GET SOCIAL

SOCIAL MEDIA’s importance increases steadily.Therefore the conference reporting about this substantial topic was greatly inspiring.

Here is a figure about how „social“ we are.

2.078 billion users of Social Media accounts is a massive number considering the the mass of people that do not have any internet access.

Content Creation

Paul Buckley, the head of Aer Lingus’s Social Media was the first speaker. He was talking about creating the suitable, interesting content for social media. Aer Lingus had a new project, initiating flights from Dublin to Washington DC. (#dublin2dc) Paul demonstrated the key messages of content creation related to this Initiation. Based on different events like the start of the first plane to Washington DC, they set up the content.

Content is everywhere, we are overloaded with it. Therefore is is really important that it has been selected wisely and that it really gets attention from people.

It has to stand out! Aer Lingus for example focuses on major matters like their cooperation with the Irish Rugby team, as these ones are most attention seeing.

Very impressive is that Aer Lingus being such a big company in Ireland has got a Social Media team of only five people and two of them are actually working of the Social Media Content.

Creativity is required working with in Social Media. Finding new stories in which people are interested in can become a big challenge. Being creative is essential if you want to work in this area.

Paul Buckley puts it like that:

„Find your story, become an expert and share it!“

Here is some advice how to create the right Social Media content:

How to sell yourself! Social Media!

Damien Dunne, Senior Direct of Sales Programs for Oracle Direct, a fast-growing global computer technology cooperation which specializes in developing and marketing hard- and software products. It has been the second-largest software maker by revenue in 2011, after Microsoft.

Damien started with talking about how to sell yourself. If you know how to do that, you’ll know how to sell your Social Media content.

He came up with 5 tips to sell yourself on Social Media:

Create a shortlist of companies you want to join
Build up a profile
Share your knowledge
Find the right people
Start conversation

It was very interesting to see that he was also talking about the importance of sharing your knowledge, just as the previous speaker. He highly recommended LinkedIn as a way of presenting yourself to possible employers. This is just like using any source of Social Media like Facebook or Twitter to sell your product or service to the customers.

Digital Society

The third speaker Nina Gallagher is Senior Manager of Accenture Interactive. Accenture is global technology, consulting and outsourcing company with it’s headquarters in Dublin. With experience in design, marketing and Social Media she helps shaping the right strategy to reach customer via Social Media.

Nowadays every business is digital. Digitalization is changing the world in so many areas. Many of them have been changed already, but there is still an enormous potential in the following sections:

Shopping
Entertainment
Learning
Exercising
Travelling
Paying

In the entertainment area an enormously increasing number of people for example watch online movies, available at Netflix or Amazon Prime – market that didn’t even exist a few years ago.

Very impressive was the following statement:

UBER – biggest taxi company, but no cars

FACEBOOK – biggest media owner, but creates no content

AIRBNB – biggest housing provider, but no accommodation

A few years ago no one could have imagined something like that. What is going to come next? The biggest food provider without food?

The following video demonstrates

Sure is that Digitalization including Social Media is driving consumer behaviour and that there is a market in this area with workspaces that have to be filled. Nina advised the linsteners to follow the companies one wants to work for. If you are getting to know them better, you have a better understanding what skills are required to work for them and whether you will fit into the company.

The Evolution of Social Media

Cian Corbett‎, Business Director with Radical, a Social Media Agency, described how Social Media has developed in recent decade.

It has been a real evolution.

Social Media spending has more than doubled over the last five years. Companies get more aware of its role it plays in today’s society and about the amount it influences consumer spending. Cian started with some critical statements concerning what people think of Social Media and people working it these areas. He explained that working with Social Media is actually very different than people would it expect it to be. It is strongly related to numbers and figures and he gave us some examples straight away:

“The average European checks their phone 150 times a day with most time spent in Social Apps”– Google DEP Conference, 2015

According to IAB Connect 2015 Social Media’s growth rate has approximately been 107% which is an enormous figure.

Another, quite provocative statement, that should express the massive importance of Social Media in the current society is:

“Facebook has more relationships than God”

– Scott Galloway, 2015

The picture demonstrates that there are over 2.4 billion of Facebook user and around 2.2 billion people using Google, where there are „only“ 1.1 billion Christians in this world.

In my opinion it is very difficult to compare such completly different things, but it gives us a feeling of how hugely the world is influenced by Social Media.

There are 7 phases in the evolution of Social Media:

Peer to Peer
Awareness
Fan Growth
Advertising
Organic Reach
Increased Analytics
Social Video

Very remarkable is that people are even more influenced by other people’s opinion (73%) than by advertisement (58%). This is also a point where individual’s Social Media plays an important role for companies, as consumer recommendation is not directly connected with expenses of the firm, but influencing their sales even more than any advertising campaign. This was demonstrated by the first phase.

The other phase which was surprising to me was the relevance social videos have nowadays. 8 billion videos are watched on facebook daily, the convenience of users leads to the fact that they prefer watching it on Facebook straight away, because they would not like to open YouTube or other video channels for each video. So therefore Facebook videos gain increasing popularity.

Senior Research Analyst at Econsultancy, Seán Donnelly assists their customers to be successful in digital business, marketing and ecommerce. Econsultancy resources have been used by the world’s most successful brands. So the last speaker of this conference before the penal discussion started talked a lot about the changing marketing sector.

The traditional marketing funnel does not exist anymore, because it doesn’t reach consumers anymore. It appears to be very difficult tracking consumer decisions or interest. And it is a lot about loss of intimacy: Seán says that people kind of have to give up a part of their privacy to gain from suitable advertisement. He claims that consumers can profit from sharing more personal information to have perfectly tailored offers to their wants needs.

Find more information on

“tailored advertising”

by clicking on the picture:

It was explained to us that in future and partly already, competition doesn’t happen through lowering prices, but rather through customer experience. One example for that is the huge success amazon is experiencing. Their costumers support comes mainly because the customers face a large selection of product or product categories, they are mostly offered at low prices and have a great convenience.

Some other examples advertising “customer experience” which have been mentioned by Nina before are Airbnb and Uber. With online payment, GPS functions and giving the customers a certain level of security, they catch many persons interest.

However, a great customer experience through personalizing isn’t always easy can con mostly not be fulfilled perfectly. As en example Seán mentions that passenger X might not like peanuts which you should then avoid offering to him. But such an extend of details about customers makes a huge effort and is most of the time not possible.

At the penal discussion, Stephen Cummins (CEO, AppSelekt), Inez Mahony (Digital Marketing Manager, Daft.ie), Thomas Ryan (Social Media, Irish International BBDO), Lisa Deeney (Press & PR, TanOrganic), Dr Jane Suiter (Director, FuJo) discussed about Social Media’s functionality for SME (Small and Medium sized Enterprises).They all came to the conclusion that Social Media also plays an important role for SMEs. Sometimes the role is even bigger than for big firms, but there are also exceptional cases where Social Media is not really relevant for SMEs.

It is extremely important to find the right Social Media director, who should in the best case also be your target customer, because that person would know what target customers want to see. They again stated the importance that the Social Media director should be extremely trustworthy and professional.

The statements of final avice which I liked best were the following ones: