This week I moderated another webinar from the SocialMediaToday Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Too Many Platforms: The Next Wave of Social Management Integration. The webinar included a great group of panelists: Melinda Byerley who is the CEO and Co-Founder of Vendorsi who helps companies with their technology vendor decisions, Kat Mandelstein who is part of PwC's Advisory group helping brand with their digital and social business strategies and Jason Eng who is a Senior Social Media Strategist and Community Manager at Sony Electronics Professional Solutions.
Melinda Byerley started us off with a marketing technology landscape slide from Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com. This slide has 947 marketing technology vendors all on one slide so you can image how densely packed it is with logos of vendors in various boxes such as marketing operations, marketing automation, social media, display advertising etc. I went on to talk about the consolidation of marketing and the "elephant footprints" we are seeing the market by Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe buying up discrete pieces of this landscape and rolling them into a "marketing cloud". This trend is easily a 5-10 year trend in which we are probably in year 3 or so now.
Kat Mandelstein then discussed PwC's approach for helping companies navigate the world of marketing technology by defining clear business objectives when considering new social technology rather than just jumping in a adding new technology for technology sake. She also talked about the importance of developing a social media crisis communication plan. This seemed to be one pitfall that many people overlook.
Jason Eng talked about his role at Sony Electronics Professional Solutions and how they decided they needed to engage their audience with a private forum that Jason runs. He also talked about the decision process they went through not to undertake some social technologies like Vine and Pinterest etc.
If you have ever been on a SocialMediaToday webinar before, you know they are very "participant-driven" and we love to ask your questions of our panelists. Many of the questions from our audience revolved around topics such as: how to utilize social technologies to the fullest, how to deal with old social sites that have been abandoned, how to know when to jump into a new platform and more.
If that piqued your interest and you want to hear the replay of this webinar, please check out this link. Otherwise we hope you will join us on another SocialMediaToday webinar! The next webinar is on Trust is the New Currency: Innovative Models for Business Transactions signup for it on the SMT website or just view the schedule of upcoming webinars here.
(Social management integration / shutterstock)