Social Media Week

Partner Profiles

Ogilvy Joins Social Media Week as Global Sponsor!

Advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather has a rich heritage of digital innovation. More recently they’re growing beyond digital and focusing on social media and social business solutions for their clients. In fact, in the past seven years, they’ve grown the world’s largest network of social strategists. All this is why we’re thrilled to have Ogilvy on board as a global supporting sponsor for SMW12.

Aside from making it all possible, Ogilvy is taking an active role. Featuring a three-city global tour throughout Social Media Week, top executives from Ogilvy will host a leadership series– the Insidious Plot to Socialize the Enterprise. How will it work? By kicking off in New York City on Monday, February 13, with special guest, John Bell, Global Managing Director of Ogilvy’s social media practice; followed by London on Tuesday; continuing to Hong Kong on Wednesday, and concluding with a full day of events hosted at the Ogilvy headquarters in New York City on Thursday. A whirlwind of activity.

“The impact of social media around the world is just getting bigger and bigger. That’s why Ogilvy’s grown the world’s largest global team delivering integrated social solutions relevant in each local market,” said John Bell of Ogilvy & Mather. “Social Media Week is the perfect partner to host a discussion across 12 markets about the business impact of social media and real, proven best practices. It’s more than an event, Social Media Week is a global platform. Brands, organizations, smart thinkers will all come together and share what they are doing. We have a lot to share from our work around the world and learn from the experience of others– Social Media Week is the perfect place for that.”

We have worked with Ogilvy in various capacities in past Social Media Week events, and through that, have established a fantastic working relationship with Ogilvy’s teams in multiple markets. Their support for what we set out to achieve in the early days of Social Media Week has been crucial, and we are excited to take this partnership to the next level. You can keep up with Ogilvy on Twitter, Facebook and by following the global partnership at #SMWOgilvy- you won’t want to miss their insights!

Spotlight on Mark Schmulen, General Manager of Social Media at Constant Contact

We’ve got some amazing partners, and learning more about each of them inspires our team and challenges how we at Social Media Week do what we do. Bringing on Small Business Sponsor, Constant Contact, has been no different. Through affordable and easy-to-use marketing tools, Constant Contact helps create and grow customer relationships. And now, they’re here to help strengthen and grow how we support small businesses in this area. Learn a bit more about them with us, as we talk with Mark Schmulen, General Manager of Social Media at Constant Contact.

The global theme for SMW 2012 is “Empowering Change through Collaboration.” How does Constant Contact support this in all they do?
The only way to truly achieve change is through collaboration. When communities work together, they can share insights, inform, engage, enlighten and connect in more meaningful ways. Now through social media and email marketing tools, this collaboration can be accelerated. Constant Contact provides small businesses and non-profits with these tools to foster one-to-one and one-to-many conversations that result in positive change.

 
Constant Contact powers over 500,000 small businesses, non profits associations.  With markets growing more and more niche, how do you manage to successfully target each of your clients?
Essentially, we follow the same advice we give our customers when they ask about how to successfully target clients. It really comes down to these three steps: 1. Listen, 2. Engage; and 3. Act.
Listen to what your customers are asking you, asking for, and not asking yet should be. Based on this information, engage them by continuing the dialog that’s focused on their business needs. From there, create customized messages and campaigns that are specific to them. While it’s impossible to create one-on-one tailored campaigns, you can divide your audience into segments and subgroups and create compelling offers based on the specific needs of separate audiences within your larger customer and prospect base.
 

For many of your clients, social media has become an integral part of their digital campaigns. How is Constant Contact integrating social media into its existing email marketing tools?
From a purely tactical standpoint, it comes down to making it easy for your customers to share your messages through different platforms. By adding share buttons such as Facebook and Twitter as well as links to your blog and website, you take out any heavy lifting a customer would have to do to tell their friends and colleagues about your business or current offers.

From a more strategic point of view, you should view social media and email marketing tools as part of your overall methods of reaching your customers. It’s not so much about separating them as it is about seeing them as complementary vehicles to reach your customers in the ways that they prefer. Email marketing is the best way to get your message heard, but social media is the best way to get that message to spread.
 

