Monday, March 14, 2011

SXSW Interactive 2011: Day 3 in review

Social media analytics. Twitter thinks they have one of the most open public APIs. Raj from ViralHeat disagrees that it is good enough at serving the needs of his clients. Jason Falls is a fabulously entertaining, engaging and informative speaker, if you are a newbie or small business owner. Every small business owner who is interested in getting involved in social media should be reading his work at social media explorer. But here begins my rant:

They have spent the first 20 minutes talking about tools. We still aren't talking about which KPIs are important.

It's frustrating that nobody seems to want to answer the question. They either don't have it or don't want to give up an edge. How long until people stop trying to avoid the ROI question by saying "it shouldn't matter"? My feedback on the panel: we understand that fans & followers isn't important. We want to talk about measuring cost per lead. Let's hear from someone who delivered a solid engagement & financial report. Sick of people avoiding it. Show us the numbers. It's nice to hear Raj from Viral Heat talk about cost per lead from social, but this is FAR too hypothetical. Get actionable folks!

The panel talks about how social is only a sliver of your marketing/branding budget, but here's where I massively disagree w/ panel. You wouldn't not track ROI of email or a print campaign. It's all part of the mix and should be measured accordingly.


I think it's time to have a real reporting & measurement conversation when we get back to the MSP. I'm annoyed by "panels"

swixhq.com has an interesting dashboard creation tool. I will be checking it out when I get back to the office on Wednesday.

Then I went to a core conversation session on getting social at regulated industries. The conversation leaders are from healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. Interested to see if they talk about SOX at all, or just worry about HIPPA or FINRA. I'm so impressed, got right into it, that yes, we are all regulated in some way or another, it doesn't mean that you can't get involved in online conversation, just that you should be careful what you say!

My thought about alleviating the fears of legal & c-suite in regulated industries: create an FAQ and try to anticipate their fears and concerns, then come with answers. Work with legal on the answers to the concerns and have a policy pre-established. There are plenty of samples online that can act as a starter for you. Look at Facebook and blogs and twitter and YouTube accounts for competitors across the country and do a content audit. What are their high-level themes? How can you turn at into an editorial calendar? How do they respond to account questions? How do they approach the ethical wall? What happens if you do break the rules and get caught? Then, create a report mockup that will show the return and how you will measure success. Come prepared and get the approval.

Now one just for me. Hockey & music. Hells yeah.

Brian Jennings from the NHL is paired with  from Versus and folks from Interscope Records and an entertainment consulting firm talking about how the NHL worked with artists from Interscope on a strategic alliance to pair artists with sporting events. They focused on Eminem's releasing "Not Afraid" as the theme song to the 2010 Stanley Cup playoffs.

My takeaways:


  • Highlight player playlists. Great idea. Now, package it to iTunes as a download special every week & push to NHL.com

  • Interscope/Aftermath uses Facebook & twitter comments re: artists & songs in staff meetings as focus group. That's ROI

  • NHL fans are richer and more educated than other sports. We're better looking too.

  • NHL gets 15-17 million unique people per month engaging with their brand and messaging.

  • Millions of dowoads of songs as a result of placement in NHL & Madden gaming franchises

  • Bands now want to do free shows and tour with Lord Stanley's Cup? Great concept for sponsorship.

  • NHL concentrated on developing their digital presence and get there first. Look at NHL social, awesome section of NHL.com

  • Goal is to get people to be fans of hockey instead of only their favorite team. Tactic was to concentrate on events

1 comment:

Erika said...

Actually, this reminds me a lot of the conference presentation that I'm doing at LOEX this year... The area is online tutorial and online education metrics, but it's a similar conversation, because we have 6 different modes of online instruction, all of which require precise learning outcome assessment.The session is called:Reducing digestible tidbits from meaty stock: satisfying varied tastes with an attractive instructional assessment menu (They love cheesy titles.)And it's all about dashboards and scorecards - balancing qualitative and quantitative data. If we end up with anything brilliant, I'll send it along - but I'm happy to see more dashboard tools out there! I'd been scouring Mashable, etc. for open source data visualization tools. We're thinking we might have to build our own.