"Twitter is like word of mouth on crack," says Scott Seaborn, head of mobile tech at Ogilvy (@scottseaborn). "The paradigm shift is that the people now have the power. The best thing to do is acknowledge that and give them tools to have more power."
Gareth Jones, the editor of Revolution (@gj), means that they have moved from pushing their content out to having conversations with their readers, and making their brand more transparent.
For BA, social media humanises the brand. It puts a human face on something they normally think is out of their league.
"Isn't social media just PR?" asked Kieron Matthews of IAB (@IABUK)
"Is PR in the sense of ongoing discourse, but it's not PR in the modern sense of spamming journalists with press releases," said Robin Grant of We Are Social. (@robingrant)
And Gareth pointed out that Twitter allows him to engage directly with people without going through PRs.
Scott then characterised social media as just another channel, and there need to be PRs with a speciality in it. And then Kieron had a go at RSS. This conference is feeling far less what I'd call "socially media aware" then the journalism-based one earlier in the year.
And now - the ROI discussion is upon us with the inevitability of a WiFi FAIL at a tech conference...
...and the panel seem to be talking around it rather than at it. And we're on to mobile instead.
And Scott has twittered a picture of us all. The excitement.
Nuria Garrido from BA (@ng01): Social media gives you the revenue potential. You can't segment your audience on social media sites. So we can't push information just to people in the UK or Europe. You need to work out what's important to you as a brand. It may not be the revenue, it may be building relationships with users you don't normally talk to.
And now, a challenge from the audience: why not give some real examples. And now we have an example of a Wimbledon Google Android phone app used by IBM in their guest boxes, giving better data about what was happening.
Robin talked about helping Skype and DirectGov, but in a lack of detail, frankly.
Mel Exon of BBH Labs (@bbhlabs): Huge shift from short-term campaigns to platforms and programmes. We're having to rethink everything we do in a social space.
Gareth: social media is forcing us to rethink our whole business model (see pretty much every other post on this blog for more on that. ;-) )
I've somewhat lost interest in this panel really - there's too much "use social media to engage! It's a revolutionary idea!" and not enough "Here's what works and what doesn't". Baby steps stuff.
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