“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” – Albert Einstein

This is not my typical post. It consists of more questions than answers and what I really want to know is how you feel about these images.

This is today’s 24H News frontpage. It seems that what makes the headlines is not food shortages at the food bank or that we have the most chronically destitute skid row on the planet. It’s about the fact that we have an abundance of crack users and not enough crack pipes. We have a systemic problem not just and addiction problem. Paraphrasing the Einstein quote above – the people and the thinking in the system that have allowed this social disease to propagate are very unlikely to be able to solve the problem.

8 Blocks away from Canada’s poorest postal code where hundreds of HIV infected drug users live in 3rd world conditions I snapped this picture. It’s from boxing day. Seems people waiting to get into the Future Shop Boxing Day Sale felt it was okay to pile their empty cups and garbage on top of two news stands instead of (gasp) holding onto them and disposing of them in an ethical way. My hypothesis: these consumer drones were so fixated to their big screen TV’s they couldn’t make the right decision in their trance. In addition to this… everyone else was doing it. (similar logic for the riots).

Lastly I think that this image sums it up. We should be reaching for this button more often than the “Easy Button.” Our thinking and level of personal responsibility on all fronts needs to be adjusted. What has to change? I think as we discard our garbage while we buy new “things” and hope that big brother will take care of all of our problems we will be doomed to propagate these social sicknesses and to a greater level. The solution isn’t more money from government or more “things” – it’s a new consciousness. What has to change on a individual level to make this happen?

- Shane Gibson – Chief Social Officer @ShaneGibson

Shane Gibson by Cathy Browne

Thanks to: Mark Smith, Meena Sandhu, Teri Conrad, Shane Gibson…I don’t know how you get that done. One of the reasons we became partners is your passion for this sphere and connecting.

Shane: I scheduled this as the buffer, in case George went over time. I want to talk about where Social Media Week came from and how it came here. Eric and Jeff talked about it. It’s really about people. An organization is just a group of people, and that’s what got it done. A bunch of organizations helped it all come together.

SMW founded in 2009 in New York and then it spread. They offered us some guidelines and it was really useful. My vision was that Vancouver was full of very talented social media people doing ROI driven things. And we have a habit of bringing out of town experts in to tell us how to do this when our neighbor is doing great. This isn’t about bringing in superstars from outside. This is about local superstars. Everyone looked at me and said, “you figure out what we’re going to talk about” and we put it out there and put it forward and all these people stepped forward and we got amazing supports. We can’t even name all the supporters, because we’d be here all night. We wanted to break down silos and this has been so much more successful than we dreamed. We’ve had over 3000 people registered. Our Core Chief Tweeter, Teri Conrad was trending briefly.

Thanking sponsors briefly:

CTV, the Sun, Board of Trade, The Province: gave massive resources and support. When they stepped up, a lot of other chips stepped up. Social media event, but when mainstream media came on board everyone else did too!

ING Direct and Meena Sandhu, UBC Continuing Studies, Amuse Consulting, Fasken Martineau, Marketwire, Yelp, SFU Woodwards, UrbanLifeMedia, Popchips.

Dye & Durham, webnames.ca, BuildDirect.com, Langara , MoenbyMedia. There’s about 25 other key people:

Thanks to Lorraine who has reached out to people who couldn’t be here today.

My girlfriend Rina who put up with me.

We’ve got two people here from Nokia: Tom Hall and the other is Cathy Garfield. Nokia is a global sponsor and if you tweet to NokiaCanada that something nice will happen!

And thanks again Cathy Browne for all your photography.

What we want next year I want to see 60 events next year, so step up. I think the really big theme for the next year is integration: it’s not us versus them or online vs offline. It’s about putting it all together seamlessly. It’s becoming increasingly mobile, realtime. What we can’t forget about is: it’s the people that count and the relationships that are absolutely vital.

Infographics have emerged as one of the most popular and shareable forms of social content. That’s the premise of what we’re talking about today. 973,000 Google results on “Infographics”. In four months it’s almost doubled. They make content easy to digest. I”m overwhelmed just trying to keep up, and I’m a pro at this. Make it easier for your customers and community to learn from you easily.

60-65% of us are visual learners. Cater to them.

Easy to share infographics. It’s a type of content that’s different and people are more encouraged to share them; cool, funky, fun.

Definitions: visual representation of information, data to simplify it. Data visualisation for example. Think back to boring powerpoints, and how they could really be improved. Idea art!

