I recently had the pleasure of attending the SoCon10 event at Kennesaw State University. Now, I’m itching to share ideas, inspiration, and put what I’ve learned into practice– which assures me that I had a worthwhile experience. Granted, it’s virtually impossible not to be inspired with a line-up of speakers that included Carol Kruse (VP of Global Interactive Marketing for Coke) and Dan Siroker (Founder of Carrotsticks and former Deputy New Media Director for the Obama Presidential Transition).

Here are some highlights from their presentations:

Carol Kruse: Inventing new social media strategies to put your brand on the map

• Social Media Marketing is a tactic and should support brand objectives.
• New media platforms and tools change frequently, and can be very disruptive to a campaign/ strategy. (Case in point: Facebook’s ever-changing guidelines.)
• Use the KISS methodology; just because you can use a particular tool, doesn’t mean you should.
• “Viral” is not a strategy.
• Don’t create extra work for yourself– many make the mistake of continually starting over from zero, rather than building from past efforts.
• Clear any potential legal hurdles within your organization first. Legitimate legal questions will arise, and need to be dealt with prior to rolling out social media initiatives.
• Regarding the question of ROI: within this topic, a double standard of sorts exists. One could ask, ‘What’s the ROI of a billboard? How many cases did the billboard move?’
• Repeat visits to a site, or page drive more brand affinity.
• Each new community is an entirely new market, and should be treated as such– what works for some may not work for others. For example, Bebo is popular in China; Brazil uses Orkut.
• Moderation is key– too many try to be everywhere at once.
• Listen first. Identify where the influencers are– then reach them.
• Create sustainable relationships. The ‘everyone loves a puppy’ analogy: Social media is like a puppy. In the beginning, everyone loves a puppy. They’re cute, cuddly, fun, and new– but then the puppy grows up, and it still needs constant care, exercise, and nurturing. The same is true for social media–it’s work. Social media is like a reality show; it’s 24-7/ 365 days a year.
• Interaction is crucial– when you get people interacting, you no longer have to stimulate every conversation.
• Case studies: Expedition 206. Filming Happiness– three ‘happiness ambassadors’ travel the world to visit all 206 countries where Coca-cola is sold. Their mission: to discover what makes people happy around the world. The ambassadors blog, tweet, and post videos of their adventures for viewers.
• My Coke Rewards: Combines customer loyalty and social media.
• Simple, yet true: fish where the fish are. Do the due diligence to discover where your customers and major influencers are online. And– collect (readers), connect (with your audience), and perfect (your message).
• Optimize the existing functionality that social media platforms offer; don’t try to reinvent the wheel. For example, ‘events’ is a great Facebook tab/category that is fairly underutilized.

Dan Siroker: How to raise $300 million using social media and online tactics

Dan Siroker was a product manager for Google Chrome when Obama came to Google to speak. At the time, he was so moved by Obama’s speech that he decided to move to Washington DC to volunteer for the campaign. Eventually he became the Deputy New Media Director, and handled strategic planning for the administration’s internet and technology use throughout the election. Recently, the administration called upon Dan’s team again– this time to optimize the Clinton/Bush Haiti fundraising campaign. (I think it’s fair to say that Dan is kind of a big deal.)

Here is a breakdown of his presentation:

How data won the Obama election:
Mind-blowing statistics: $656 million was raised for the Obama campaign. $500 million of it was raised online.

Dan’s ‘lessons learned’ throughout his experiences:
• Lesson 1:
  Define success and generate quantifiable success metrics.
  Obama campaign example–metrics involved: website>email signup>raise money
• Lesson 2:
  Question Assumptions
  Add a multivariate touch; experiment. Dan shared variations of splash pages and videos his team used during the election and asked us to vote and attempt to guess which models received the best results. Interestingly, very few of us guessed correctly, which emphasized his point: never assume that one model will be the most effective. Always test.
• Lesson 3:
  Divide and Conquer
  To demonstrate this point, Dan shared additional multivariate examples through various fundraising call to actions he experimented with, such as ‘donate now’, ‘please donate’, ‘why donate’, ‘donate and get a gift’, and ‘contribute’. He asked the audience to vote on which call-to-action we felt was most effective, and once again, the majority of us got it wrong. However, he then pointed out that his team took the testing and step further and divided the results into groups of first time visitors, first time donators, and past donators in order to accurately analyze the call-to-action clicks.
• Lesson 4:
  Take advantage of circumstances
  Here, Dan showed a clip of Sarah Palin’s speech that mocked ‘community organizers’. (Palin’s quote: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a “community organizer,” except that you have actual responsibilities.”) His team immediately leveraged this opportunity by sending out a mass email to enraged Obama supporters, asking them to retaliate by donating at least $100 to the campaign. The email blast raised an additional $10 million in funds for Obama’s campaign, and undoubtedly serves as rock solid argument for taking advantage of circumstances.
• Lesson 5:
  Always be Optimizing
  This one is fairly self-explanatory: always be experimenting; always be optimizing– when it comes to analytics, don’t ’set it and forget it.’

This was my first SoCon experience, and I’ll definitely be returning next year. To sum up, here’s a great video that Amani Channel from Visual Eye Media produced for the event:

For my next post, I’ll discuss highlights from my latest adventure: the Social Fresh conference in Tampa.