Executive Summary
PR News Big 4 Social Media Summit
August 10, 2016—Grand Hyatt, San Francisco, CA

Wake-Up Call: How to Think About Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat in the Post-Organic Era

David Kellis, Director of PR and Social Media, The Clorox Company

  • Organic reach is down to 1 to 3 percent on most of the social channels except for Twitter, especially if you have influencers/are an influencer/have B2B and B2C companies following you.
  • Clorox uses Datalogix to measure ROI on social. Datalogix can measure in-store sales vs. social media, showing Clorox that for every dollar spent on Pinterest, two dollars were spent on Hidden Valley and Burt’s Bees products.
  • Communicators should look up the “Influencer Manifesto” in which users said they saw social media influencers as peers.
  • Recommendations from peers drive sales.
  • Listening could be the most important use of social media.

How to Create a Unique Experience on Snapchat and Build Your Brand

Colleen Hartman, Head of Paid and Shared Social Media Marketing, W2O Group

  • The Instagram Stories release shows that if Snapchat can’t make advertising cheaper for advertisers, it will be overtaken by Instagram as an ad platform.
  • Follow all Big 4 blogs to keep up with social media trends (Facebook for Businesses, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter).
  • Sponsored geofilters may be out of some budgets, but community area geofilters are free to submit (if you do not have a logo on them). Geofences are economical—some are under $100.
  • 400 to 500 million snaps with geofilters are viewed daily.
  • Sponsored lenses can start as high as $400,000 for national brands.

Leslie Douglas, Senior Manager, Social Media, PwC

  • For PwC, Snapchat was a grassroots experiment. Cross promotion on other platforms has been critical.
  • Download pictures and videos from Snapchat and post them to other platforms.
  • Snapchat is raw, real and relatable.
  • Snapchat Memories allows you to use saved photos form camera roll.
  • Measure story completion rate and screenshots. Compare total snaps per story and story length to see what works. PwC tracks these statistics manually with an Excel spreadsheet.

Facebook Content—What Works, When to Pay and When to Go Organic

Veda Banerjee, Director, Communications and Digital Marketing, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy

  • List your social advertising objectives (e.g., new followers, website visits, email list growth).
  • Only start social channels that you’re going to consistently feed content.
  • For their “Packing the Parks” campaign, Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy utilized live video reporting along with a youth takeover of the Conservancy’s social channels.
  • Google Analytics: Use UTM code tracking for your ads and content to help you see what content resonates with your audience.
  • Rotate your ads every three to five days to avoid ad fatigue. If your click-through rate starts to drop, Facebook penalizes you by driving up your cost per click.

Paul Englert, Vice President, Marketing, C. Mondavi & Family

  • Pay close attention to social voice—stay on topic for your brand.
  • Leverage enthusiasm and creativity to encourage your fans to share the love of your products.
  • Be concise – consider your audience’s short attention span.
  • In videos, include your hook in the first 15 seconds.
  • Facebook Live: Don’t wait for your competitors to prove the value of this new tool before you embrace it.

Stephanie Elsea, Vice President of Communications and Marketing, SouthWest Affiliate, American Heart Association

  • Consider your destination for “passengers” (the community interested in your brand) in the planning phase.
  • The more you can get followers to comment and engage, the more organic growth you can have.
  • Even family and supporters of the brand can get involved and start conversations to help boost posts within the algorithm.

How to Use Twitter’s Periscope App for Your Organization’s Video Strategy

David Landis, President/CEO, Landis Communications Inc.

James Mowdy, Founder, BSPOKE

  • Facebook Live vs. Periscope: Facebook Live is more of a personalized social network (“What are my friends doing?”), whereas Periscope is about the live web and what’s happening globally.
  • Periscope is accessible and doesn’t require a budget.
  • Periscope is right for your brand if storytelling, brand identity, audience development and conversion are primary concerns and your brand already has a Twitter presence.
  • Periscope is not right for highly regulated companies running most of their businesses confidentially.
  • Periscope measurement tools are in beta. Use Twitter Engage and native analytics to track total views, replays, comments, new followers (post-broadcast), engagement, Hearts and shares.
  • Be choosy. Only use Periscope for special or important business moments.
  • Follow new Periscope viewers on Twitter to drive engagement.

