Advice from @baratunde on how to win online: React swiftly & cover it live – with a strong POV. #istrategy #strategitunde—
Sarah Skerik (@SarahSkerik) October 09, 2012

Best selling author and comedian Baratunde Thurston knows a thing or two about garnering attention online.  After all, he’s guy behind some of the most memorable trends on Twitter, and during his tenure as director of digital at The Onion, the top tweets about events such as the President’s State of the Union address and the Super Bowl.

Baratunde on stage at iStrategy in Chicago. (Photo via iStrategy).

The advice he offered marketers in his keynote yesterday morning at iStrategy was pretty straightforward:

• React swiftly
• Cover it live – with strong point of view
• Find new ways to share.  We have so much content out there, and we’re all vying for attention.

The first two suggestions go hand-in-hand.  Social media is all about immediacy, and to the fastest actors often go the greatest gains.  However, in addition to speed, Baratunde emphasized the necessity of a strong point of view.   It’s imperative, he noted, that you say something worth listening to.

That said, you can prepare ahead of time.  Tweeting evergreen (and prepared) content in conjunction with live events is a great way to “win” events, and takes pressure off the communications teams

managing the outflow.  However, simply cutting and pasting the same content across different channels is a mistake, Baratunde noted.  Instead, he advocates alter the messaging (and strategy ) for different  social networks.

“Most people don’t want to check out the things you think are interesting,” he noted.  “But somewhere, someone does. You have no excuse not to be a little more relevant.”   Developing the right content to connect with those “someones” is the opportunity at hand for most brands.

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media.

I popped down to the London iStrategy conference which was held at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday and Wednesday last week; there were a couple of speakers that stood out &  felt their content was worth sharing with everyone.

Bertrand Bodson, SVP Global Digital Marketing @ EMI

Bodson talked about his experience in trying to open up the music label to innovation through the use of their first ever hackathon. They teamed up with tech developers who were also passionate about music (enough to give up their weekends) to work with open APIs such as Spotify, LastFM, & a selection of EMI’s content to come up with ideas for great apps, websites etc.

• The revenue share is then shared 40:60 between the developers and EMI / artists to encourage developers to push through the idea into reality.
• Some of these ideas are now in production, such as an iPad app focused around their Blue Note Jazz back catalogue

A nice idea; rather than briefing creative agencies to come up with ideas (often the same old, same old) and instead open it up to passionate people to see if they can come up with something new and purposeful. Hackathons are becoming an increasingly popular way to develop great ideas in an intense, short session (for those of you who aren’t geeks, here’s the definition on what it actually is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon)

Alexander Koppel, CCO @ Red Bull Media House

Koppel spoke about content yesterday, and in particular how this has progressed from being central to their marketing policy to becoming a key part in their overall business model. Red Bull are on top of their game at creating and distributing content, and definitely leading the way in this space. Here are some of the key outtakes:

• They found that there were no traditional publishers for them to distribute their content that focused on extreme sports, so created their own to fill the void – including TV stations, magazines and a music label. Koppel emphasised that you can’t always rely on 3^rd parties to deliver, and where this is the case you have to go at it yourself.
• They’ve managed to grow their online social communities to 28 million Facebook fans, 600,000 twitter followers & 250 million YT video views – impressive stuff.
• With their content they are not prepared to stop at sponsorship of individuals or sports, but move beyond this to have a closer relationship with their athletes so that they’re with them from the start & for life
• From here, they’ve started to monitise their content & their brand, selling their content in packaged goods & streaming (such as The Art of Flight film, trailer here if you haven’t seen it already: http://youtu.be/kh29_SERH0Y)
• Where they have historically partnered with other brands pre-production, they are now being asked if they can distribute the content of these other brands in a commercial agreement (such as Quicksilver). They also white label their brand to phone companies to create new tariffs that appeal to the young ‘Red Bull audience’
• And finally, you need to allow failure to encourage innovation.

I spoke at iStrategy some time back in Melbourne and was blown away by the level of engagement from the Audience via Twitter, by far the most hash-tagged tweets I have ever seen. My iPad twitter ap was alive the entire time I was speaking with real time commentary about my presentation, can’t beat good-honest real-time feedback!

Only, it wasn’t.

I felt the entire time that Twitter and particularly the use of a hash-tag had lost its mojo. Previous when I have been speaking there has been a real balance to the Twitter feedback, some great, some not so great, and some just plain old brutal. But not this time. In fact, I don’t think there was a single tweet that could be euphemised as “brutally honest”. I suspect the medium is just too prolific.

