IPA Social Evening Seminar October 6th
A few of us from Collective London attended the IPA Social Evening Seminar on Tuesday Evening this week to listen to and participate in lively conversations and talks regarding various questions, topics and principles about Social Media. The debate was largely centered around some the ‘Ten Social Media Principles’ as identified by some of the present luminaries in the group in response to the IPA’s own Social Media Futures report which was launched earlier this year.
The intended outcome for these conversations was largely to get Social Media ideas and debate into a more dynamic and practical space, rather than a theoretical one by sharing experiences, case studies and successes stories, and initiating conversations based on these questions and principles.
Social Media Principles
The first part of the evening had Mark Earls, Neil Perkin and Amelia Torode discussing ideas and topics in relation to some of these social media principles.
So briefly, Mark kicked proceedings off with some ideas linked to his principle of ‘People not consumers’. He spoke about the idea of connectedness in a social media space and how this relates to the bigger picture of understanding human behavior in this environment. Mark used the idea of how humans learn to copy and imitate from the age of 42 minutes and how a power structure and relationship change can happen in this multiple connected space. He identified the success of Lauren Luke’s YouTube channel (56 million views, 280,000 subscribers) as an example of some these ideas.
Neil Perkin briefly discussed the ten social media principles and used a nice analogy of how traditional advertising can be thought of as a firework, in that it’s a costly way to briefly gain as much attention as possible for a short space of time, whereas using various social media platforms to achieve goals can be likened to that of a slow burning but growing bonfire which increases its reach and visibility over a longer period of time. He then spoke a bit on his principle of how ‘being authentic, not persuasive’ is key for earning attention.
Finally Amelia Torode began by briefly discussing her principle of ‘technology changes, people don’t’. She used the example of creating a real time character in a social space and how this can then lead, perhaps unintentionally to create a brand world and a personality for this, not in a traditional sense but rather utilizing different social media platforms as a place for this to sit. Amelia used the successful Compare the Market Meerkat (Aleksandr Orlov) character and his extremely popular Facebook fan page to demonstrate this idea. Amelia made the point that Meerkat campaign was not a social media campaign but how the changing technology enabled this brand world to manifest itself in this manner. As an aside, Aleksandr now has over 27,000 followers on Twitter and more than 585,000 fans on Facebook.
Discussion
The second part of the evening involved the speakers and some unwitting (but willing) volunteers to host a conversation on a topic or question that they feel could be salient on pushing some of the principles into a more dynamic and lively space, with the intention that people could drop in and out of different conversations depending on their own sense of personal interest. I attended, along with my fellow Collective colleague Dan Hall on the conversation based on apparent client skepticism with social media.
Some of the points raised in the conversation included the need to educate the client on how allocating some project budget on a social media segment could benefit the project, as often it’s hard for them to see the benefits, particularly as it’s difficult to gauge any apparent level of success and ROI on a social media solution and that they could simply say why should I spend this on the possibility of getting a couple of thousand fans on Facebook when I could buy twice as many people elsewhere.
Another point was simply that often when selling in an idea to a client how the now ever present social media bookmarks are simple just stuck on somewhere as an afterthought (because everyone else is doing it), without any thought on what they would actually mean to the project, particularly in understanding who then maintains these social media accounts in the following weeks with status update and so on.
Often a social media solution isn’t really practical – Tesco was used an example in that would they really want people talking about various fruit and veg on facebook fan page, whereas something like the imminent release of FIFA 10 is far more suitable to drum excitement prior to its impending release, as demonstrated by their good use of twitter on the FIFA Earth, Football Twitterverse campaign.
Red Fox
The evening was rounded off with the conversation hosts offering some of the more pertinent points of their respective conversations to the entire group, before moving onto the pub for some alcohol fueled social media debate, and more importantly to indulge in some tremendous Fullers Red Fox ale.
