Yesterday the Affect team sponsored and attended the Real-Time Communications Conference in NYC put together by the Business Development Institute (BDI)
I thought it was a great gathering: The keynote speaker was Ray Kerins, VP Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. The panel that followed was moderated by Melanie Milstein, author of Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution with Dave Armon, President PR Newswire, David Sacks, Founder of Yammer, Paul Gennaro, Chief Communication Officer, AECOM, Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communications Manager, JetBlue, and Marc Monseau, Director, Media Relations, Johnson & Johnson
The forum then broke out into roundtable sessions moderated by professionals in PR and Marketing who are involved and active in social media and real-time communications.
It was exciting to actually meet and talk to all of these good people that are the front-runners in embracing and using social media and real-time communications to strengthen their brand and connect and communicate with their customers.
I must say, it was mostly in a B2C context, but the forum tried to cover B2B as well.
Everyone was fired up; the room was abuzz with talk, questions, and networking. All the social media buzzwords you could find were flying around: Twitter, YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, tweeting, video, RSS, IM, email, wikis and on and on…
I felt that people could not get enough information. Everybody was thirsty to learn more.
The questions seemed to be unanimous and ubiquitous:
How do I start?
What does it take from a tactical point of view? One person or a team of 10?
What are the risks?
What are the benefits?
Can I calculate ROI?
How do I get executive management on board?
How do I manage a crisis?
What is a fast response? Two days, two hours, 2 minutes or 2 seconds?
How do I control what’s out there?
How do I manage and aggregate all the different platforms for RTC?
What about traditional media?
How do I get buzz going for a small company that’s not a JetBlue or J&J?
Some questions were tackled and answered, some were not, some got an honest “we don’t know the answer to that yet”.
My key takeaways – and I hope this helps all of us – were:
- Start by discovering what conversations are going on in the social media space like Twitter, YouTube and blogs
- Monitor these everyday by getting RSS feeds through Google RSS or Google Alerts
- Make sure you understand and define your goals and what your communications strategy is
- Don’t be afraid to dip your toe into this fast-flowing social media river.
- Conversations are happening about your company anyway, so get involved
- Depending on your corporation or business, you should decide how to become part of these conversations and who should be answering
- Key: BE HONEST, BE TRANSPARENT
- Employees are spokespeople for the company – they are out there using Twitter and the likes, so they should be brought up to speed
- To do this, and do this right, in a big corporation, there needs to be a mind shift from the top down. Changes in the organization need to be made. Processes need to be streamlined. The social media spokespeople need to be empowered to reply quickly
- To quote Morgan Jonston from JefBlue, “This is about humanization of the brand!”
- Be careful not to seem like the overbearing “big brother”, don’t be intimidating
- Open up, LISTEN to your customers, be committed to change
- Remember and be aware: The line is thinning between traditional media and social media – many journalists have left traditional media and are now influential bloggers/tweeters
Lots of *stuff* to take in…
I look forward to a follow up event, which, in my opinion, could be a full day event, instead of half a day.
If you’d like to hear the two main sessions they are available here.
*Please* add your comments – I would love to hear your opinion and additions!
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