Engage 2012: The Socialbakers Conference

About the Event

Today is “E” Day – the day of the long-awaited Engage 2012 Conference, covering all you need to know about social marketing to drive your social media success. Speakers from Socialbakers will share the stage with industry experts from social networks and internationally known brands and agencies at the historic Bohemian National Hall in New York City from 10 AM EST. They will share inspirational experiences and best social marketing practices with us, so don’t miss the live stream right here on Socialbakers.com if you didn’t get your seat. The event will culminate with the first ever Socially Devoted Awards Ceremony.

Engage with Us:

Join the conversation with #Engage2012 on Twitter and on Facebook or via the live stream directly where you can participate through chat, as well as comment below this post.

This page will be updated throughout the day as we follow the Conference, so make sure to check back with us often while you follow the Conference live from our homepage.

Program Schedule (EST)

10 00 AM

Jan Rezab, Socialbakers: What is the true ROI of social media: unveiling the proof with the right KPIs

Update: Welcome to the Conference! 27 countries are represented. Jan discusses the changes in social media, the platforms, users and brands.

• Brands are posting on average 35 times per month, versus 7 times a month from 2011.
• Pages are being Liked more and more – gone from 5 to 37 since 2009 for the average per user.
• And companies are posting 5 times more this year than last.

So, there is much more ‘noise’ in social media these days. He also explains the effect Engagement has on Reach. The higher the Engagement the higher the Reach.

• 50% of your Reach comes during the first 30 minutes after a post is published – with the remaining 50% over the next 7 hours. If Engagement is not maintained, Reach will suffer as a result.

Jan shows that the sector with the highest engagement rate is the automotive industry. Reach is also affected by the size of the community – the smaller the community, the more relevant the brand is to them. He also talks about the value of industry benchmarking and the benefits of Socialbakers' analytics tools. He then discusses the importance of actionable and sharable content in social media to improve your reach and expand your fan base.

10 45 AM

Pete Blackshaw, Nestlé: Integrating social media strategy with our brand by building a social newsroom

Update: Pete Blackshaw discussed Nestlé’s social media structure and how the company uses Socialbakers’ Analytics Pro tool to monitor, compare and analyze their 600 Facebook pages.

He explained that Nestlé follows a “Listening, Engaging and Inspiring & Transforming” model for satisfying customer needs, and states, “conversation reveals brand value.”

Their Digital Acceleration Team uses many real-time listening screens which allow them to follow what fans are saying, which discussions are taking place and where the primary issues/needs are.

11 30 AM

Helen Min, Facebook: Developing social: Digital marketing in a connected world

Helen Min introduced the 4 dimensions of social: connect, engage, influence and integrate.

Connect: converting fans into customers and building a high quality customer base – Helen said you should never chase for the number of your fans but for the number of customers. You can support your connections with targeted ads.

Engage: deliver a compelling page experience with unique and creative content. Mobile also offers great ways to reach and engage your fans.

Word of mouth: Helen Min said that this is the Holy Grail of social marketing. You can post as much content as you want to your fans, but it´s the Facebook users who will share it and spread the word. So you need to make sure the content is worth talking about. Sponsored stories can boost this dimension.

Integrate: Friends and connections concentrate on one platform and everything is better with friends. Businesses are on Facebook too, but the communication should always be personal.

Helen Min also revealed the Secret to Social: connect first with your most loyal customers; they will do the job for you and influence the others.

12 00 PM

Case studies

Sai Irene Sánchez Correa fom Volaris talks about using Social Media to manage all their customer relations

Using clever plays on words between English and Spanish, they use social media for customer relations as opposed to traditional media. As a low-budget airline, they use social media (in a media department of only two people) for all announcements, promotions, news, travel tips and contests, but forward any complaints to customer service. She stressed the importance of bidirectional communication and responding to posts. They use a variety of social media platforms, targeting promotions to each.

Joice Fernandes of Microsoft talks about their Social Media Marketing Campaign, “Empower the Children, Shape the Future”

Through creative public-private partnerships, they've helped governments achieve their broad scale digital access goals – from education reform to creating a 21st century workforce. They created a dialog with governments and then used social media in order to reach students and teachers to stress the importance of ICT. The program reaches out to 20 million children in 10 countries that are “betting on a better education” and ending the digital divide between those who could afford a computer and those who couldn't. They use Socialbakers to better communicate with their audience, so their ‘flying machine’ can land safely.

Ismael Sanchez Anguiano from InDatCom, a digital strategy company, explains the strategies they took when executing a political campaign in Mexico.

InDatCom’s various strategies:

• Social Media
• Ad Campaigns
• Email
• Real-Time Coverage
• Engaging Content

Without access to traditional media, the company attributes their success to having a great social media team, digital communication and constant engagement. InDatcom utilized Socialbakers’ Analytics Pro, among other analytics tools, to identify patterns and monitor performance.

Their ROE was discovered when their expectations were exceeded after promoting a social engagement only 4 days prior to event. Attendance at their event was 10,000 more than expected and, according to their Analytics Pro data, their Engagement Rate increased the day after the event and maintained its momentum during the following week. InDatCom succeeded in assisting their client with “shifting political paradigms” and ultimately becoming the 2nd political force in the state.

