts.
• Markets are conversations, participation is marketing.
• We can’t control the message anymore.
• We miss what we’re not part of.
• One -> One and Many -> Many are important communication concepts to use in social media.
• Something to think about: how do you define influence?
• There are 120,000 new blogs started every day (I believe the source was Technorati).
• Social media is not just blogger relations.
• PR is not about top down anything anymore.
• Old metrics no longer ally with the new web.
• Something to think about: are you an evangelist or a consultant?
• Are you confined to the role of a social marketer or do you represent something with long term value?
• This is about public relations – remember that!
• Everyone feels like they’re an expert about something.
• Social media creates a new hybrid of PR professionals.
• We become influencers.
• Understand how to match people to products.
• There are 3 sides to every story – what you want to say, what people want to hear, and the truth somewhere in the middle.
• People = viral.
• No social media is rooted in broadcast, 1 way streams, or blasts.
• Who owns this channel?  Sometimes it’s advertising, PR, marketing, customer service.
• It requires a champion internally, but it’s really everyone’s responsibility.
• It’s the listening that separates experts from the theorists.
• People become pseudo-sociologists – each community is radically different.
• Chart your social media.
• Identify ways to deliver value.
• It’s about conversations not messages.
• Cultivate relationships.
• Remember you’re speaking with people, not an audience.
• DO NOT jump in and start pushing a message or shilling.
• DO NOT SPAM.
• DO NOT fake it.
• Remember that social media requires daily participation.
• Interactive marketing is starting to seriously clash with traditional advertising.
• PR is contending with outsourced relationship managers.
• Web marketers are grappling with digital content creators.
• PR is no longer defined by hits.
• For every bit of information you push out, the higher your authority as an expert becomes.
• Conversations are traceable.
• Social media is not the final frontier – this is just the beginning.
• The semantic web is around the corner.
• Social media is a means, not an end, and is a lesson.
• Being human vs. humanizing your story.
• Either you’re an employee or you’re an evangelist.
• All your social media efforts work back to building your personal brand.
• Respect the community and it will respect you.
• Companies will earn the relationships they deserve within social media.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• How did you decide where you need to be?  Looked at keywords, thought leading people’s names to see where they were, there are tools to show metrics.
• When asking some major brands why they got into social media, they just said they felt like they needed to be there.  When asking them how they track they said “We don’t.” which is cool but scary at the same time.
• There is math you can do to see where or how deeply to participate.  Look up your brand + sucks to see the suck factor and use that to gauge your success.
• What do you look for in hiring a community manager?  They vary, the ones who really understand social web are very expensive.  Use the social media tools to find them – put out a tweet, use LinkedIn.

Great stuff that helped to set some of the high level concepts on social media for the relative newbies in attendance and people who really had the questions on how to make social media work for their business.  I’ve seen lots of people talk about how powerful social media is, but this was very related to make it really work well for your brand and company.  Great job!