In a conference of the size of iStrategy, which numbered around 300 delegates, there’s nowhere to hide and worse still there is a very good chance that the speaker you have just appraised will know what was said and by whom. And no one wants a possible confrontation!

As a speaker at the conference I wanted that brutal feedback, and I was looking for it real time to make adjustments to my session. But it didn’t come. I’d appreciate any suggestion that my talk was perfect, however I saw some sessions that were quite poor yet no negative tweets emerged!

I think we need to bring some anonymity back to twitter, at least find some other way to harvest the ugliest of commentary. Or accept that feedback is a gift, good, bad or ugly!

Click here to view the Storified tweets.

Image credit: @twynleaf (Instagram)

Getting back to the other attendees that were there, I saw name tags that said EBay, CBS Interactive, Lucas Films, OPI, You Send It, Lucky Brand Jeans and so on. It definitely felt like “this is where the cool kids are”… and to kick things off Brian Solis gave the opening keynote. What a awesome way to begin! Although I have to say he was a really tough act to follow, and it wasn’t until day 2 that we had other speakers of his caliber.

During his opening he talked about resonance and creating content that has a longer life span than 20 “likes” in 3 minutes… and then it’s dead. Anyone can find a cute picture of a kitten in a meadow, or a meme that hits your funny bone in the right place, but will people still be talking about that in 3 hours? Probably not. Content has to include a story, not a moment, and should be something that others can find some way to connect to. If they feel close to it they will want to engage with it, share it, talk about it and so on. Then you’re on your way. (No offense to kittens everywhere.)

So that was what got us going and I could barely take notes fast enough. My mind was spinning and I probably should have run around the building a few times to jog it off and calm down, but in business casual, who wants to do that?

Unfortunately the rest of that day didn’t hit that same level of greatness, although there were a lot of nuggets of information I gathered and I never stopped taking notes to remind myself about things I heard and/or learned. One regret though was not attending the workshop put on by the gent from Lucky Brand Jeans. I heard great things about it and almost went to it, but unfortunately choose something else. Supposedly he was funny and engaging with a lot of good things to share… really bummed about missing out on that.

Then it was Day 2 and we’re all back in class. This time the head of social for McDonald’s, Rick Wion, was our opening keynote and he got us back on track. Some great examples of B2C interaction as well as ways to use humor to defuse tense situations and also redirect conversations. All good things. After his opening, we broke out into smaller workshop sessions again and I have to say the one I attended had to be the best one. (Sorry everyone else..) But Ted Wright from FIZZ was absolutely amazing. No joke. He was spot-on with his presentation about Word-of-Mouth-Marketing and ways to direct conversations for positive ROI (in dollars and cents as well as social). Really great knowledge and I also appreciated that he made sure to point out it will t-a-k-e t-i-m-e. WOMM isn’t not a flip of a light switch, it needs to be cultivated and developed and allowed to “marinate” (if you will) within consumers minds and in their communities. Whether that be social or otherwise.

Anyway I could go on and on about Mr. FIZZ but I feel like I’ve made my point

The rest of Day 2 was interesting although I honestly don’t know how to explain the presentation on gTLDs except to say… “umm, ok.”  Because unless you are a BIG brand, I don’t know a lot of bosses that are going to approve spending $100k+ on registration for a vanity url. Not to mention that if your brand name is longer than Apple (for example), I don’t see how it’s going to help the consumer or make things easier to market. Who would rather type in http://www.cheeseburger.redrobin as opposed to http://www.redrobin.com? But maybe that’s just me.

Moving on… the speaker from LoudDoor, Jeff French, was excellent and provided one of the first truly “actionable” examples of how to take analytics gained from social and put it work. He described starting up the Insert Gamer page on Facebook and how LoudDoor took the information (as they gathered it) to attract more fans and grow their base. It was very compelling to see how all the pieces fit together – then generating a high impact end result.

–

Well that was the experience for me and again the added bonus was the Master of Ceremonies with his proper British accent.  What a great way to take us through the 2 days and he was so funny!  (He must do this all the time or maybe he hosts a game show? Who knows, but I’d hire him.)

- So thank you iStrategy for putting together this conference and a tip of the hat to all the great speakers.

The APPLE was a BYTE earlier, now it’s starting to be a full APPLE! So FRESH again!

The time for iSport! Towards iPerfection!