The Blog Tree

Types of infographics: Statistics, obviously. Concepts: illustrate thought leadership. Models are a great tool to use internally: describe service offering, different products, etc. Technically cartoons aren’t infographics, but it’s my presentation and I like them. Adding humour relays a message well. Straight up information eg the Blog Tree. Timelines as well.

How do you get started? Explore new ways to inform your audience and think about ways to add in a visual element to help people understand you better. Record your thoughts: doodle or whatever. Process and refine ideas; take all the inputs and output as an infographic. The hardest part is Implementation. Create and publish.

Remember:

Keep it simple, including keeping it up above the fold, think about how it prints out in context.

Tell a story. Think about your end goal when you’re deciding the story. Work backwards.

Make sharing easy. Licensing: use Creative Commons, etc, so that the image becomes branding collateral.

It’s more about your ideas than the software or the tactic. Ideas > Software. Use what works for you.

Just do it. Drop the “my precious” attitude. Done > perfect. You want your ideas to shine through, not your production values.

Workflow example: Visualizing the idea that a heavy investment in social media won’t solve your organizational issues.

Started with the idea of weak foundation. Then house of cards. This is proof I can’t draw! [img] I sketch it two dimensionaly because I cannot draw three dimensionaly. Then I go to Publisher and do it.

Infographic ROI: it helps if they add business value. The Content Grid V2 as an example. Awareness can be brought via infographics. Infographics create signals. Signals —-> Conversations.

Content Creation Options: DIY, in-house designer, outsourced to a pro, partner with arts students who are building portfolios.

Q do you copyright it?

I do my own copyright. There’s not a lot I can do about illegal use; I try to make it easy for people to use what I post. It’s clearly stated that they can use it. People still contact me and offer to buy it. If the info is proprietary don’t create infographics to share publicly. It depends on your comfort level.

Q have you dealt with distorted stats?

It’s a real issue, but I haven’t directly, no. Be honest about the information. If you’re using research, always cite to the source of the actual research report, as opposed to a place that referenced the report but doesn’t contain the actual report.

Q what’s the most successful infographic you’ve seen?

From a metrics POV I can only speak on my own stuff. What have you guys seen recently that stands out: The LinkedIn IPO was pretty amazing. Mint has put out a couple of things recently too. O6 has put out an infographic of the guy’s resume, mapping his experience and education and some cool stuff like productivity.

Q which of yours have you enjoyed most?

I like all the ones I’ve created. To me it’s more about the process of turning an idea into an infographic. The FB snakes and ladders game got lots of attention. David Armano is a huge influence and he’s with Edelman. LogicAndEmotion is his blog. Visuly is a website that is working towards helping you create visualizations. Fastcompany does an excellent infographic and National Geographic and USA Today.

Q if you make a great infographic, how do you leverage that?

It’s just like any other social media post. Make sure people can contact you, so embed your contact deets into the image. Figure out what the objective is. It’s primarily an awareness tool.

Q Has anyone done an infographic on the evolution of infographics?

You ultimately have to provide value. What Jeremiah Owyang said is, you’ve got to really connect other touchpoints through infographics.

Amielle Lake of Tagga Media, one of Vancouver’s best kept secrets, in that most of what they do is outside the city. Mobile marketing @Tagga

Mike Jagger of Provident Security and other amazing startups, a consummate entrepreneur. @providentmike

Jill Earthy CEO of Forum of Women Entrepreneurs here in Vancouver, and a social CEO. @Jearthy

George Moen is still tweeting, so that’s great. He’s the #2 most Followed CEO in Canada, and he’s sitting beside Jeff.

Jeff Booth, who has done a ton of great work with Rob Jones. @jeffbooth

Questions should be questions, not speeches.

As a social CEO what are the 1 or 2 key things to get ppl in your organization to embrace social media?

Internally it wasn’t too difficult at Taiga. It’s a great corporate culture builder: sharing photos. The other day someone faxed us an ad about buying a mobile phone, and we shared that on Twitter, etc. It has promoted sharing organically. I think even our office dogs have twitter accounts.

For Provident, we’re an old-skool business, 24/7. Our challenge is keeping everyone n the same page during a crisis. We were able to use our Blog internally as a reference for our team. We have worked hard to make the posts serve as the knowledge base for our team so when you’re answering the phone you all have consistent stories and practices. It gives the team confidence.

I’m still laughing aobut the Social CEO thing. I was graduating and I got a social award, not a math one. We represent over 400 small businesses and are always looking for additional tools to share what our members are up to. I was hesitant when Twitter started. We have so many great stories and we have to promote them and our offers as well. We have learned to engage and pass along resources and tools.