How does Constant Contact’s new Social Campaigns tool allow your clients to reach new audiences and ultimately drive more sales?
Our new Social Campaigns tool allows small businesses and non profits to quickly and easily run results-oriented social media marketing campaigns on Facebook. More specifically, users can create professional looking landing pages on Facebook where they can run Like-gated campaigns and offers such as coupons, weekly specials, fundraisers, product showcases, and videos for example. Yet the customer engagement is not restricted to Facebook because users can publish and promote their campaigns to their Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and email subscribers all from within the Constant Contact platform. And they can run reports to evaluate campaign metrics such as fan growth, email subscriber growth, site visits, clicks, downloads, and participant sharing.

Our primary focus is to make social media engagement even more easily accessible by allowing anybody to run their first campaign using our new social campaign tool for free. And for companies with less than 100 Facebook fans, the product is free.
 

Tell us a little about “Fanbruary.” How did it develop and what does Constant Contact have in store for its fans and small businesses after this campaign?
It’s not a typo! This year, we’ve re-named February and turned it into a celebration of social media success for small businesses and organizations. Every day throughout Fanbruary (even on the weekends) our team of experts will be sharing a different social media tip on our Facebook Page and on our blog.

In addition, everyone who signs up to try our new Social Campaigns tool during the month of Fanbruary will be entered to win $2,000: $1,000 their business and $1,000 their biggest fan.

“Engagement Marketing” has been a strong theme in your company strategy over the past year. Tell us a little about what this means and how it affects your offering?
To successfully build your business, it’s important to view every customer as a potential lifetime customer as opposed to a business transaction. With engagement marketing, you take this approach to the next level by connecting with your customers in more meaningful ways both offline and online. Whether it’s on Facebook, via email or another communications platform, we’re always striving to make each interaction worthy of their time and specifically address their business needs.
By engaging our customers and continuously learning how we can further help them drive business success, we are able to refine and expand our portfolio of offerings. This provides our customers with the ability to reach their customers through a comprehensive suite of of social media, email and event marketing tools.

Along with the tools, we also guide customers on how to effectively use these tools through our collective know-how and help them track their success so they truly do make the most of their marketing investments. By providing the tools and tips that enable them to learn more about their customers’ specific interest and needs, our customers are able to provide higher quality and more personalized service to their customers. Not only are they able to addresses their customers’ current needs, they have a distinct competitive advantage because they are able to anticipates future needs as well.
 

What sort of trends within small business marketing do you expect to see in 2012?
What we’ll continue to see is the dwindling of one-size-fits-all campaigns and the rise of more effective and highly targeted campaigns. This will happen through the continued evolution of social media, email, and event marketing tools and an increased level of comfort among small businesses using these tools.
 

In your opinion, what small business or organization does the most effective and inspirational job of utilizing these tools and mobilizing their supporters?
There are so many businesses and organizations effectively using social media, event and email marketing it’s difficult to point to just one. However, what I’ve found is that there are similar characteristics among businesses that are realizing success with these tools.

Those three primary traits are: 1. Passion for their business that is evident in the way they freely impart advice, 2. Receptive to feedback and continuous improvement of their products and services; and 3. Lead all of their marketing campaigns with a focus on engaging customers.
 

What can SMW supporters expect to see from Constant Contact this February and what should they look out for?
Look for a big, exciting Fanbruary, as we help small business and organizations get real business results with social media marketing- and don’t forget to check out our daily tips!

Powering Small Businesses, Constant Contact Partners With SMW12

Small businesses and nonprofits- two groups we want to serve better. And this year, we’re excited to announce we’re stepping up to this by partnering with Constant Contant. Through affordable and easy-to-use marketing tools, Constant Contact helps create and grow customer relationships. They serve more than 500,000 small businesses, nonprofits, and associations worldwide with email marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, and online surveys.

And now they’re supporting Social Media Week. Powering small businesses, Constant Contact’s role will greatly enhance the Social Media Week experience for small businesses and non-profit organizations.

