Takeaways From Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 London (#SMM11)

Today I attended and spoke at SMM11, one of the UK’s leading social media marketing conferences. It’s been a really awesome day with lots of great people and I’ve learnt some amazing tips to take home. In this post I’m going to summarise a few of the key takeaways from my favourite talks of the day.

Note: I’m writing this from Social Media Marketing & Monitoring and am pretty exhausted! Apologies for any poorly worded sentences and/or spelling mistakes! I promise to revisit this when i’m back in the zone

First of all, a big shout out to Luke and the team who organised SMM11 – this was without a doubt one of the best digital conferences I’ve attended to date. I’ve been to a fair few digital marketing conferences over the years such as SMX, SES, and SearchLove, and what immediately stood out about this conference was the quality and variety of information being shared. All of the speakers I listened to had a really interesting and varied area of expertise – from gamification, to location marketing, and even expertise in defeating Simon Cowell – always good to know!

Beyond Engagement: Delivering Sales through Social for Captain Morgan
One of my favourite talks at SMM11 was from Marcus Dyer of Edelmen Digital and Mark Wheeler, global digital marketing manager of Diageo. Marcus and Mark talked through the success of a great social media campaign they did with Captain Morgan’s spiced rum.

The campaign was called ‘The Captain’s Island‘ and was essentially rewarding Facebook fans with ‘keys’ in return for various types of engagement on Captain Morgan’s Facebook Page. Interestingly, Mark pointed out that the brand predominantly use Facebook due to the responsible marketing policies to ensure that the company are only targeting people over the legal drinking age. Facebook is one of the only major social networks that asks for your age on signup, making it more accessible for alcohol brands such as Captain Morgan to use.

The success of Captain Morgan’s campaign was largely attributed to tying it in with the real world and thinking outside of the social media platforms that hosted the campaign. Captain Morgan promoted the campaign in TV adverts, in bars across the world, and on the packaging of the bottles of rum.

The What, Why and How of Social Local Marketing
In PJ Verhoef’s talk about location marketing, he talked about how to benefit from location-based marketing (beyond the check-in and Foursquare). He displayed some cool alternative platforms for location marketing and gave some great tips on how to link products to location based marketing, whether that ‘product’ is online information, a physical product, or even your staff members. PJ also gave some excellent ideas for location people using location-based marketing, listening to them using tools such as Geotoko, Valuevine, and Momentfeed, engaging with them, and encouraging transactions using things like Google Offers and Level Up.

How I Beat Simon Cowell Using Social Media
Jon Morter gave an excellent talk on how he used social media to get Rage Against the Machine’s song Killing in the Name of to Christmas #1. What I found particularly interesting about Jon’s talk was how he used his background in hacking to explore and ‘break’ social media conventions. For example – Jon pointed out that until recently, you could become the administrator of any groups on Facebook that didn’t have already have an admin and then message all of the members of the group. Apparently Jon used this method to become the admin of around 300 Facebook groups, which he used to message the members about his campaign!

Jon emphasised that the victory against Simon Cowell was largely due to reading the fine print and knowing the rules. Jon studied the official chart rules for weeks on end to find loopholes in the system. Some of the loopholes that played a large part in Jon’s success were that live track sales also counted as a vote for that song. Jon messaged members on the last day asking members of the Facebook groups to also purchase the live version of Killing in the name of – adding an extra ~70,000 sales of the song.

The key takeaway that I learnt from Jon’s talk was the power of creating big stories using smaller outlets. Jon mentioned that he took a small radio station’s servers down when he was featured, as a way of creating a newsworthy story. When interviewed on a national radio station, Jon deliberately cut himself off saying ‘Simon Cowell is a…’ to make it seem that the radio station cut him off – therefore creating another wave of PR. Jon continued this method until he finally received a call from Simon Cowell himself – who congratulated Jon.

bmibaby Case Study: Using Photo Based Networks to Inspire Customer Loyalty & Engagement
This presentation by Rabbit Agency and BMI Baby showed how BMI Baby used Instagram to engage with a large pre existing community of snap happy BMI Baby customers. It was really great to hear a case study of a brand using a niche social network successfully, as most of case studies in social media tend to focus around the major players such as Twitter and Facebook.

BMI Baby encouraged groups of ‘Instagramers’ (communities of people on Instagram who take photos of their citiy e.g. London Instagramers) to take photos of the destinations that BMI Baby fly to. The campaign received thousands of entries within just a few weeks and allowed the brand to create ‘visual inspiration guides’ using the photos that the Instagram community were creating.

Final thoughts
SMM11 was an awesome conference, and I thoroughly recommend future events. The people, presentations, and biscuits were all excellent and overall the experience was leaps and bounds beyond the other similar conferences I’ve attended.

I also promised that I would upload my presentation from SMM11, so here we go!