The one thing about being president is you don’t have to ask permission to do shit. [wild applause] I remember sitting with Nestle and they were flying this guy back to Switzerland to learn email, so we watched that and within six months we owned an internet company. Tech moves fast, but people don’t. If you know that, it’s a hell of a competitive advantage.

What he said. When you have influence at the top of the organization, you don’t have to convince a lot of people. They’ll come on board. We would pay a little bit on engagement. There was an incentive plan around engagement.

Q: what do you do when things go wrong?

When I started Tagga, I knew nothing about social. I was speaking at a conference, blogging was big, Twitter was nowhere, etc. One of the people in the audience wrote a scathing blog report about me and the company and overpromotion, etc. I realized the impact it has is when people start commenting on it. A bad message gets diluted quickly when there are counter-comments. It was a touchy moment, but it helped us to see that.

We did that when we had an issue with…well, I’ve become offended by something another company has done, eg Shaw, where I feel they were misleading and so on. I wrote a pretty angry post breaking out all the reasons their ads were wrong and why they were just liars. We got great feedback and all sorts of people shared it including Telus, wrote again and got a really nice letter from Shaw’s lawyers saying STOP but what was beautiful was what they said: You gotta stop using our logo (and I had). So I took the logo out and I posted the letter from the lawyer. Every time there’s a Shaw outage, we get tons of media. They’re pretty heavy-handed, but because we hadn’t said anything that wasn’t 100% true there was nothing they could do.

We do round tables with a panel of 6. We often get a  lot of media, and one of the panelists once was a high level PR person, and someone did a post taking something of what she said, took it out of context, and posted it. This person on the panel was beyond pissed. And she’s a PR person so that was interesting, but she came back at us, and it was all over Twitter and we lost our PR person because Twitter etc was 24 hours and we had to go back to the blogger and beg them to take down the blog post and the Tweets. We had to be on things 24 hours and interact and support our people. It was a great learning experience.

I had a riot. It doesn’t get any badder than that. And I’m suing 150 people [applause] . I think you got balls to do that to Shaw, they have good lawyers. I’ve only lost it once on social media and that was at the riots. I had seen this guy urinating in my store, talking about being pissed. What he didn’t know was I have a high def camera catching the action, FRONTAL.  I went “DUDE it looks like a penis, only smaller,” and it got picked up. Larry and Willy really loved it. It kind of cascaded. It became a media thing for 24 hours. When it goes out there, it is permanent.

I”m not gonna cross this guy, OR Mike. It hasn’t really happened to us; we’ve created an environment on our site where we put everything on our site, all feedback. I think it helps prevent that sort of thing. We plan for the day we do something wrong, and the hope here is that your advocates come to your rescue.

Q You circulate amongst other CEOs, and constantly interacting with orgs that just aren’t social. What’s the most common misconception that other CEOs have.

George: I talked to one guy who wanted to run all the tweets past his lawyer. It’s the fear of having the conversation in public. We come from the school of controlled media and this is all NOT about that. They’ve just gotta wrap their brain around it.

Jill: it’s fear. We are all marketers. It’s not just you, it’s your staff. Be a role model.

Jeff: it’s fear. But it’s secondary to “what tools? Which ones? what strategy” It’ll happen but it’ll take time.

Mike: it’s either they’re concerned nobody will read it or care, or if they do put it out that their competitors will read it. Fear nobody reads it and fear people will read it.

Amielle: I used to work in mining and ran into a guy in that industry and talked to him about mobile and social and he looked at me like I was from out of space. They have to connect with analysts and institutional investors and so on and the concept of reaching them on their phone and having instant engagement…I was blowing his mind. He flipped me his card and told me to talk to his “intern girl.”

We’re going to audience questions now.

@JaenyB Is it a good idea for CEOs who don’t get it to get online? Or maybe are there other people who should do that?

Jeff: introverts are still good on social media. If you’re not good at relationships, I don’t know how you can be a good CEO.

George: to lead a team, you have to have interpersonal skills. You will see CEOs stepping up or losing.

Mark Smiciklas How do you figure out what metrics are relevant?

Amielle: you can get tweets, likes, fans, but without a conversion plan it’s useless. Plan first, then track and see what’s working and adapt.

George: I disagree. ["That's why we have the panel"] There’s another element here. Social media is nothing more than a communication platform. I don’t care about the metrics in the beginning. All that stuff will show up. It’s networking without expectations at the beginning. of course you want results. I like what Steve Jobs does. He creates stuff, and people just show up. They do no customer research. If you get too ties up in analytics, it hinders the process.