How will you see this take place? Well, they are celebrating the launch of their new Facebook-integration tool, Social Campaigns. Through this launch, Constant Contact will provide daily opportunities to win a cash prize for participants to help small businesses better utilize social media and turn fans into customers. Drawing upon their expertise, Constant Contact will also be highlighting resources and providing guidance for small business and non-profit participants throughout Social Media Week with a series of 7 live events in New York, Miami, Washington DC, San Francisco and London; a webinar and an online series.

We are thrilled to be able to offer a coordinated effort during Social Media Week to support the small business sector. As a free global conference that connects individuals from all experience levels and professional backgrounds, we have been aware of the need to make our small business focused content more accessible. With Constant Contact’s support, Social Media Week is able to empower small businesses to leverage social and mobile media to reach and engage their customers in new and innovative ways. If you’re a small business owner or work in one- or a nonprofit- you’ll want to hear what they’re putting out this SMW12. Stay tuned with them throughout SMW12 on Twitter, Facebook, and by following the conversation with #SMWCC.

And if you’re not a fan of our Facebook page, now’s the time to be one and check out Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns.

SMW In Your Hands- Our New Mobile Site

You may (or may not) have noticed that we’ve been changing things up at Social Media Week- building out new products, enhancing old ones. From the one-click registration system to our new mobile apps and down to our new mobile website, we want to improve the overall experience of SMW. And that means making SMW more convenient- so, yes, we did say mobile. Now, when you visit our site on your smartphone, you get delivered a crisp, clean and mobile-friendly version of our site- including registration. You can register for events, learn more about our city organizers and what’s going on in each of them, and- for your tweeters out there- experience the site when you click through a link on your phone.

So, pick up your phone, check it out, and let us know what you think! We’ll be building upon it for SMW12 September, making it even better. In the meantime, meet the team that helped make it happen: Todd Shingler of Mobile Perspectives and Rob Leishman of New Media Innovation.


 

How did Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation both get involved with SMW12?
Mobile Perspectives had previously met with the coordinators of SMW Chicago about putting a mobile web solution together for the Chicago 2011 event and they introduced us to the Global SMW team at CrowdCentric. New Media Innovation is a strategic technology partner of Mobile Perspectives. We leverage NMI’s Intelligent Multimedia Publishing Suite (IMPS) when delivering mobile website solutions and engage their delivery team as needed during project implementations. For Social Media Week, Mobile Perspectives worked closely with CrowdCentric while designing the mobile user interface and implementing the service flows to ensure a consistent- and mobile optimized– experience for SMW attendees. New Media Innovation handled the majority of the back-end integration work so that attendees can login, register for events and subsequently manage their SMW schedule.

 
Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovations are both solid companies built around building and designing mobile solutions. What sets you both apart and what was great about working together on this partnership?
We believe our collective breadth of experience in delivering successful mobile projects across a diverse range of industries for companies such as Wal-mart.com, Wells Fargo, AT&T Wireless, Cox Communications, and Qantas Airlines, as well as our experiences working with smaller local businesses sets us apart. The founders of Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation have worked together in a variety of capacities over the past decade and our teams and skill-sets are highly complementary.
 

Todd, Mobile Perspectives also have the Mobile Campaign Edge offering cross-channel promotional services. Can you tell us more about this?
Mobile Campaign Edge (MCE) was created in response to having a number of our consulting clients ask if we could simply execute the strategies we developed for them. MCE itself is a customized solution and set of best practices that extends an organization’s web, social media and traditional marketing to the mobile channel. The resulting cross-channel integration (web, mobile, social, print, TV, radio) provides a constant communication platform needed to reach and interact effectively with their target audience. Beyond mobile web, we incorporate text messaging, QR Codes & Microsoft Tags, mobile video and other complementary mobile technologies as appropriate. Our primary focus is on enabling effective, targeted engagement of our client’s consumers while they are on-the-go.
 

