Social Fresh Charlotte Recap – On Social Media Agencies, Rubbermaid

It may be a week late, but here’s my entry into the “Social Fresh Charlotte Recap Post” ring. There are already a ton of great ones, collected in places like here and here to start.

What did I take away? First off, the conference was extremely well organized, so hats off to @jakrose and team for pulling it all together. Second, it’s clear from the energy, enthusiasm, and experiences of the attendees and presenters that the field of social media marketing is alive, thriving (despite the recession) and rapidly congealing into a focused marketing, communications, and support discipline. It was fun to be a part of all that.

I took notes on a bunch of good sessions, but for the sake of time I’ll share my thoughts on just two for now (self-servingly, one of those I was a part of):

SESSION: Bert Dumars (@bwdumars) – Building Social Media Across Multiple Departments

Bert is a walking case study in how large companies with multiple consumer brands are handling (successfully) the challenges of social media marketing. His talk reflected a lot of what I see in our own clients – a centralized set of social media domain experts working closely with the brand marketing leads to incorporate social into their existing marketing strategies. Bert shared a wealth of good examples and I ended up furiously taking notes to share back home.

What I took away:

• User-generated content (UGC) gets Rubbermaid the most mileage. Interested concepts like the Sharpie Doodle contest over on SharpieUncapped are great examples of how you can tap into the underlying passions of your existing customers to create a stronger, more personalized connection.
• Well-moderated communities thrive. Something of an intuitive finding that jives with what my own experience tells me, but nice to hear what Rubbermaid has gone through. Bert noted that as the Sharpie Facebook page grew past 1 million fans, the time needed to clean out spam and moderate the comments grew dramatically. However, the faster they cleaned out the junked, the faster they found their fan numbers grow. People appreciate a well-moderated discussion space.
• Social media marketing strategy is a component, not the be all end all. An oft repeated mantra, but one that people often forget. You need a marketing or brand strategy that incorporates social media, not the other way around.
• Rubbermaid is selectively using social media in the brands that make the most sense. Sharpie, definitely. Papermate or Uniball? Not so much. Despite all the attention, social media marketing just isn’t a great fit for many brands.

SESSION: Social Agencies, A New Model (Panel)

I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussing how agencies are adapting to and pitching social media, involving panelists from four agencies each with a different angle on social media: Steve Parker (@levelwing), James Andrews (@keyinfluencer), Ted Shelton (@tshelton) and myself (@kevinbriody).

Though I’ll have to rely on anyone who was in the audience to tell how it really went, I think from the perspective of a panelists the flow went pretty well and we covered quite a bit of ground, ranging from general thoughts and trends to specifics like pricing agency services (by project, not by the hour, was the unanimous opinion). Hats off to Steve Parker for stepping up at the last minute to moderate.

What I took away:

While I often describe my employer, Ignite Social Media, as a “pure” social media marketing agency, that distinction is a lot less clear to me now after talking with Steve, Ted, and James. The lines between social media marketing and direct, relationship, ad, PR, etc are blurring so fast that it seems we’re more accurately described as a marketing agency with a special focus on social media as a channel and toolset.

After all, we have an analytics team, a media buying team (from search to display to social), full creative and technical teams…all in addition to people doing strategy, blog outreach, new content, and so on. Ted rightly called me on the fact that while we focus on the social media domain space, our capabilities make us more of a full service marketing shop than I would previously thought. It’s definitely interesting to be involved in the evolution of a whole field of marketing…

I also want to call out Amber Naslund (@ambercadabra) and Dave Thomas (@davidbthomas) both put out some great stuff. I wrote a bit about Amber’s presentation last week, nothing yet about Dave’s, something I hope to remedy soon (especially as he’s moving to a new role which I’m sure will put him solidly on the speaker circuit).

Related posts:

1. Beware the lone (social media) gunman
2. Yet again, social media is not about any tool or platform
3. Why no single type of agency will own social media