Mike: it depends what you’re selling. We’re a trust-based business. We obsess about numbers. But for us, because we don’t sell anything online, we don’t care. The value of a blog post is better customer service. It’s different if you’re in ecommerce. It’s great if someone in Botswana likes my blog post, butwe guarantee five minute response west of Oak street. So concentrate on that.

Jeff: you used to be able to connect via TV to a captive audience. It’s harder today. How many tweets do I really see? it’s fragmenting. You have to find your meaning. Meaning Travels Well. That builds real fans that convert faster.

Heron Henredon CTV BC @CTVHeron How do you manage your day and how has being social changed your leadership style within the company?

Jill: I’m erratic and I’m still learning alot

Mike: it’s on my phone and it’s just what works with me. Depending on how many people you’re connected to, it’s entirely possible my brother is 90% of your stream. Our other brother is trying to get on a speed skating team. We all have diffrerent things that are appropriate to us. I don’t worry about “filling space” but do what I feel passionate about in the moment and it’s fun. For someone who doesn’t like that, it’s just a lot of work and a sick amount of time. The leadership style had a major change. Once I actually understood what Steve told me, I saw the benefit of it but bringing it into our team and building the wikis internally for everyone as touchstones, etc, it changed the whole company. The value of video alone is huge. It’s making our life easier and everyone sees it.

@TiffanyMChu Have you been able to track benefits to your corporate culture?

George Yes, I get feedback in realtime and employees know I’m very active in social media and you can see that made a big change. Shane kicked my ass on all social media stuff. “your customers are having a conversation without you” said Shane, and that is what made me get it. We measure our interaction and our results have improved over the last four quarters, becuase the president is watching. If the president is Following you, you tone it down a bit.

Jeff: for us, no. We’re on the same system as Mike is on. Completely transparent in management style, no difference from before.

Amielle: social media adds and element of energy to the corporate culture.

Mike: wikis changed the core culture of our company. Some personalities are great at interaction, some are more linear and process-based and it’s all improved everyone’s lives. We can see the positive impact we’re all having on each other and the company as a whole. The people who are most diligent on editing and fixing aren’t the ones generating the content in the first place. it’s all helpful.

Jill: my staff know where I am, what I’m doing and who I’m talking to. And vice versa. That helps with leadership.

Mark @AmuseEvents: what has being social brought that you didn’t even know it existed?

Amielle: When Twitter first became popular I went to blogger party and talked to a girl going to med school and her boyfriend who had thousands of followers she was talking about him like he was a hero, and I was like, but you’re ACTUALLY GOING TO SAVE LIVES and he’s your hero? There’s this misguided sense of celebrityship that I don’t know is totally warranted. I was hesitant about social media for that reason. They give themselves awards and they pay themselves lots, the celebrity-industrial complex. But I have learned things from Twitter that I couldn’t get from the Economist in the same length of time, and that’s been mind-blowing.

Mike: it accelerated our mainstream media exposure. We’re just a local company and got 700 news stories including the NYTimes. A lot of that comes from social media.

Jill: I agree with that. It extends our reach so much and you’re instant friends because you’re already connected.

George: we hugged! I’m working on the biggest deal of my life I can’t tell anyone about because of social media. I heard everybody gets a .tel here…Because of the riot and my accessibility through social media….i got deluged with contacts from journalists, and I put my cellphone on my .tel and that freaks people out. We were able to get a handle on that whole story because of social media and the accessibility and access. I don’t get that much incoming calls, but I don’t. It can really extend the brand of my company, being accessible. You’re an individual brand even if you’re a president. Even if you’re a president of one.

Jeff: I was named as one of the top 25 CEOs by Forbes, and that never would have happened without social media.

Jeff Booth Build Direct

I had a family moving into a house and the flooring didn’t show up. I was so angry about this, and I investigated what happened. I was amazed by how many people who touched that product without taking responsibility for it. Imagine that frustration! We built Build Direct out of that.

Great entrepreneurs are driven to make the world a better place. They feel others’ pain and are moved to solve it. This is a much stronger mission than to make money. When great people share your dream, something magical happens. We persevered through subprime mortgage crisis, worst housing market ever, dotcom bust, etc. But the growth is remarkable. What does this have to do with social media? Why are we winning despite the complete collapse of the market?

Internet removes friction. Speed. But the tools that were supposed to serve us, took us over. It’s not about the tools. If it were, what is it really about? is your life richer because of the tools? It’s easy to be overwhelmed. If you’re on a free service, you are the product that they’re selling to someone else. We are bombarded by these messages. Heck, I got put on a list of People to Follow in business, and let me tell you, one of these things is not like the others.