What trends are you seeing in the mobile space?
The primary trend we are seeing is the creative leveraging of social media and geo-positioning to enable mobile-enhanced experiences that are simultaneously more personal, intuitive, effective and satisfying than previously possible. Retailers are starting to leverage geo-enhanced mobile advertising within applications, like Pandora, to entice consumers into nearby stores and then offering mobile concierge services through branded mobile applications. Restaurants and other businesses are enabling– and encouraging- loyal patrons to ‘share’ their experiences and purchases with friends and followers by linking directly to social media via optimized mobile websites. When there is a sufficient value exchange, consumers are willing to share their location and act as brand agents within their social media circles.
 

Rob, you create mobile solution for enterprises looking to interact with their customers via Mobile. With the complexity of different backend systems within these organizations, how does New Media Innovation tie this together for a successful customer implementation?
New Media Innovation has been developing and fine tuning our Mobility suite of products for the past 5 years. We have developed a highly configurable and flexible product suite that allows us to provide a mobile offering to suit any customer. Example solutions may be

  • An out of the box Mobile website
  • A Multi-Channel (Mobile and Web) based site
  • A Native Client (currently iOS or Android)
  • Or a combination of all of the above.

We work with our clients to define their requirements and help guide them on the appropriate technology for their situation. Whether it be extending their existing web-based systems to mobile via our New Media Framework or using our Mobile/Web CMS (the IMPS Product used for SMW) to host and manage the customer branded multi-channel digital content on their behalf.
 

As the rate of accessing sites via mobile is steadily increasing, do you think this will slow down or will brands that opt out miss the boat?
Brands that opt out will definitely miss the boat. Retailers are already starting to change their business models and revisit their supplier relationships to avoid simply becoming ‘showrooms’ for Amazon. Likewise, the hospitality industry is fighting to take back ownership of customer relationships they’ve inadvertently ceded to OpenTable and GrubHub. The advances in smartphone capabilities provides brands with a new opportunity to get (literally) into their consumer’s pocket.
 

This year’s theme for Social Media Week is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. How are you seeing this played out locally and globally?
The growth of social media, web communication tools and complementary mobile apps makes it possible to quickly assemble and manage virtual teams across companies and geographies. Take the SMW mobile website for example. Mobile Perspectives is based in Chicago, Crowdcentric in New York, New Media Innovation in Melbourne, Australia, the Nokia maps team is based in Finland, and Techliminal, who we worked with on the back-end integration, is based in San Francisco. Almost all
of our communication has been via email or Skype and our geographic spread actually allowed us to progress the mobile website virtually around the clock.
 

Finally, what was your favorite part of working with SMW this year?
Everyone we’ve worked with at SMW has been incredibly enthusiastic and collaborative. We’ve also enjoyed gaining insights into the hot social media topics around the world through our exposure to the various local city event blogs and schedules.

Spreading the News- Social Media Week & the Guardian US

As Social Media Week has evolved, one aspect that we always strive to hold true to is partnering with the best industry leaders. From the local to the global level with Nokia to Buddy Media to SAP, we look for those leading in their fields. This stretches down to the incredible city organizers behind the scenes hosting SMW on a local level. Continuing in that vein, we couldn’t be happier to announce Guardian US as our Global Media Partner.

Just how will you see the Guardian US this SMW12? A special section of the Guardian US website will provide exclusive, in-depth coverage of Social Media Week, including daily interview features with thought-leaders and keynote speakers at our Global Hub in New York City. A key component of this section will highlight data emerging from SMW12 in real-time, as well as provide access our livestreamed events. Also, we’ll see notable Guardian staff, including editor-in-chief Janine Gibson, participating and leading events throughout Social Media Week New York.

“We have the privilege of working with a number of incredibly iconic organizations and today’s announcement of our partnership with Guardian US is one of the most exciting yet,” said Toby Daniels, founder of Social Media Week and CEO of Crowdcentric. “This is exciting because the Guardian US will play an integral role in helping to capture and broadcast the content and conversation that is created during Social Media Week to help reach a much larger international audience.”

Want more? You’ll also see Guardian content in our new mobile app, powered by Nokia, featuring live content feeds related to social, mobile, and digital media. Starting with Symbian, our official app will be available for download starting today, rolling out to 4 other platforms by Monday, January 30th.

