MIMA Social Media Event Recap

Posted by Jennifer   |   May 20th, 2008 1:50pm

“Create something that allows you to listen” was the astute answer that Gary Koelling of Best Buy gave to the question, ‘How do you start with social media?’

The panel discussion, Dual Reality: Who Controls Social Media in the Enterprise, happened Wednesday, May 15th at Solera in downtown Minneapolis. The panelists included the following individuals:

• Jim Cuene, Director, Interactive, General Mills
• Brad Smith, VP of eCommerce & Digital Marketing, Fingerhut Direct Marketing
• Gary Koelling, Creative Director, Social Technology, Best Buy
• Jason Kleckner, Manager, Information Architecture, Target Corporation
• Moderator: Michael Kraabel, Group Creative Director, Gage

The panel was intended as an event to start these conversations with MIMA members and interested parties. Social Media aspects of the event included texting and twittering questions to the moderator and follow up to come on the MIMA blog and through other blogs posts such as this one.

The main points that were shared:

• Brands need to start acting more like people in order to build real relationships with customers.

There is definitely a shift happening. Interactive practitioners need to help brands & marketers understand this shift. Social media is not a ‘push’ device. The ‘push’ medium of how we deliver messages is becoming less relevant. The future is more about ‘pull’. We need to listen and respond instead of broadcast a single message. It’s important to think about what your brand looks like and acts like when it is ‘being social’. It’s also key to keep in mind that this is about understanding what is right for the customer. Our concept of what media is doesn’t fit anymore. Social media makes the way companies are acting and interacting with their customers more ‘normal’ as opposed to the way companies have pushed messages at consumers in the past fifty or sixty years.

The opportunities for marketers to be more closely connected to customers is exciting. It is also a huge shift from mass media and presents challenges because larger companies are not necessarily tuned to respond in this manner. It’s probably less challenging for a smaller company because small brands are more frequently built on experiences in comparison to mass advertisers and larger companies that are usually built on pushing out single messages.

• Start Small

The panel talked about the idea of starting small and being comfortable with failure in your efforts. It’s a time to learn how your brand can succeed in a social environment. There will be some trial and error, so it’s best to experiment.

• Paying for these efforts

There isn’t really a direct ROI justification for social media. At this point and perhaps ongoing, it’s really opportunity cost. Companies need to ask themselves the question, ‘What is the cost of not participating?” However, it doesn’t have to cost significant amounts of money to participate. The overall sentiment was about doing something small and therefore less of an investment and risk. Jim Cuene strongly advocated for paying for the efforts out of product development dollars not marketing and advertising. His argument was that it’s part of the product experience to listen to customers and understand how to evolve a product or service based on that conversation.

• In the future – every marketer will be a community manager

Technologies disrupt behavior. We should take our time to understand this disruption. Jim Cuene stated that, “We are in the early stages of a fundamental shift, we should slow down and watch how patterns evolve.” It’s important to understand this is not the next ‘new’ thing. In fact, the idea of calling this “Social Media” was challenged. The panel agreed that these activities would eventually become part of how products are made and not have a special name. I definitely agree with that sentiment. The features of Social Media are really just tools to employ to engage with customers. Over time it will become part of how web sites get made and products get developed. It’s going to become part of the social fabric of what is understood and expected by customers. The panel related it to the early questions that companies asked when the web was new. For example, it used to be a question, “Do we really need a web site?” Eventually we won’t be talking about Social Media as something separate.

The panel illustrated that it’s an exciting time full of challenges. Things are definitely changing and it’s important to be part of understanding this change. We have better tools that allow us to listen to customers when we engage in and enable conversation. As an interactive professional that has empathy for people and wants to help create the best experiences for them, this is music to my ears.

Entry Filed under: Events, Social Media & Emerging Technolgies