Nov 6, 2008
Highlights from FOSM Conference
Last week I attended the Future of Social Media Conference in London. There were around 200 people at the event, mainly marketers from traditional organisations looking to update themselves developments in social media and how the tools could be effectively adopted by their businesses.
Rohit Bhargava from Ogilvy was one of the speakers and he made a number of key points from his recent book “Personality Not Included”:
Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is now the holy grail. For example, companies should be using a Twitter search to find out what is being said about their brand online, and monitoring comments on blogs, forums etc etc. Engagement with customers rather than impressions should be the measure of success.
Companies need to assess the quality of an online review (aka Ebay’s star system or, even the basic ‘was this review useful to you?’ question) in order to develop a system of ‘virtual trust metrics’ that contributors can rely on. A product or service rating of 4.3/5 appears to be more authentic than 5/5 – which looks to be contrived.
Suppliers have lost control of the message, because the number one influence on a customer’s purchase decision is now a personal recommendation. Recent research by Universal McCann showed that 8 out of the top 10 sources of trust are in fact word of mouth (4 from friends, 4 from strangers). In addition, you can’t choose who your spokespeople are (think John McCain and Paris Hilton….)
Another inspirational speaker was Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes. Will noted that the future is not evenly distributed – some companies are way ahead of the curve, others are way behind. Ford’s social media newsroom gives away unused professional product photos and shows that they ‘get it’ (see http://ford.digitalsnippets.com/ ) He called on audience participation to demonstrate the current disconnect between the numbers of people expecting to see ratings on a site they visit, while not providing it to others on their own sites….
Martin Verdon- Roe from Trip Advisor explained how his company now has 20 million reviews, up from 10 million a year ago. Major travel industry players such as Tui display both their own reviews and Trip Advisor’s on their website – but the independent Trip Advisor reviews are much greater in number. The next challenge for the company is the introduction of a Traveller Network, which works like a social network where people can sign up friends, and the system will show you reviews from your friends first when you input a particular destination query into the site. Keep an eye on Trip Advisor to see how this develops.
There was also a very interesting case study from British Airways which is worthy of a blog post of its very own….so watch this space!
All in all a very informative and entertaining day…with hardly a mention of the ‘recession’ word 
Technorati Tags: FOSM,social media marketing