“We are honoured to participate in Social Media Week,” said Chris Pelekanou Global Commercial Director of the Guardian. “Social Media Week is one of the world’s most unique and interactive global platforms – driving economic, cultural, political and social change conversation, making it a natural fit with us as we continue to be committed to an open, engaging and cooperative newsroom.”

You can keep up with the Guardian on Twitter. We’ll be unveiling other partners as we near SMW12, and you’ll want to keep your eye on all these players. SMW12 is going to be bigger and bolder than ever.

Social Media Week and Nokia: Building Something Amazing

When Social Media Week began in 2009, we set out with an aim of redesigning the traditional conference experience with a focus on making it more collaborative, open and inclusive.  In three years we’ve hosted more than 2,000 free events for 70k attendees in 20 countries worldwide, with at least 75% of the content curated by industry leaders who most impacted by social media.

None of this would have been possible without the investment and engagement of our brand partners– most notably our global sponsors. We are therefore pleased to announce that Nokia has committed to serve again as global headline sponsor of Social Media Week in 2012, reprising a role they held in 2011. By powering SMW in 2012, they will substantially enhance the intrinsic value of SMW, making it easier for attendees and participants to experience content, engage in conversations and connect with other attendees

In returning as global headline sponsor of Social Media Week in 2012, Nokia’s contributions will make some significant enhancements to the attendee experience, and together, we will work to make advancements in connecting the next billion to social and digital media. Chief among these is the launch of the first official SMW Mobile App, which will run on Windows Phone, Symbian, Android, and iOS (both iPhone and iPad), and be available to attendees worldwide in 6 languages.

Helping make SMW12 more convenient and connected, the SMW Official Mobile App will allow users to see the schedule, and track and add preferred events, speakers, and venues to their SMW Profile. Registration will also be easier, allowing users to quickly log-in to their SMW account to register for events and access their personalized schedule. Finally, the SMW Official Mobile App pulls in content that matters, including Twitter feeds and stats, related Facebook pages, and blogs for all the latest news and SMW-related conversations, including special content from additional content and media partners. Access to social media platforms from apps and the mobile web on smartphones is growing exponentially, and this move will help connect SMW supporters quicker and more smoothly than ever- all through the power of their preferred mobile device. Starting with Symbian, the SMW Official Mobile App will be available for download January 20th, rolling out to other platforms within the next week. You can learn more at socialmediaweek.org/mobileapps.

Complementing the global Social Media Week theme of empowering change through collaboration, our SMW/Nokia 2012 partnership will also focus on events and speakers embodying this concept. This includes, not the least of these, Nokia rolling out a range of initiatives focusing on making attendees and supporters’ days better in small, and some not-so-small ways. Each day will bring something unexpected. From Global Keynote Don Tapscott to interactive events in Singapore, San Francisco, London, NYC, Hong Kong and Sao Paulo, both Nokia and SMW will be helping attendees and supporters discover how to best utilize social media in their lives- whether it means networking with like-minded people, promoting their own business or participating in community initiatives for positive change.

Nokia’s contributions to Social Media Week–from apps, to ideas, to just helping participants have a brighter day– will go a long way toward making SMW12 a success. We loved what came out of this partnership for SMW11 and look forward to bigger and more exciting developments this February.

Stay connected by following SMW on Twitter and Facebook and show our support to Nokia by following them on Twitter and Facebook.

Nokia: Creating Goodwill, Connecting People Globally & Having Fun

Leading off today is the first of a few posts that recap some of the contributions of the major partners of Social Media Week September 2011. Today’s focus is on Social Media Week Global Headline Sponsor Nokia, who helped power the conference globally and across many of our markets.

Working with Nokia we collectively agreed that their participation in Social Media Week needed to focus on creating goodwill, providing value for our attendees and on making the experience better, richer and more fun.  This video is a really tremendous example of how this was achieved:

#NOKIACONNECTS RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS

Through its “Random Acts of Kindness” efforts, Nokia was able to provide some very cool incentives for attendees across six of the SMW cities, from phones to get-well kits to customized drawings of user tweets.