Sociology from FB: average female who has 500 friends, comments on 26 people’s photos. Dunbar’s Law: the power of 150. You are capable of 150 relationships that are powerful, after that it breaks down.

When you are mediocre, nobody pays attention. If you’re great, it spreads fast. If you’re awful, it spreads fast too, so be great. It’s not how do you trick somebody; it’s how do you wow someone. Here are couple of things that wow me: Authenticity. Trust, including trusting organizations. Sometimes I’m burned, but I would rather live open than closed. We have a 30 day guarantee, we even pay shipping in both directions, and free product samples with no credit card required. Help Others First. You can imagine how many people I get reaching out to me to help themselves. But look at @TLCHome who is always reaching out to us and other people to help.

People think mostly about themselves. True in all businesses and true in all relationships. When you invert that, it’s a powerful, powerful advantage. When you try to help others first, amazing things happen. Remember this scene from my favorite movie?

It IS a wonderful life

Eric Weaver

Eric is the chief evANTgelist for Ant’s Eye View.

There are two kinds of people in a Vancouver social media talk audience: the social mediaites who love it and the others. When I say social media is dead, I get the response “BUT we love social media!” We love getting +1′s for pictures of our dogs, etc, and we are so proud. But there’s a change in social media.

I love it and I am feeling a shift. The hype cycle has crashed. We’ve explored every niche, joined every thing, and there’s always the next hot thing and then they suddenly go dark. We’ve poked everyone, as Shane and I know..and why didn’t that get the laugh I was hoping for [because everyone's going Why Not Me?]

A guy stood up and said this to me: “If social media is dead, it’s because guys like you killed it.” We’re emotional about this stuff, it gives us power and connection. We are emotional creatures. 95% of decisions have an emotional basis, not a rational one. It’s not Think->Do->Feel it’s Feel->Do->Think. And that’s because we are crazy monkey people. We are primates, it’s evolved so we can quickly react to a threat. We can have two conflicting emotions at the same time, but not two conflicting logical thoughts, it takes too damn much energy. Rational processing is harder. We are emotional, time-starved people. If you’re answering client calls in the next stall at the YVR airport bathroom, we’re obviously time starved.

How does this translate into buying?

Does social media translate into buying?

Study: There was a rational assignment: one group did it on Twitter, one did it old-skool. The Twitter group consistently outperformed by a %.

Oxytocin. Study: pro basketball teams that touch more consistently outperformed the ones that don’t. When we touch we get an oxytocin buzz that helps focus, relaxation, optimism. If we’re engaging more in social channels does that actually create oxytocin in us and make us feel better about the brand? Study: are you more likely to buy after Following or Liking? Absolutely. And more likely to recommend too. If we engage people in social channels we are more likely to get clients, dollars.

1 in 2 leads to B2B sites comes from LinkedIn. Most likely to convert, visitors most likely to attend webinars.

The marketing goals haven’t changed: build awareness, convert the curious, increase revenue. THIS DOESN’T CHANGE. But what’s next?

We have many hurdles:

• no one has time
• we are all distracted
• trust is harder to come by, and the default assumptions about organizations are negative.
• expectations can often be ridiculous

That’s the best example of this mindset

• One blogger can outshoot our budget. One viral video or post can do it
• so much noise about social (so many unemployed marketers about social)
• where do you go for good information? Social media jedi, ninja, guru, rock star, etc, etc. They’re saying stupid things. They were techies, have no marketing background, and yet they feel comfortable telling you how to do your job.

And this drives me insane: “You need a social media strategy” That’s like a cellphone strategy, or a freeway strategy. THE TOOL DOESN’T MATTER!!! This drives me insane! That reduces social media’s power when you focus on the tool. It’s usually tool guys talking about the tool. [Eric avoids making the obvious "and they're tools" joke].

The Journey for Some:

1. Convince management to try
2. push via social
3. buy fans…once youv’e invested that money to buy Likes etc, it’s just as easy to unlike your brand, and 2/5 do! It’s a fickle crowd. Why buy them and just lose them anyways? I had someone ask me if they should buy Twitter followers, if it’s guaranteed? It’s unethical, stupid, AND ineffective. It’s the “hot 21 year old on FB with three friends”. It’s not a basketball game, kids. It’s not about the numbers, but it’s hard to convince the old skool marketers.
4. Tabs and apps! Tabs and Apps! We need Tabs And Apps!!!!
5. Justify the labour cost. Head office doesn’t like this one.
6. Where does the journey go? Mobile? Minority Report Style advertising? Where does it go from here? There is no clear path. The bigger opportunity is to engage the entire organization around integrated social engagement.