The ‘I’ Eye of Eyes!
‘I’ – EYE! The Eye is a sphere! So it’s the world, the globe! It just doesn’t see things, it visualises them, it has a vision!
The “I” ‘Of’ “SPIRIT”, the “I” ‘Of’ “Soul”! (iOS)
The I Of S! The In and Out of S! (iOS)
The “I” “C”! Yes, I See! (iC*) The Independent Cloud! The “Icon” of the “Century”!
“I” for IMAGINATION, “I” for INNOVATION, “I” for INSPIRATION!
When expressed with respect to the SOUL, the “I” is just the AVATAR, the INCARNATION!
The “I” is so sweetly and positively Infectious!
Mathematically, ‘I’ to the power of Infinity!

~ Prabeen Kumar Pati

Online Branding – .com becomes .brand

Beginning in January 2012, brands may be able to apply to have their dream domain name.  Instead of fighting for their brand name.com, they can now use their brand’s name as their .com. For example, if a consumer is going to mycokerewards.com, Coca-Cola can make the link simpler and more memorable by changing it to something like, “rewards.coke”.   This .brand will become a digital anchor for brands.  It will become an essential marketing tool allowing for even more web pages, less click throughs and more direct web interaction.  There is a vast worldwide web out there, and this is going to blow it wide open.

[There is some heated debate about ICANN's gTLD ("generic Top Level Domain") plans. You can read more about it here.]

Key Speaker Take-Aways

Katrina Klier – Sr Director World Wide Digital Engagement, Microsoft

We have always been told that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.  Well as marketers, we need to figure out how to make the horse thirsty. We need to have the proper interaction with the horse, and convince it that it wants to or needs to drink the water.

–A good marketing strategy gives the consumer more reason to “drink the water”. Today brands need to be interactive and give consumers more than their used to.

Elizabeth Pizzinato – VP Brand Communications, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Social Media is inclusive.  It allows consumers to be a part of the brand without ever actually experiencing the brand.

–The Four Seasons Hotel is not something everyone can afford.  But what social media has done is give consumers the chance to become a part of the Four Seasons brand without actually ever having to stay at a hotel.  Social Media includes, never excludes.  Marketers can use this principle to gain an even stronger brand following.

So, how are you making your horses thirstier?

Lauren is an Account Director in our Detroit office.

An iStrategy e-Book

They guys (and gals) at iStrategy have compiled and nice e-book with some of the best speaker quotes from previous events, and I am honored to be quoted twice! :) (Thank you so much iStrategy!)

Next to speaking at the iStrategy events I have also been writing some of my digital thoughts on the iStrategy Blog, so if you are keen to read more of my digital ramblings your welcome to CLICK HERE :)

The next event will be in Amsterdam on the 25-26 October 2011, will I see you there? click here to sign up!

related posts

iStrategy: Facebook, Twitter en social ROI – Frankwatching

Digital Thoughts After iStrategy 2010

Social Media: From Hype to Business As Usual | Penn-Olson

My ‘Digital Thoughts’ on the iStrategy Blog

iStrategy London | the good, the bad and the social

Posted by octoberclouds with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Posted by octoberclouds with WordPress for BlackBerry.

iStrategy, a tech PR firm run by Joe and Peter Corbett, put on a party for the launch of USConverge, a nonprofit that gets for-profit and nonprofit tech organizations to work together. Other than that, I have no idea what they do. Perhaps they don’t know yet either.

I’m not quite sure what iStrategy does either. I used to think that they developed technology. But after looking at their web site, I think they just put on tech events, like TechCocktail. Peter told me it costs $15,000 to get a venue in Washington that seats a thousand people.

Peter was talking to Jen Consalvo of TechCocktail when I arrived. I chatted with them a little. Jen told me about Lean Startups, a meetup group in DC where entrepreneurs critique new startups. I tried joining the group, but they rejected me. Eh, I’m in too many meetup groups already.

I met Rob Pegoraro, the tech reporter at the Washington Post. He was also at the Online News Association event last night, but I didn’t know what he looked like, and didn’t bump into him. Rob said his wife used to be a member of the Society of Women Engineers. She’s a manager at a big government contractor.

Marta Urquilla was the only female speaker at the launch. She advises President Obama on using social media. She talked about crowdsourcing technology solutions.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter was there. Lots of young people flocked around him like sheep after the talk. Supposedly it only took him two weeks to write the prototype for Twitter. It’s such a stupid little program, I would have been disappointed if it took him any longer. The impressive part about Twitter isn’t lists of 140 character texts. It’s the ability to link to other sites to spread a word-bite ad or concept. Micro-ads. That anyone can put out there whether they are a company or just have something brief to say.

If Biz can write up a stupid software, and have it become popular, I should be able to create something much better. Ever since Microsoft Word, I’ve been wishing I could come up with a ubiquitous software. Something that everyone would want.