Possibly most cool of these all was the Nokia Gift Machine in Glasgow–featured here on Engadget–that dispensed all kinds of goodies (including N8 phones!) to people who checked-in to the machine via Foursquare.

Awesome as the Random Acts of Kindness were, Nokia also contributed to the conference in three additionally significant ways:

  • SMW RealTime:  Powered by#NokiaConnects and focused on bringing people together around the world
  • Social Media Week Live:  Making SMW content available globally for as many people as possible
  • SMW Local:  Participation in the content and conversation in multiple cities throughout the week

SMW REALTIME APP

Perhaps the most significant of these efforts was Nokia’s collaboration with Social Media Week on the development of the SMW RealTime app (at socialmediaweek.org/realtime) that powered the conference, providing attendees with a way to track their schedule, follow specific sessions, discover new events and follow the real-time conversation of other participants in all 12 cities and around the globe–72,000 tweets and 6,000 Foursquare check-ins worldwide. The app also provided a great way for event organizers in all 12 cities to project real-time data about their event on large screens in both a global and local view.

SOCIAL MEDIA WEEK LIVE

Additionally, Nokia made it possible for people around the world to catch SMW events that they weren’t able to attend in person by powering Social Media Week Live, the streaming platform through SMW partner Livestream.com. With over 180 SMW events streamed live and 65,000 unique streams totally 2.2 million viewer minutes, this was a significant contribution to the SMW experience this September.

 

SMW LOCAL

Lastly, as a truly global organization Nokia was able to contribute to content and conversation on a significant level, with involvement in nearly 20 events across six cities, including local sponsorship of the conferences in Berlin, Beirut and Milan. A sampling of some the highlights are included below–click on the event titles to watch archived videos of the sessions:

GLASGOW:
Nokia & CNN at SMW Glasgow: Social Media and The Evolution of Breaking News”
Nokia Global Director of Digital and Social Media Craig Hepburn (@CraigHepburn) joined this discussion with Peter Bale of CNN to discuss how social media has impacted Nokia and how global brands are responding to digital trends.

CHICAGO:
Always On, Always Connected, Always Local
Adam Mirabella (@AdamMirabella), Global Director of Digital Marketing at Nokia, joined this panel to highlight the social conversations taking place on digital and mobile tech- and its impact on consumers and their purchases.

BERLIN:
Keynote: Gabe Zichermann on Gamification, hosted by Nokia
Looking at the new arena of gamification and its purpose in fund-raising, enjoyment enhancement and location-based services. Hosted by Nokia, this session brought in Gabe Zichermann of the Gamification Summit and Workshops with Wooga’s Sina Kamala Kaufmann and Willempje Vrins.

Location and Social Space, hosted by Nokia
Sylvain Grande of Nokia Maps and Digital Marketing Manager Alex Oberberg (@AlexOberberg) reviewed location-based services, using Nokia’s Checkin Reward Campaign as a case study.

LOS ANGELES:
“The Mobile Marketing Revolution- Gimmick or Here to Stay?”
Global Director of Digital Marketing of Nokia, Adam Mirabella participated in this panel covering mobile marketing. From QR codes to ROI, this session presented examples that have worked and lessons that the community can learn from. You can follow Adam on Twitter at @AdamMirabella.

MILAN
“Hunt the Icons”, a scavenger hunt sponsored by Nokia
A treasure hunt in the center of Milan during the final day of the festival, where teams were given a Nokia N8 and had to interpret the clues scattered throughout Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, reach different goals and to check in before the others to win a Nokia 500 phone.

BEIRUT
“When Nokia Engages with the Audience: Success Stories”
Creative firm 1000Heads joined Tania Retief, Social Media Communications Manager at Nokia, and Nokia’s Digital Marketing Manager, Antoine Naaman (@_Ant1_), to highlight some of their favorite consumer collaboration stories and how they involve you, the customer, in the process.

I am really happy to make this happen in Berlin: so far, one of my best professional experiences at Nokia. Pino Bonetti,  Ovi by Nokia Blog Editor in Chief

—-

As you can see, Nokia’s contributions to the week–from apps, to ideas, to just helping people–were huge and went a long way toward making the week the success that it was. We leave you with this video from Irkafirka, who worked with Nokia to contribute random acts of kindness by illustrating user tweets for them.