Ant’s eye view of the engagemnt journey:

Stage 1 is traditional: commend and control busineess operations using one way communication to drive business outcomes.

Stage 2 Experimentsal dabbling in engagement and social it occurs but is diconnected to biz ops. Fractured tools, silo’d efforts, and disparate measures reign.

The lion’s share we’re seeing is at Stage 3: social engagement becomes embedded in the bix ops, internal training, channel alignment and campaign integration, begine to deliver tangible results.

Stage 4: Starbucks is a good example. Social engagement drives real business resluts with systems and tools fully optimized to support confident and competent employees ant to more fully harness online relationships

Step 5 the Nirvana stage. Everyone is involved and engaged throughout the company and there are real and consistent biz outcomes.

Bix outcomes: products brought to market more quickly, we differentiate beyond $, engaged users spend more time on site, infliencers drive revenue via trust, activation creates choice at retail, get and retain the best talent, more efficient research , dev, mkts, etc.

Organizational impacts: entire emplyee base has 360- degree view of customer and can anticipate needs, brand dashboard tied to revenue, senior execs leading with engagement,

Customer Evidence: I trust you, i recommend you.

How do you start on the journey? Know that there is one! Communicate and educate beyond your department. Create a plan that allows everyone to win. The marketing department is always under money pressure, so make sure everyone sees the benefits of social in their departments. Suddenly the money will appear! Tie it to their egos: you too can be a social media champion! YAY! What’s not to love? Assess where you are and set a compass point based on biz goals, not a silo goal. Map organizational objectives to social tactics. Don’t blast the same offer out on Every Damn Platform. Choose your presence wisely. Anticipate “tribal rifts” in your own company. Make sure they’re all working together.

Consumers distrust advertising, but they love engagement. Start with emotional, integrate traditional. DDB example is the Sidekicks low salt product: a strong emotional hook:

They totally went after your heartstrings, and it WORKS! They had money for one commercial, not ten. They spread the money over YouTube without that huge media cost. They took it into transit and prit ads and took Salty to social media on Twitter @SaltysLife and they’d take pictures of him all over and post them to Twitter, and got tremendous uptake. Created a fanpage for Salty and continued to upload videos on Salty’s live. We can continue to engage with them.

It got tremendous pickup in mainstream media and social media users. “I tweeted him and he replied with a link to his dating adventures!”

Zero product mentions, but the response has been crazy. People are doing fan videos and pictures. Someone created pasta art for a product avatar…think about that. That’s true advocacy, for a product that is essentially not that exciting. 375,000 views on YouTube at media cost of 0$. Unit sales rose by 24% over previous year. Sideckicks outpaced Uncle Ben’s as the #1 Brand in the category.

Consumers reserve their time for Oxytocin-rich places.

Coke has an 81 times multiplier on their FB page hits vs their website. We’d rather be in our personal social space rather than an office building.

The forgotten benefit: Google loves engagement too! So it bumps you up in the search ratings! THis is a pic of my wife…I uploaded it six years ago and thought it was a hot passport photo and then I forgot about it. Then later I noticed the referrer was Google.com for “hottest woman ever” and I was like, UM???? But this shows that Google assumes that if it’s getting conversation it’s more likely to be interesting and they bump it up to the top. She’s the only one in the top five that’s not in a bikini. This shows the result of engagement on Google results.

Let hard metrics also lead your choices. See where the conversation about your brand is happening and go there. Map channels to business goals. [there's a great infographic here which I wish I could see without my glasses, but hopefully Eric will email it to me so I can embed it].

Lessons for senior management:

1. There is a path beyond participation and fan acquisition and it’s towards the fully engaged enterprise.
2. Search and social are the norms for Gens X and Y and they now outnumber Boomers in the workforce.
3. Alignment with your market means competitive advantage and more importantly, cost efficiency, and nobody was ever shot for saving money.
4. Cross fucnctional social is an organizational win everyone can get behind #enterprisechampion
5. CONVERSION IS HIGHER WHEN COMPANIES INVEST IN ENGAGEMENT.

Chris Breikss

I’m beginning to understand why they call it Social Media Week…after the Nokia tweetup last night, I’m feeling a little weak.

I’m president and cofounder of digital marketing agency 6S, one of BiV’s top 40 under 40 and a top ten company to work for in BC. There are 25 of us and we love what we do.

