Last week I had a great opportunity to speak on a panel and also moderate a panel at the 2011 Social Media Days London hosted by Finextra at Thomson Reuters. The event’s next stop is New York on May 18. 
There were three key themes that I noticed being discussed during the day:
- Measurement and Evaluation: Most of the questions and “water cooler” conversation focused around measuring social media efforts. I was surprised to hear so many people ask about how social media is driving B2B sales. While ultimately all things we do in the marketing/communication mix should be to increase sales, I’m not sure focusing on sales is critical at this stage. Sales measurement in the B2B space for communicators has always been a challenge. While I’m hopeful that so much data being produced can give us better insight and we will continue to be better at measuring our efforts in social media, I am still of the belief that focusing on supporting the brand and building your presence for now is key. Like all things, this will take time and the brands who understand this will do a better job of using the data. For a look at some of the leading brands at what they are doing in social media I found the Social Brands 100 study helpful.
- Who Owns It?: There was a good discussion around who owns the strategy and process of social media at a company. A social media team? Corporate communications? Marketing? Advertising? The individual? Or all of the above? Usually we’ve seen strong individuals take the lead at companies and they come from a variety of backgrounds. We continue to move rapidly toward a model where everyone can play a part and contribute through providing content to distribute or monitoring conversations. I continue to be impressed where more and more people at CME Group pass good content over to us to distribute and help us monitor the conversations. This should be the case for most companies moving forward. As for what department internally should run social media there is no simple answer. Due to culture, structure and processes there really is no “one” model that works better than another. But finding the “right” model should be the focus of chief communicators.
- International Growth: With the conference held in London there were a number of questions on how to reach stakeholders not just throughout Europe but also in Asia and North America. I enjoyed some of the commentary about new technologies coming to bypass translation, but the fact that moving the social media needle to expand corporate content into a 24/7 cycle is going to be a challenge. It’s a topic like this that makes the challenge of using these resources so exciting, and something I am certainly going to research more.
I also had a chance to sit down with Liz Lum of Finextra who organized the event. You can watch my interview with her here.
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