Sharing Stories of Social Media’s Impact

When we announced our partnership with CNN iReport, we were excited to see the responses. And the past two weeks, we’ve been able to hear from you and others about the impact of social media in your life- both within the context of Social Media Week and outside of it. Ranging from ordering pizza through Facebook to Matias Bruno interviewing an attendee in Social Media Week Buenos Aires, we can’t wait to see them all. It’s not too late to add your voice, as the assignment runs through the weekend. Here are some of our favorites for inspiration!

Social Media Manager Detroit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Using Social Media To Advance Your Writing Career

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media And Policing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Media Week Buenos Aires

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Share your favorites- and your story- with us!

Sysomos Does Social Media Week

Sysomos is no stranger to the Social Media Week community, regularly contributing to our global blog and providing insight into social media trends in our host cities. They’ve also been providing social media monitoring and analytics to help us follow and track all the social media activity.

But Sysomos is not just a virtual partner of Social Media Week- they will also have a physical presence. While you may have missed them at Social Media Week Vancouver’s Kick-Off Soiree, you can still catch them in Chicago and LA. And this is a team you want to get to know. Learn more about where to see the Sysomos team in action:

Los Angeles, Wednesday, September 21 at 7:30AM

Social Media Breakfast: Social Media Monitoring and Measurement
Understand How To Turn Data Into Business Insights

Guest speaker Natalie Petouhoff discusses social media measurement and how your business can incorporate Sysomos. Using real-life case studies to illustrate with examples, tools, tips, strategy and tactical capabilities to monitor and measure the success of your social media and digital communication programs will be discussed in this session. And don’t worry, they’’ll cover the how’s, the what’s and the why’s to social media monitoring and measurement, as well.

Chicago, Thursday, September 22 at 5:30 PM– 7:30 PM

Sysomos and WOMMA Tweet-Up
Help unwind after a full day of Social Media Week with Sysomos and WOMMA. Enjoy the conversation and share what you’ve learned over the past few days. And get to know the Sysomos team, personally.

We look forward to hearing more from Sysomos and hope you’re enjoying seeing social media broken down on a local level. In between their posts on our blog and their events during the week, you can also check them out here.

6 Questions with Cliff Torng of TigerLogic

We’re proud to announce our newest partner for Social Media Week, Postano. And to help you learn more about them, we’re featuring a Q & A with their VP of Marketing, Cliff Torng.


 
1. What is Postano and why did you build it?
Postano is a platform that aggregates any social media or syndicated content (anything with an API or RSS feed) and seamlessly imports it in an attractive and brand-right way into a website.

Postano gives brands the ability to post social media content, with full sharing capability, in locations beyond the original source channel. This extends the
reach and velocity of the sharing of that content, greatly increasing the impact and efficacy of all the brand’s digital efforts.

An additional benefit is that because Postano injects dynamic content into previously static websites, those sites should experience increased traffic and
time on site. The traffic increase will be due to an SEO bump from the frequently updating website content, along with increased consumer understanding that
there will be fresh content available each time they visit. The increase in engagement will be from the amount of relevant and attractive content available
in one place. Both effects should lead to a greater number of website enabled transactions.

Postano started off last December as a personal Facebook reader called PostPost, which pulled in an individual’s newsfeed, and displayed in a
newspaper/magazine format, a Flipboard for the web so to speak. After launch, a number of prospective clients contacted us, wondering if the technology could be
used by the brands to create a brand page. Six months of development followed, and the new revised platform was launch late in June.
 
 
2. How does Postano fit within parent company TigerLogic?
TigerLogic’s overall corporate mission is to help customers organize their data and make it more useful.

Postano is the latest product brought to market by TigerLogic, following on the heels of the previous launch, yoLink search plug-in. yoLink is a hierarchical
search enhancement that sits on top of existing search engines and takes search farther by going beyond the links to pull in a deeper and more detailed summary.
This saves users time and effort by giving them a clearer picture of what the link contains.
 