Google+ was an invite-only social networking tool up until this week. I actually can’t believe there are 90% of this room is on it. It’s going to revolutionize what we do. It’s growing crazily. Reached 10 million users in two weeks. That was before it came out of beta. It’s still growing rapidly and there’s a reason: Google’s homepage now has a big blue arrow for that and my prediction is by Halloween there will be 100 million users on G+. It’s like old skool delicious on steroids.

80% of success is just showing up. Now, it’s Just showing up on Google.

How does Google+ affect search engine marketing. Google knows if you have the +1 on your website, and if people are clicking on it. We don’t know how much or how strong the signal is, but it IS affecting how well your site ranks. Get it on your home page, product pages, and blog posts.

Google said in the panda update that if someone blocks your site or marks you as a spammer, it has an immediate impact. We can guess that if someone pluses you, it is dramatic as well. If you don’t engage with G+, you’re not going to be getting much out of it. It’s coming for business soon and we need to get a jump on that, so fill in your profile, circle people, etc.

If your competitors don’t have the +1 button, you’ve got a great chance to get ahead. Matt Cutts hasn’t been overly clear about the impact on search results. G+ mini case study from Rand Fishkin. They put a single page on G+ only, and got people to share it widely and they were #1 on google for the search term within hours.

TechCrunch has blogged extensively on how G+ became the #7 referrer to their site before they were even on it. At 6S we looked at our analytics and found: our clickthrough rate was about 5%. With the +1 button where it had been endorsed, the clickthrough went to 24%. That’s dramatic.

G+ is not only on organic rankings, it’s also on ads. You can +1 your own ads. Ads appear at the top of search results, but the every day use, ads are becoming less and less distinguishable. People may have not endorsed the ad, but the landing page, so it’s critical to have the +1 on your landing page. It’ll improve your clickthrough rate on both search results and the ads. You’ll be able to see who’s endorsed those ads or those pages.

For people who say “oh, I don’t pay attention to those ads” well, when you see your friend’s face on that ad, you’ll start clicking. Trust me.

Things to watch for:

Brand pages on G+ are coming

personalized URLs, and attendant land rush

Sparks rankings. Spark ranking algorithm isn’t clear yet, but allows you to follow that topic. You’ll be able to get your company indexed in Sparks. If you put the +1 on your pages, it’ll be considered for sparks.

Facebook:

Likes are important, but Shares are MORE important, especially for SE ranking. Business pages are like another version of your website, so optimize it. FB has taken SEO into consideration. SEO title: the name of your page plus /Facebook, you want to put keywords in your Facebook page. Even though there is a NoFollow tag from FB to your website, Google’s stated that there is still a social signal that comes from it. Use keywords at the beginning of posts and updates. Write content that has good keyword density, the link to your website doesn’t help much but some.

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is social media for business. Create a custom LinkedIn page for your brand. Port over your RSS, embed videos, do new content pages. You can put a list of your services. you can make it look much better than a usual LinkedIn page. People going there are looking for your services, looking for a job, or looking to steal your employees.

Twitter has the most dramatic impact on Search Engine Ranking ,and still very valuable. Google disabled the livetweet functionality in July because we think they’re bringing on a new live social update part of their algorithm. Stay tuned for that.

Use keywords in tweets and hashtags, optimize your bio, etc. Don’t go nuts, but optimize the description and have a good landing page. Twitter launched a new analytics tool, which is a game-changer. It’s coming to the public soon and we’re all trying to figure the ROI of social media and this is just another step in that direction.

ROI: calculating it is now easier. Google just published new functionality in analytics on direct conversion or assisted conversions. Many times there’s a combination of factors and G analytics has built in the functionality so you can see how social media has assisted on goals. It’s multi-channel reporting. It’s hard to find, but look and see New Version, then Goals and you’ll see it there.

ING direct

Shane says, “I was working with the CEO of ING and he said he had this person he wanted me to work with and hey! I didn’t have to do anything! She GETS it.”

Meena Sandhu says: this week is the olympics of social media. We don’t have gold medals, but we do have Likes, retweets, and so on, so Go Us! Looking around the audience, there are a few zombies including myself but I’ve had five shots of espresso and I’m good to go.

Meena Sandhu

I’m not here to ramble about social media. I want to show you a story. I wanted this to be an inspirational story about how a serious business entered the fun medium of social media. I was worried about attendance for this talk. Thank you for being here. We are far from a typical bank, I promise you.

Meena attended the Unconference with Unmarketing, and someone called ING the Unbank. We do things differently, including the first ING web cafe, and we lead the way in engaging with clients and staff via social media.

