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Event Recap: SocStardom2, Featuring Dave Evans

After the SocStardom event with Frank Warren and Rohit Bhargava in January, as tends to occur when you bring together social media-minded people for discussion on an interesting topic led by good speakers, it will inevitably happen again — especially when it’s organized by Mayra Ruiz:

Once again hosted by Johns Hopkins University – Montgomery County Campus in the wilds of Rockville, Maryland, the second SocStardom featured Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day:

Here I’ll give you my own recap of the event, complete with disjointed recollections and a lot of jumping around — due to spotty wi-fi, there wasn’t a lot of liveblogging or non-mobile tweeting, but if you have your own recaps, feel free to leave a comment with a link.

* It was an unstructured talk, though Dave did have a presentation to refer to (he promised his slides will be made available to attendees.) He started off with quotes from talks by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and Tim Berners-Lee in 1995, both of which spoke to the promise of interactive, networked knowledge, that today’s crop of social media tools is getting to realize in a big, big way.

* As a marketer, he spends all day working on campaigns for companies, and then spends all night trying to avoid them — most folks want to be left alone, until they want to find someone who has an opinion on a something, to help inform their own decisions.

On a demographic note, while creators of social media are younger by a large margin, the consumers of social media, especially in the context of purchase decisions, are a lot closer together.

* This led to a discussion of the Feedback Cycle…

…with a marketer-driven Purchase Funnel on the left, driving people to be aware > consider > buy, then leading to a consumer-driven social megaphone as people utilize social media to use the product > form opinions > talk, which then circles back into a feedback loop.

* Along the way, there were questions of how we can use social media to change people’s behavior, typically seen as social marketing, with an example from the Obama campaign, where for many people, social media changed their behavior from nonvoting to voting.

* After a tangent on the Nike+/Apple iPod collaboration that involved the conflation of the running community, the music experience, and Nike+ hardware hackers, he then talked about the Networking Cycle, which is similar to the feedback cycle, adapted to personal networking:

Although the term personal branding is a much-abused term, it does fit into this context, where by using and having lots of positive content on the core networking platforms of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, it helps contextualize any outlying negative stuff people may find about you.

* A related issue was in response to a question: How do you set and articulate your preferences for personal networking on diferent networks? When and how do you say, “I’m willing to friend/follow anyone on Twitter, but only people I know on Facebook/LinkedIn?”

Especially on LinkedIn, he stressed the difference in actually knowing people who can vouch for you, from his Twitter behavior, where he wants to have as many people in his network who can answer questions he does not even know he has right now.

This is actually a topic I want to revisit separately.

* There was a discussion of his first-grader’s use of Powerpoint, as well as adults as DSL-speakers (Digital as a Second Language)

* There was also a lengthy discussion of the credibility of networks, capstoned by the infamous Wal-Marting Across America incident. The mistake they made was positioning traditional marketing/PR, which people recognize as advertising and filter accordingly, as genuine social media, which people saw as “real,” then reacted accordingly. He stressed the importance of transparency and taking the extra steps to disclose who you are.

* When presenting social media strategies to C-level management, start by reviewing the business’s objectives and their intended audience; then add in the listening data (the conversations that are happening without you.)

* On the blurring of personal time, the need for clearly articulated employee social media policies. If the company decides not to allow personal social media participation, one of you may figure out you’re working for the wrong company.

* The recent experiment where Skittles displayed a realtime Twitter search on “skittles” to their homepage showed great confidence in their brand, even if they weren’t able to keep it up because people were gaming it.

* Finally, on social media measurement, another slide showing some tools:

In summary, it was another good event. The crowd was definitely engaged, though a bit less tech/social-media savvy and more traditional marketing-oriented (although it was the segment of traditional marketing folks who are interested in social media marketing).

Dave Evans gave us all a few things to thing about — I’ll be ruminating some more and following up with some related posts.

If you’ve got your own feedback or comments from the event, please leave a comment below.

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