 
3. Where do you see Postano in 3 years from now?
Once the capability of taking content and placing it a site where it can serve as a postcasting, syndication or DVR for posts is better understood, we see Postano
forming the basis of multiple uses for brands and businesses:

  • As the postcasting channel for all of a brand’s social media posts– located in one single place along with full search capability.
  • As a central display center for contests that leverage social media platforms – for example, if there is a model search done through
    Facebook, where the winner is the photo entry that receives the most “likes”. Postano would augment that effort, and make all the entries
    available in one place for easy review, search and voting.
  • As a crowd-sourced company, community or industry newsletter, where multiple feeds from a variety of contributors are aggregated, published and
    widely shared via the platform.
  • As a content management system (CMS) for events and campaigns, and in the case of small businesses, as the actual CMS for the whole website.
  • As the management dashboard, configured so that C-level executives and below, or in some cases, all the employees of a company, can keep up to
    date with and see all of the company’s social media activity in one place. On that note, we are also reaching out to analytics companies to link their
    statistical results with our visual platform to create the most robust and most engaging monitoring systems.
  • As an internal communication bulletin board – the platform can be configured to pull in posts from social media channels that are set up to
    serve employee communities, and would provide a maintenance-free way for the company and the employees to post items and communicate back and forth in a public manner.
  • We fully expect that our customers will also come up with other ways to use the platform – at the base, Postano is a way to aggregate and display
    content in multiple locations, and there are a lot of uses for something that can do that so effectively.

4. What are your favorite social content platforms and why?
Of course, we absolutely love Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo (and anything with an RSS feed)!. Those services serve as the foundation of our
platform, and we have been very careful to ensure that we augment (versus cannibalize) what they do. What they have done is to make it very easy for
brands to publish content and very easy for consumers to share it with their networks– what we see ourselves doing taking that content and ensuring that
more people are able to see it and interact with it, and further leverage the networking capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo et. al.
 
 
5. You have an interesting pricing platform that uses Facebook fans or Twitter followers to arrive at a per month subscription cost, can you explain the thinking?
The first thing we wanted to do was to take the “build it yourself vs buy it from us” question off of the table. We wanted to make sure that it was a no-brainer decision to subscribe to our platform and gain instant access and impact from using our platform (versus hire and project-manage a large team of developers
and engineers to duplicate our on-going efforts). We also wanted to make sure that our customers would see the benefit of locking into and leveraging our aggressive upgrade/innovation roadmap.

Secondly, our costs are based on two key factors, the first being development and engineering time required to develop, maintain and improve the product, the
second being data storage and network query costs. We wanted to arrive at a simpler model than trying to figure out projected traffic and load factors and we
wanted to make sure that a small brand or business could quickly calculate the cost of the subscription. We also found that using Facebook fan count or Twitter
followers was a good proxy for how much traffic and activity to expect.

Using these two principles is how we arrived a starting price point of just $10 a month for small brands and businesses. We also believe that using our platform
will increase the reach and efficacy of a brand’s social media and digital efforts, and lead to increased commerce and increased fan/follower counts. We’re
confident that no matter what level you start at, we will soon have you up at the next level, and you’ll be more than happy paying for the results.
 
 
6. What are some tips you could share with brands looking to engage more socially? (As a former marketing leader for brands like Nike and Polo Ralph Lauren)
Content content content. Publish cool, interesting content that furthers your brand positioning, and do it often. The cooler and more proprietary the content
that you create, the bigger the online community you build and can leverage.

Graphics, pictures and videos. Words are great, but to paraphrase an old adage, the inclusion of a picture or video link is worth a thousand words. Combine that
philosophy with a platform like Postano that leverages the use of graphics and videos to increase the visual appeal of the content, and that impact is multiplied a thousand-fold. Brands have to earn the click, the share or the follow– engaging the viewer with insightful and intriguing graphics/videos is key. Show people
what you envision for them.
 
 
Thanks to Cliff for sharing more about Postano and stay posted for how Postano will be integrated into Social Media Week- get a sneak peek here.

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