Social Media Strategy – Highlights from the #SMSSummit

I presented both a workshop and a breakout session at last month’s Social Media Strategy Summit in Dallas. This was my second time attending a Social Media Strategy Summit this year, and conference producer Breanna Jacobs and the team from GSMI do a fantastic job of bringing together both wonderful presenters and experienced attendees together in a very interactive learning environment.

Here are a few highlights of the tweets, insights, and audience reactions to the social media strategy ideas shared at the Dallas event.

Social Media Strategy and Customer Service

Via Vanessa Sain-Dieguez (@VSDieguez) of @HiltonHotels

• You don’t want to “train” your customers to tweet and get better attention than when you call.
• It’s vital to listen for people mentioning your brand in multiple ways, even when someone isn’t mentioning your brand directly. For example, if the location on a tweet or Facebook update suggests a person is at your location with an issue, you want to be able to identify that and respond.
• Hilton layered its social media-based customer services activities into pre-existing protocols between its franchisees and customer service group. This move minimized issues that might have developed if social media customer service were treated differently. That’s not to say that delivering customer service via social is simple. “Scalability is our biggest challenge every day.”
• Successful real time marketing is about what's relevant, not what's trending.

Via Jeff Gibbard (@jgibbard)

• It’s easy for customers to be rude to a logo on Twitter or Facebook. That’s not so if they sense a person on the other end. That’s why it’s important to sign your customer service social media in some way to show there’s a person involved on the brand’s end.

Social Media Strategy Insights from Adrian Parker of @Patron

Quick disclaimer – I was one of three people who won some of the new Roca Patron Tequila for live tweeting the most during the Adrian Parker presentation.

Nevertheless, Adrian had a plethora of great strategic insights and paraquotes from his diverse career experience.

• “Outsource your thinking, but not your decisions.”
• “Your social strategy should be something your competitor would never do.”
• “A best practice isn’t a strategy. It’s something you should be doing anyway.”
• “Good strategy is inspired by, but not limited to, current customer behavior.”
• “A good strategy should make you nervous.”
• “Leadership is plural. Vision is singular.” Multiple people can lead against the sole vision.

An Attendee Recap

Dan Vadeboncoeur (@danvadeboncoeur) attended the SMSSummit and shared his recap on take-aways on his Media Nerds podcast. I tweeted Dan that I appreciated the shout out, especially since he sat in on both of my sessions.

• Media Nerds recap: http://medianerdspodcast.com/2014/08/26/the-ice-bucket-social-media-summit/

Video Highlights from the Social Media Strategy Summit

In a great example of using content providers to create even more content from an event, a video crew was onsite the second day of the conference to film brief interviews with #SMSSummit presenters. There is a YouTube page with all of the videos, plus here are several from yours truly on social media and content marketing strategy.

See the video at: http://youtu.be/sOuBJzHvRBQ

See the video at: http://youtu.be/Vkf6Xu2HKWs

See the video at: http://youtu.be/MQkdKal2rtM

Wait, There’s More

This quick recap doesn’t do justice to the breadth of content at the #SMSSummit. Look for another post with additional highlights coming soon! – Mike Brown

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