This morning's session featured Jason Bartlett, Vice President, Global Social Marketing, Xerox; Andrew Bowins Senior Vice President, External Communications, MasterCard; and Wendy Lea, Chief Executive Officer, Get Satisfaction. With nothing in social written in concrete because of its ever-evolving nature, these seasoned professionals talked about major lessons they have learned over their years working in the trenches of social media marketing.
I've broken this session down into 10 quick bites of brilliance (easy to digest, easy to tweet!) of the key learnings covered in this session.
- If you are not going to treat social as always-on tool, you may as well shut it down.
- Canned responses hamper authentic, real-time conversation.
- Making mistakes should not be a negative thing, only making big mistakes should be. You should be making mistakes on a small scale on a regular basis, otherwise you aren't taking risks.
- Just remember, we are all one tweet away from a communication crisis.
- Too many tools and technologies can paralyze an organization.
- While we should measure everything & big data is important for insights, we have to remember it is about people, not numbers.
- Data is only as smart as the questions you ask it.
- Crazy is good, but crazy with purpose is better.
- When speaking to consumer, language has to be thoughtful and natural, not jargonized. You have to speak in the language of the customers.
- We all have moved from mass communications to mass communicators.