Claudia Berbeo from Asesora Social Media introduced the #brigadadigital hashtag which has been successful in breaking the barrier between the government and citizens.

The campaign aims to help different causes, increase awareness, raise funds while bringing people closer together. All this and much more thanks to social media which have the power to hopefully change Colombia´s men­tality affected by a negative relationship with the government. Now, political representatives are trying to restore this relationship by tweeting and hanging out with young people and helping the right causes.

2 00 PM

Lukas Maixner, Socialbakers co-founder and GM Professional Services, introduced and explained Socialbakers’ new tool, TrueLike. TrueLike is a free Facebook app available to fans that allows them to rate brands and interact with other fans via discussion boards. The app is in a “game” format that scores users and creates a competition-like atmosphere so fans will want to beat their friend’s scores or be a leader on the scoreboard. This tool permits fans to discuss with friends which brands they like or dislike and provide valuable, firsthand feedback to the brands themselves.

Jiri Voves, Socialbakers co-founder and VP product, explained that a social side must be implemented into any marketing campaign. Social is tangible and crucial to a brand’s success. However, this can be difficult without the right metrics or tools. Which metrics should be measured for a social marketing campaign to be effective? Socialbakers provides 4 basic metrics that have proven to be the most important when gauging a brand’s success. Fans, Fan Growth, Engagement Rate and Response Time are all vital when implementing a social aspect into a marketing plan.

Jiri also describes another Socialbakers feature called Market Insights. This tool measures demography and the top content for any given country. Not all countries have the same social media interests, and therefore, different social marketing tactics should be employed per market. Socialbakers now offers 4 product platforms: Analytics, Insights, Builder (Page management system) and Listening (monitoring buzz by selecting keywords mentioned in specific regions).

2 30 PM

Michael Terpin, Social Radius: Mastering content creation and distribution for social networks and platforms

Update: Michael Terpin of Social Radius talks about the differences between the various social networks, not just Facebook. Blogs were revolutionary and the primary feature of Web 2.0. Then came the photoblog (tumblr) with a young demographic that is both a gateway and destination for social media. These were followed by video blogs or vlogs (YouTube channels). Mainstream media then entered the fore, followed by news aggregates like The Huffington Post. He talks about how they work together, how to achieve conversion (Pinterest is highest) to sales, the trojan horse quality of Google+ and the value of Wikipedia. Kickstarter has over US $300 million in sales and is rising fast, and its model is the future of social media.

3 30 PM

Koen Spiers, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines: Soft-selling your way to hard cash through social media

Update: In April 2010, KLM had only one employee dedicated to social media management and they had just launched their Facebook and Twitter Pages. With no time to properly adapt to social media, the ash cloud crisis came as a surprise. Thousands of people were stuck at airports and the airline´s help desks were overwhelmed, so people started to contact KLM via social networks. That´s when the 93 year old company decided they need to bring their departments together, grow their social media management team and start responding to users 24/7 in 7 different languages. Social media customer service became their backbone and they started to listen and respond to their fans even if fans had nothing nice to say.

Koen Spiers also talked about KLM´s successful marketing campaigns stressing that they follow one key strategy: “Don´t push, create stuff worth sharing”. KLM also launches interesting social products like Meet & Seat, which is a very simple way to connect with fellow travelers on your flight.

4 00 PM

Jan Rezab, co-founder and CEO of Socialbakers, stepped back on stage to introduce the Socially Devoted standard in social customer care. When we ran the first study in June, brands ignored 70% of questions posted to their Facebook walls. Three months later, after setting and promoting the standard, we are proud to announce a shift in social media customer care. During Q3, pages responded to 48% of the questions from fans as opposed to 30% in June.

To qualify as Socially Devoted, you need to:

• Open your Facebook wall to questions
• Respond to at least 75% questions posted to your wall
• Respond in a timely fashion

Considering that 35% of questions are addressed outside opening hours, it is crucial to move customer care to social networks where you can be devoted 24/7.

Check out the infographic here: sociallydevoted­.socialbakers­.com and stay tuned for the Socially Devoted Awards Ceremony after Jakub´s presen­tation and a special performance.

Jakub Hrabovsky, ManageSocial: Proven ROI from customer care over social channels

Using Vodafone UK as his primary example, Jakub Hrabovsky of Manage Social talks about the benefits of building a social media-based customer care community. How to identify, recognize and reward key influencers and superusers. The benefits and savings of leveraging social media as an integrated platform, i.e., the reduction of customer queries, ad hoc product testing and staving off a crisis before it occurs. He uses the model of “Listen, Create, Engage and Analyze” to build larger, more dynamic and scalable user communities that fit any business model.

5 00 PM

Socially Devoted Awards Ceremony

Only the airlines brands flew in to get their Socially Devoted Awards: KLM (1st place), Alitalia (2nd place) and Volaris (5th). Congratulations!

We will publish the list of the Socially devoted brands across different industries very soon, stay tuned!

YouTube Video Coming Soon!

Socialbakers will publish the conference in its entirety on the Socialbakers YouTube channel!

Tweets by @sociallydevoted