Then it hit me. I have to create the site that allows not just me, but anyone to do something that I’ve been trying to kludge for my own site. So now I need to do a real job on it, not my kludgy garbage. But I won’t tell you what that is until you can play or do business with it too.



Landmark Digital Directions

Sydney 3 March 2011

“Digital Directions is a one-day international gathering of the world’s leading digital media executives and entrepreneurs, showcasing global best practice in digital media innovations. Ten international guest speakers will share their expertise – examining changes in media and technology strategies, the preferences and behaviours of consumers, as well as the brightest digital revenues”. Follow @DigitalD2011 on Twitter.

Frocomm’s 4th Annual New Media Summit 2011

Sydney, Tuesday 22nd & Wednesday 23rd March 2011

“This conference covers the key digital trends in the PR industry, and offers fantastic case studies”.

I prefer when conference sites list the actual speakers, rather than organisations, but at this stage an organisational list is all Frocomm’s site is offering You can access the speakers list, by delving into the Program. Thanks to @themediapod (also Frocomm Chair) for quickly pointing this out on Twitter. Also follow Frocomm founder @GlenFrost.

CeBIT
31 May – 2 June 2011 at The Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Sydney

The  “WebForward Conference 2011 will take a closer look at the latest trends in Digital & Social Marketing, Search, Web and Mobile Marketing to ensure you make the most of the opportunities given by these powerful tools.” Follow @cebitaus on Twitter.

iStrategy Global Digital Media

Melbourne Convention Exhibition Centre, 17-18 May 2011

iStrategy’s Australian Conference will be held in Melbourne (there are others held around the globe). “ iStrategy will offer speakers with expertise in every online channel, a wide-range of attendees for exclusive networking opportunities and workshops with actual learning scenarios.  If building a high-performing, integrated marketing strategy is important to your corporation, then iStrategy Melbourne is a sound investment.” Follow @istrat_buzz and #istrategy on Twitter.

ConnectNow

Dates to be confirmed.

I attended ConnectNow last year and it had a rockstar line up including Solis, Vaynerchuk, Papworth, Heaton and Rowse. Dates haven’t been released as yet for the next one, but it’s well worth keeping up with @marketing_now to see what’s planned for the next event. It could be massive!

So how do you choose?
As is usually the case, the organisers behind any of these conferences publish a long list of the people who “should attend”. While that’s handy to gauge what type of market the conference is catering to, be mindful that it’s a big catch-all to get bums on seats, and you should focus on the program. Do some fact-checking on the speakers to ensure you’re going to get relevance and value.

What are you thinking of attending? Please contribute any relevant conferences I  might have missed ….

I now have the privilege to write for the new iStrategy blog, where I will contribute a blog post every week.

So keep an eye out for my ‘Digital Thoughts‘ and ramblings about socialmedia, digital strategy and design at my own little corner on the iStrategy site.

Read my latest post

Privacy & Social Media | Is Nothing Sacred Anymore?

I am very curious about your views on Privacy… so feel free to comment!

Last week I headed down to London to visit the iStrategy event in the Millennium Hotel in Kensington. Over the 2 days many interesting speakers brought their experiences and insights to a group of 250 online professionals.

I will not go into the details of each keynote, as Phil Jenkins already posted a great summary on his blog. Instead I want to reflect on the things that where memorable to me and I have started reflecting on after the event, and give you an impression of the event itself through some pictures I took.

The good

“People talk to people, not to brands”. This was a theme I heard a few speakers talk about. Brands like Dell are empowering and enabling experts in their organizations to become brand advocates on twitter, and have them engage with people in social media. “You cannot outsource social media” as you need the expert knowledge that is within the people of the organization in order to have a meaningful engagement. Enabler for this is a mind shift within an organization, social media becomes part of employees job profiles and objectives. Brands need to pay utmost attention to employer branding and nurture engaged people to become spokesmen for the brand.

Convergence convergence convergence! Everything is coming together and connecting. Products, people, data, touch points and content. The mobile platform is the main driver for this shift and is enabling a greater value for people by bringing everything they care about and need in one interface which they carry with them all the time. We are just at the early beginnings of this new world, and are learning everyday how we can bring true value to people through this new technology. Behavioral transformation seems imminent. Trial and error is the way for brands to experiment and learn with this new phenomenon.

What people want & what people need.  Both David Henry of Monster and Mark Stuart of CIM touched upon the imperative of understanding people and taking User Centric Design (UCD) as the strategic driver for successful experience design. As this is my mantra I really enjoyed their talks and was glad to hear the success story of Monster.

