Day three first session of the day for me was Perfect Orchestration from Thomas Bryner. He spoke about social media content and that whatever I push out today an be recontext and reused a long time in the future - which can be a good thing or a bad thing. What it calls for is close monitoring of what is going on, and asking "what is happening to my content?"
He talked about how referrals are the most effective form of marketing, but marketing should be targeted and addressed to individuals, not just message dumping, your followers should be used as a message hub to others. Value of Facebook - a unique chance to reach the social referral system of the people you engage with. But like buttons are too easy, and people might forget the company they have just liked within ten minutes.
He then smoke about conversation rates for various media, banner ads is 0.2%social channels is 0.71% search is 1.95% but the biggest is email at 3.19%. I was surprised by this as personally, and speaking to friends and colleagues, I rarely buy from an email, and more from social channels or search - but maybe that's because I love social and spend a lot of time there, or maybe it a generation thing? Interested to know people's thoughts on this...
He also spoke about being present on social just for the sake of being social probably isn't a good idea - couldn't agree more! He also discussed news jacking - which is a new term for me, but he gave the example of how when the miners in Chilli were trapped, Oakley gave them all free sunglasses for when they came into sunlight, which would not have cost the company much but was worth a hell of a lot in brand advertising due to the mass global news coverage of the disaster.
My next session was from Jason Cornell and Stefan Hepper on Exceptional Web Experiences with Digital Asset Management. Jason started by showing some website that are using extensive rich media content to capture people's attention in an ever crowding online world - which is why it's imperative to have a Social Web Experience.
He spoke about IBMs rich media solutions- including the newly announced Digital Asset Management. Stefan then took the audience through some use cases and a gave a quick demo.
Jason then talked about Digital Asset and Web Content flow
And then talked about some case studies of the solution - including this one from Showtime
My penultimate session of the conference was from Mac Guidera and Adam Ginsburg on Leveraging the power of IBM Connections and Websphere Portal.
Mac started by talking about Forbes view of how social media takes custom relationships to the next level and how important it is - as after all we are all social animals. In addition we are all web savvy now and it's important for us to understand what is happening to the data we generate online and know that the companies we interact with our listening.
Customers are on the driving seat - connecting with the individually requires a consistent and engaging online experience - including meaningful self service on the web - something which IBMs web experience software helps our customers achieve says Mac, seeing benefits like a 32% decrease in calls to the customer support line.
Here is how IBM help customers improve their organisations social web experience
Adam then took us through an example of how people could collaborate on organising a downtown carnival (from food, to music to acts etc) - the interactive site allowing people to see an activity stream of what's happening- which is embedded so people can interact in situ and in the context of the application. Lots of social rendering portlets - such as member directories- are designed by IBM and available out of the box to help our customers get started - all of which are customisable too, as well as their look and feel.
The next tool discussed was the Social Media Publisher and the analytic capabilities associated with this.
And in closing Mac suggested next steps for the audience
My last session of the day, and of the conference, was by the ever informative Stuart McRae - Social Business is an Integration Problem - and was a follow on session to the one I attended yesterday (see my day 2 blog).
He talked about how social businesses focus on creating trusted networks as the way the operate. Problems now need to be rethought as interacts between people, rather than a set of processes - people driven works, workflows driven processes won't in the journey to becoming a Social Business.
He then moved onto mobile - which he said was an absolute must for social. There is no point rolling out social in an organisation and not giving them access on their mobile phones, as they will update on the go rather than when they get back to their desks later, mobile is key to enabling social.
Love this example from Stuart of why its important to tweet and how this could be used in underpinning your business processes
And that's it from me at XWebX Berlin 2013. I hope you have enjoyed reading my blogs from the last three days and you can keep up with where I am next on Twitter @RSwindell. Till next time.. Stay Social!