Executive Summary
PR News Social Media Conference
October 9, 2014 – The Grand Hyatt Hotel, New York, N.Y.

 

8:45 a.m. – Wake-Up Call: Embracing the Power of “Social Mobility”

Ron Casalotti, Associate Director, U.S. Lead for Social Media, KPMG

  • Smartphones/mobile usage has surpassed television in popularity.
  • Tablets are most popular during evenings and weekends. Email is still the most popular activity on mobile devices.
  • Responsive web design is the best mobile design strategy.
  • Every tweet is a call to action or a tease—not a complex thought.
  • Sometimes, ignoring grammatical conventions on Twitter is OK if it helps to get your message across. 

Jereme Bivins, Digital Media Manager, The Rockefeller Foundation

  • Social media is all mobile—Instagram and Vine are mobile-only, and the consumption of Facebook content takes place primarily on mobile.
  • With email campaigns, your goal should be to give your targets something to do.
  • Not everybody who shares your content is actually going to click on it.
  • Make your content as easy to share as possible with share buttons and "click to tweet" links.
  • Location services are the next big thing—think about ways to interact with consumers when they are near a store/point of interest.

 

9:15 a.m. – How to Make Your Brand Pop on Facebook

Thom Lytle, Director of Social Business & Community Engagement, EMC Corporation

  • It’s OK to tease on social media. Use the curiosity gap to your advantage.
  • Make friends internally in your organization—especially with lawyers and designers.
  • Know what’s cool in your company and make sure to highlight that on your Facebook page.
  • Use Facebook to do what you can’t do on your website.
  • People "Like" humor on Facebook—actually, they love it.

Allan Gungormez, Enterprise Director of Social Media Strategy, Transamerica

  • Facebook’s algorithm takes into account affinity (how often a user interacts with an author or type of content), weight (how popular a post is) and time decay (how long a post has been out for).
  • Videos are the most engaging content on Facebook.
  • When buying ads on Facebook, don’t buy right sidebar ads—nobody clicks on them.
  • Look at the data to find out when your audience is on Facebook and post content at that time.
  • Analyze your competition—what kind of content are they posting and when are they posting it?

 

9:45 a.m. – Are You a Good Social Listener on Twitter and Beyond?

Krisleigh Hoermann, Director of Operations/Digital and Social Media Consultant, American Heart Association/American Stroke Association

  • The top 3 factors for success on social networks are: a developed strategy, prioritization by executive management and a dedicated social media staff.
  • Make sure that you don’t just stay on your “own island” on social media.
  • Listening on social media can help you identify influencers and find out what people are saying about topics you care about.

Nathan Strauss, Manager, Digital Corporate Communications, GE

  • Metrics are a balance of quality and quantity.
  • For quantity, understand the total volume of conversation about a brand.
  • For quality, understand which key influencers are active on your social channels and determine the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of that activity.
  • Both social and traditional media listening help shape a proactive strategy.
  • Trends over time signal successful campaigns and risks.

Nicole Moreo, Senior Manager, Research and Analytics, Peppercomm

  • Social media listening makes you valuable to senior leadership.
  • Social listening gives you context and keeps you abreast of what people are saying in the moment.
  • True engagement is the goal of social media listening.
  • Real life is not separated into channels—you need to look at the whole picture in order to know how people are interacting on social media.

 

11:15 a.m. – Breakdown of a Winning Integrated Social Media Campaign: 3 Team Leaders Share Their Playbook

Alexandra Kirsch, Account Supervisor, Digital Practice, Finn Partners

  • Make sure you have a well-rounded support team on the ground.
  • Don’t forget your core followers during your campaign.
  • Mind your senses—don’t just pay attention to one media or one engager.
  • Be flexible. Your game plan is never going to be set in stone.

Taylor L. Cole, Head of Public Relations, Hotels.com

  • Get the community involved in your social media campaigns. Encourage them to engage.
  • Creating a buzz prior to your main campaign activation is important.
  • Invite people to show how they use your product on social media and reward them when they engage with your brand in this way.

Patrick Burek, Vice President, Consumer Practice, Finn Partners

  • Be as clear and transparent as possible with your followers.
  • To create goodwill, give something of value to the people you’re trying to reach.
  • Make consumers feel like your brand cares about them by creating captivating social campaigns.

 

12:00 a.m. – Luncheon Keynote: Using Game Dynamics to Make Your Message Stick

Steve Shenbaum, Found and President, game on Nation

  • We’re all starving for connectivity.
  • A simple game can activate your audience. Don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.
  • Through games, you can find out what members of your team need in unobtrusive ways.
  • When sending out messages, don’t forget to serve and help people.
  • Find positive, uplifting humor—throw the snarky away.
  • If your audience doesn’t care about you brand, they’re not going to listen to you.

 

1:15 p.m. – Case Studies in Social Media Storytelling

Morgan Johnston, Manager, Corporate Communications, Social Media Strategist, JetBlue Airways

  • Find an internal story and use social to seed it.
  • Don’t limit your search for story ideas to just your marketing team.
  • Look into stories that come from your customers and enable them to tell stories about your brand so you don’t have to.

Christina Saylor, Senior Vice President, Alembic Health Communications

  • Social media needs to be a core part of the way you need to reach audiences. It’s no longer optional.
  • Well-trained advocates are key to any communications program.
  • Facebook is ideal for telling stories because it allows for context.
  • Twitter is great for reusing evergreen content.

Kimberly Jaindl, Head of Communications, Advanced Technology Laboratories, Lockheed Martin

  • Adopt a newsroom mentality within your organization and find out who is creating the big ideas.
  • Encourage employees to share their stories on social media.
  • If employees are shy about sharing stories publicly on social media, repackage them and share them internally on your Intranet.
  • Help conversations start online and allow them to continue offline.

Bev Yehuda, SVP, Operations and Digital Media, D S Simon Productions

  • Social media is noisy. Moving images and video catch attention quickly.
  • Develop content that your audience can identify with.
  • Have a call to action, engage the audience and inspire them to share your content.
  • Social and traditional media can work in tandem.
  • Social media is an easy way to say something. Actually being heard is more difficult.

 

2:45 p.m. – Google Analytics: How to Make It Work for Your Brand

Krista Seiden, Analytics Advocate, Google

  • Use your data to tell stories.
  • Determine your business objectives, define your business strategies, identify key stakeholders, categorize your channels, and set holistic KPIs.
  • Don’t ask what can you track—ask what should you track.
  • Tracking will help you better understand your visitors—who they are, where they’re coming from, if they’re visiting your page multiple times and if they convert into sales.
  • Segmentation allows you to take your whole user base and break them down into subsets to further analyze behavior.

 

3:30 p.m. – What’s Next in Digital Communications? On the Trail of Generation Z

Sheryl Joyce, Global Head of Marketing, Investis

  • Your stakeholders expect your online communications to be as good if not better than the ways you traditionally communicate.
  • Visits to corporate websites from mobile devices have increased 150 percent over the past two years.
  • By 2016, 760 million tablets will be in use throughout the world. Corporate communicators prefer iPads and iPhones even though Android outsells Apple products globally.
  • A visitor will stay two times linger on a website that has video.
  • 80 percent of the U.S. media use Twitter as part of regular reporting.

Calvin Stowell, Director of Digital and Content, DoSomething.org

  • The American population is growing more diverse and older because we’re living longer.
  • Snapchat has 30 million active users. Half of all 18-year-olds in America use it.
  • If you don’t know what metrics matter to you, you can’t build a strategy.
  • Every time you post or tweet, think about what the value is to the user.