In 2006 we started talking about social media. We the first bank in Canada to do online enrollments and so on. We were seeing independent staff members and even clients setting up Facebook pages for us, there were 15-20. People wanted us to engage with them in ways other than traditional banking. October 1 2007 we went online and chose YouTube as our first social media channel. We launched with a 30 second video contest on Super Star Savers: staffers showing us their best acting. That one little clip is our most viewed video to this day.

How do you take an unsexy business and make it sexy? this video helped us. We interact on YouTube in various ways, including ads. Our most viewed videos are old commercials. Frederick, the Dutch Guy, has a fan base and his fiftysomething female fans love his videos. Someone stole his lifesized cardboard cutout from our office, so Frederick is now somewhere in Vancouver.

When we launch an online demo video, those things are definitely watched. If it’s knowledge-based, they will love your videos. It’s easier to learn by watching.

After YouTube, we got on Facebook and we talk about our events and so on there. And then our CEO went on Twitter. CEO_INGdirect and he was thinking about it from the beginning. Who would follow a company when they can follow an individual? That’s great. Individuals will always get more attention, they’re more interesting. We’re people.

We are a nationwide bank, we have ZERO nationwide social media strategy at this point. We’re just randomly trying things. “Meena I would like you to explore social media. Talk to Shane Gibson” Peter emailed me. That’s one heck of an email to get, and I went with it. I just started going to every tweetup in this city, learning as I went. If you’ve seen people face to face they become your supporters and you support them and that’s far bigger than trying to grow someone you only know online.

What do you as a company do when you have a Meena out there representing your company and she’s out of your direct control? The rest of the executives weren’t really ready for local twitter handles, etc. There was fear. But I’m going to be your brand if I’m out there talking to the world. People who know of me, they know ING direct. And if they know of ING direct, they know of me. And what happens if I leave? Those Twitter followers are going to go with me. So we slowly introduced a local twitter handle, OrangeYVR, and it’s going to take a longer time to grow it, but it’s stable. If an individual is a positive representation of the brand, you shouldn’t mind them representing you. It’s like having clients as advocates; so powerful.

Once we started getting the whole company onboard, I voted for Hootsuite but I lost and they went with Spreadfast instead. We use a lot of those analytics that most of these tools offer. We have to monitor what people are saying about and on behalf of the company. I was at an event and one of our team members was at it tweeting, and half an hour later she tweeted she had the hottest legs in the joint. That is not a message the company is thrilled with. So of course I see it, I say OMG! So I said listen, if you’re going to tweet, you’re taking accountability for ING direct. If you don’t want that, then you don’t have to tweet on behalf of the company. But she said “you do it” and I said but I create barriers for myself and don’t go over the barriers. So I thought Wow, we need a social media company. It’s not about control, but it’s a bank: trust is a huge component of our business. We did have a social media policy and then we have a q: do we have an approval process? We have a two tiered policy where some of us have free rein, and some have a minor approval process. I believe in transparency and engagement, and we didn’t want to get too much in the way.

Now we have our HR department on board as well, talking about training, development, and so on engaging with the staff and connecting with peers in the industry. Lots of execs will have gatekeepers, personal assistants.

Story: Kemp Edmonds had sent a friend request on Facebook, got a response from the secretary: how long have you known them, why do you want to connect, etc, etc. FAIL.

How authentic is that?

I shared this story at a meetup and he said, “That was me. I get so many emails” But no, that’s a major don’t. Be social or don’t be social, it’s up to you. But don’t not be social and be social. And I got home and had a Friend request from him. So I emailed back and asked if it was him or his secretary, and I never actually accepted the request.

I want to talk about ROI: qualitative and quantitative. I decided to open up the doors of our space as a community hub and let people use it for free, and we only promoted it through Twitter. OUr traffic quadrupled in one year, and in year over year our local client acquisition doubled and the ONLY difference we made was getting social. And people were sharing our story with others. We all love pie charts, but at the end of the day, look at your sales figures.

And the qualitative side: we make a really strong effort to listen to people. THe forum for Women Entrepreneurs was missing a piece of equipment for a huge presentation, we tweeted them and said we have one, come down, and there were 30 tweets about how we’d helped them that day!

Q: How in depth is your social media policy?

Ours is a two page policy. The policy is one thing, the strategy is much longer.

Q how do you introduce your policy to your staff?

We do a lot of lunch and learns and have delivered differently to the different groups. We do a more basic workshop for the senior execs.

ING Web Cafe