Keynote Presentation – How to Make the Transition to Strategic Reputational Storytelling

Chad Mitchell, Senior Director, Digital Communications, Walmart

  • Walmart’s communications team has evolved from focusing on an outdated corporate website to diving into reputational storytelling.
  • Look into the stories of the everyday customer and the employee.
  • Identify your audience and which social channels they are on.
  • Once you identify your audience, you can find ‘true north’ for your storytelling.
  • Be aware that there may be tension between what audiences are looking to hear and the story you want to tell.
  • After you lay out your paid/organic strategy, you need to think about localization.
  • Love your legal department—although it can be tough to get buy-in on social strategy, it pays off in the long run.

How to Visualize Your Brand’s Stories With Instagram

Karen Do, Senior Manager, Brand Social Media, Adobe

  • Make sure your community is the hero. Use Instagram to spotlight their work and celebrate all kinds of creativity.
  • Extend existing relationships with influencers even after a campaign has finished. In one Photoshop campaign, Adobe ran an Instagram contest using hashtags that referenced a recent influencer’s artwork.
  • Brand and relationship building are defined by community growth, engagements and sentiment.
  • Instagram measurement relies on soft measurement for now.
  • Track success on Instagram by measuring the points/posts where engagement meets user base growth.
  • Adobe has released Spark, a free app for creating attractive social content.

Erin Flior, Senior Director of Digital Communications, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation

  • Build a team calendar for scheduling Instagram posts.
  • Use available tools for creating good content: Layout and Superimpose for better images, Latr.com and Schedugr.am for scheduling, and Inc361.com for analytics.
  • The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF) crowdsourced content and made community central in their messaging, posting authentic images of members of CFF’s Instagram community living with cystic fibrosis and using relatable hashtags (#CFirl, #CFawareness).
  • You can repurpose content and hashtags from older campaigns (CFF used a slideshow format for their #CFawareness trip to Washington D.C.).
  • Users crave authenticity. Stop staging Instagram photos—go beyond the scenes at the office and at events, choosing real-life moments over highly produced content.

How-To Clinic: Pay-to-Play—Putting Paid Social to Work to Amplify Your Brand’s Messages

Leslie Drate, Social Media Manager, U.S. Consumer Print, HP

  • Execute social media campaigns in seven steps: Objectives, budget, target audience, key messages, content types, platforms, targeting and retargeting.
  • Establish your budget by running scenarios to determine how much money you’ll need. Parameters include target audience, click-through rate, conversion rate on landing page, and value per conversion.
  • Cost per impression and click-through rate very from industry to industry, so research costs in your industry when you budget.
  • Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube offer targeting by location, demographics, interests, behaviors, connections and keywords.
  • Different social media platforms are optimized for different audiences and business goals. For example, LinkedIn has better targeting for business, Google+ trends male and technical, and YouTube is well suited to how-tos, keyword search and brand awareness.

Melissa Wisehart, Director, Social/Digital Strategy, Moore Communications Group

  • In today’s market, even a $10 daily budget can yield more than organic content that took 10 hours to create.
  • Focus on quality, not quantity. Publish half of your usual amount of content, and devote the rest of the production resources you would have used to your paid budget.
  • Set up proper tracking and objectives to tell a clear ROI story and attribute success to the bottom line. Tie social campaigns to overall business objectives.
  • Social data can be harnessed to create your most effective marketing channels.
  • Data empowers communicators to make the case for resources to leadership.
  • Recommended tools and resources: Facebook Blueprint, Twitter Flight School, Domo, pixel plugins and Sysomos.

The Future of Social Marketing: Using Facebook Messenger and Snapchat to Make Personalized Connections to Your Brand

Carlos Gil, Global Head of Social Media, BMC Software

  • Take what you know and apply it to new mediums. Ask yourself how you can take what’s already working for your brand on other platforms and apply it to Snapchat.
  • Brands shouldn’t shy away from Snapchat’s 24-hour window, since people already visit Facebook, Instagram, Twitter for what’s happening right now.
  • Snapchat is the best way to reach users from the age of 13 to 34.
  • Influencer takeovers are an example of customer advocacy by the most engaged members of your audience.
  • Facebook Messenger is the next wave of customer service.