Today wraps up the final day of the Social Media Marketing World conference, hosted by Social Media Examiner. While Bop Design wasn’t able to attend in-person, we still wanted to get some thoughts and insights on how the conference was for all those unable to come to sunny San Diego (maybe next year!). So we hopped on over to the Grand Hyatt and asked the first ten friendly people we ran into…
“What was your top takeaway from Social Media Marketing World?”
Here’s what they had to say:
Todd Hedberg, Digital Marketing Manager at Starkey Hearing Technologies
The reason I signed up, the reason I came down and what I’ve enjoyed is just getting a glimpse of what’s next. Any of us here who are relaying our knowledge to our peers and our companies or the clients we serve know we always have to be one step ahead of the game and this is one of the best place to do so.
A lot of discussion about the next stage of virtual reality, geo-fencing and all these buzzwords that have been out there but they’re actually becoming developed and that for me is really the pay off.
Jennifer Tyler, Sales Director, Unmetric
The key takeaway for us because we are a solutions provider—we provide analytics to all these companies— is [that it] solidified that companies’ major challenge is defining ROI. And it further solidified the need for platforms like ours—where we’re providing the metric, providing the analytics—in order to help relate social to return on investment.
Alisha Rock, Marketing Associate, Black Oak Casino Resort
Just your quality of content is king. It’s constantly changing and you’re constantly having to keep updated with the latest, the current and what is trending.
Jen Hatzung, Social Media Manager, Blue Star Families
I just attended the session by Ian Cleary and he gave so many useful tools for managing your social media. I am the one social media person [at my nonprofit], so it will free up more time to have more social interaction on more of the sites.
I attended a lot of the Google+ sessions because I know we’re not utilizing Google+ in the way that we should. One of the things Lynette [Young] said from the session she did this morning was that basically you need someone running that platform that is excited about it.
If you have more than one person doing social media then you need to make sure the person that’s doing Google+ isn’t begrudgingly putting stuff up there because it’s not going to work. You can’t just copy and paste from one platform—even if it’s the same message—you have to tweak it.
Alex Bowden, National Marketing Specialist, CBIZ, Inc.
Mostly the type of content you have to produce to earn the engagement—how important that is. For B2B it’s very hard to get really engaging fans following you on social media, across any channels. LinkedIn works really well because it’s very business related, but there’s so much more that can be done. Just learning little nuances of how to embed links, where to put them, what drives people to search for you and the optimization of it all.
Wendy Larsen, Marketing Manager, RMC Health
There’s been a lot of “Aha’s!” What are the trends? What we need to focus on. What the next big thing may or may not be. For my organization we’ve dumped everything into social media. We’ve tried to blog but haven’t really considered it part of social media. One of my biggest “Aha’s!” was the Keynote that said a lot of brands have been building a house on rented land—that’s what [social media] is—and your blog [should be] building your own community.
Scott Engleman, Senior Director of Consumer Marketing, LinkedIn
[First] it’s ideas. Ideas of what other companies are doing. Second is being inspired about being a marketer again—this opportunity to connect with audiences in new ways is and how much change there is in the marketing function.
Sandra Glendinning, Social Media Officer, Vancouver Police Department
A completely different perspective on how the private sector uses social media. I’m with a law enforcement agency in Canada, so we approach social media from a different [angle]. We’re not trying to sell a product, it’s reputation management… it’s a different perspective coming [to] this because many of these people are trying to meet that bottom dollar. It’s really refreshing to see the different approaches and how we can use those with law enforcement. Looking at it from a different perspective because that’s the only way we’re gonna get better at what we do.
Matt Daniel, Marketing Manager, Cox Business
My takeaway is the importance of social media over traditional, legacy marketing methods and sales methods. I manage enterprise marketing, so I’m trying to figure out how to influence sales behavior. The biggest takeaway I have is a lot of information, stats and justification for why social media is important and that truly the pursuit of changing the sales culture is legitimate.
Victor De Leon, Public Affairs Officer, Workforce Solutions
Anywhere to 50 to 75% of the resources and tools being made available are absolutely free that in itself—and the wealth of knowledge, the caliber of speakers at the conference—is just mesmerizing. To be in a room with like-minded individuals, who are all looking to do the same thing—[to] help improve whatever it is they’re doing—just through outreach.