The bad

A better “Sales pitch” balance!! Some keynotes just did not land at all, as the majority of the slides where a self promotion and sales pitch. Not delivering any value to the audience. On the twitter feed #istrategy2010 the comments were very critical about this, and a learning to those speakers. Sure speaking at a conference is an opportunity to get leads, but there is no need to be a speaking advert. Bringing meaningful and helpful content and insights will be your best advert!

“Sex sells” Jonathan Oliver of Microsoft had a strange presentation. He started of very strong talking about creativity and how creativity is about ideas that can drive innovation on all fronts. A very charismatic and enthusiastic speaker with great passion for the Microsoft brand. He even managed to have the audience stand up!! Respect! He got all my attention … until…. He showed a case study of a campaign targeted at 15 year old boys, and the main visual to the campaign was a bikini babe!!! He talked about how successful the campaign was… Now this I found very disappointing, how can creativity lead to bikini babe? This is not creative, this is the easy sell! He did however manage to deliver the most retweeted quote

“Social Media is like high school sex. Lots of guys talking about it, few doing it, and even less doing it right.”

The Social

I met loads of great people at the event and the #istrategy2010 tag helped me find them. I highly recommend them so here is the list!

@yushkalia @PhillipJenkins @RIBenjamin @lars_hilse @_insightz @tamhm @taylorzoe @KerryatDell @hoorayhenry @FZammit @nclangereis @nickwallen

If you get a chance to go to one of the upcoming iStrategy events in Syndey, Singapore, San Jose or Amsterdam I highly recommend going! Visit the iStrategy website for more info.

More detailed notes on the keynotes by Phil Jenkins

iStrategy 2010 Conference – London

iStrategy Conference Day Two

iStrategy was originally billed as a “CMO centric, high level social media conference” by the uber-persistent sales people from the conference organizers (and yet, everyone there commented on the aggressive sales techniques… but HEY, they bought in) . It was 2 days of keynotes and breakout sessions with networking lunches and dinners as an added bonus. It turned out to be a lot different than the original pitch… but I had a nice time nonetheless.

The conference was well attended: 200 folks in all… a mix of big and small brands with about 1/2 of the folks being agency types or offering services. As with all SM conferences, there was a vast array of experience levels and speakers. Can I say I learned anything besides some new anecdotes? Not really. Can I say I met a lot of great people and learned about their products, challenges and little tricks? Surely.

I flew in on Tuesday evening and stayed at the Hilton at ORD. My expectations were low for the first night, but was happy that a pre-event happy hour was organized. The hotel bar, The Gas Light,  at the Hilton at O’Hare is a MUST SEE.  Something straight out of downtown Vegas. Totally unexpected and fun. I ran into a few Silicon Alley vets then retired early to rest up for the conference.

The next morning we took what appeared to be a Hummer limo to the Hotel Allegro. I met Christine Carey, a well-spoken woman from Rand Corporation in D.C. who is a HUGE proponent of Vanguard (yay, client love!). She was looking for ideas and approaches on how to get her healthcare organization/think tank more visable via social media. Of course I gave her an earful of ideas.

I won’t go into great depth here, but you can see some of the top quotes by searching for #iStrategy2010 on Twitter, since all that work is already done by the Tweeps at the festival (including moi).

The keynote speaker, John Hayes from American Express started his speech with “I am not a digital person… go easy on me”. His speech was great and he smoothly answered some of the questions from the audience (he never mentioned the OPEN program, which surprised me due to its huge social hooks). As an avid AmEx card evangelist, I was charmed.

Next up was a panel lead by the funny/smart Chris Heuer from Social Media Club featuring a few execs from PepsiCo, Edelman PR and the Chicago Bulls. I had a chance to catch up with Heuer later at the festival… looking forward to staying in touch with him for sure.

I chose a break-out session after lunch with the Travel Channel’s Jonathon Sichel along with his agency sidekick James Clark (Room 214… and btw, his biz card made me lock myself out of my hotel room!). Interesting thoughts on “VIRAL vs SPREADABLE” (something @faris here at work preaches). It was nothing revolutionary, but very well stated and something all social marketers need to understand and have at the ready when the bossman asks “Why didn’t the commercial we placed on Daily Motion go VIRAL?”

VIRAL = Magic. Rapidly spreading quickly. Good luck.

SPREADABLE = Word of mouth. Usually gets passed on one or two levels then dissipates/decays. Many times SPREADABLE things go viral by chance. Most of your campaigns should aim at this unless you include celebrity, sensation or tap into a raw human emotion.

Then we watched Anthony Bourdain burn six tons of cocaine. This sorta went viral (that’s the point). VBS eat your heart out on this one

More coming soon. Don’t want these posts to turn into a novel.