Social Media Strategies Conference Day 1 summary (includes my social commerce panel video)

I attended Social Media Strategies conference in Santa Clara and started blogging live select sessions I get to attend and the nuggets of wisdom I find worth sharing!

11am Keynote: The True Drivers of a Successful Social Media Strategy by Francois Gossieaux @fgossieaux

1. Be real people, passionate with reciprocity helps companies on socialmedia.

50% of community members are active lurkers. Companies treat their facebook fan page as coupon centers. Success comes when the people engaging on social media are human. Someone in audience put it well "It is the difference between being and doing". So the lesson is to be real and engage with your customers.

2. Turning Business Process to Social Process

Social Media can get your employees to help in areas that was not in their original job responsibility, this is when your have a business process becoming a social process.

I can relate to this as I focus on events and social media for PayPal from their Developer Network whose charter is to foster community driven innovation. I get help from multiple teams inside PayPal who are excited to participate in events to meet developers wherever they are and get feedback and help them disrupt payments industry with their innovation. I see a fundamental shift in our internal process as I hear from across our global offices to engage with us with local events and for social media outreach.

3. Department that are easy to become social enabled

Many departments are adopting social media:

• Customer Support
• Employee Communication
• Lead Gen
• Market Research
• Marketing Campaigns
• Product development
  

This is because they engage with customers in some form and are ready to speed that engagement via social media.

Two departments that the speaker hasn't seen adopt social are financial dept to social because they are focused on corporate entity, not customers directly.

1pm: New Paradigm in Social Commerce (my panel)

I moderated this panel and the panelists were:

Laura Peile,head of mobile, PayPal
Katie McMahon , SoundLoud
James Dellisanti CEO of ilikelist
Gordon Liametz ,CEO, Revenue Performance
(Thanks to Mary Vincent for the entire panel video)




The panelists started out by describing social commerce as -

1. shopping with friends,
2. customer reviews from trusted social graph that influences purchase,
3. bringing customers from top of the sales funnel where they go look for comparison shopping to a friend referring a product to buy online similar to an offline social setting and
4. focusing on reviews and community to influence positive referral of your product.

Nuggets I got from this panel from panelists and audience questions:

• Audience were hungry to learn about real experience in making social commerce work for them as entreprenuers, startups and businesses.
• Mobile Commerce is overlapping with social commerce and there is so much room for innovation.
• Social media feeds are about people wanting to create an inclusion experience for their friends who are not with them at a game or a store , and is the core of social commerce recommendation
• Privacy is important, people will want to each share certain type of information.
• Identity of who is making the word of mouth referral is key to its value to a friend, so facebook with its social graph makes it very powerful for social commerce
• Interesting possibilities of social commerce was brought out, one was for a lady to share a picture of her dress from a store to get friend's recommendation as she tries out new clothes from Macys (I'd like this one)
• Lot of discussion about negative feedback in a community setting and how to differentiate the intention of the user, how to distill the feedback into your product, how to respond to negative comments, how to manage the balance to negative comments

Other Observations from the conference:

I met a variety of interesting people and some products.

1. Position2 is a new Brand monitoring tool, looks new fresh UI. I hope to check it out and write further.

2. Met many of the local valley influencers - Shirley Lin from APWT Women in tech group, Mary Vincent of Green Strategy/Greenappstore, several followups from Santa Clara Alum social media panel at PayPal, several cool social media strategy types each with different flavor of experience and expertise.

3. Ed Terpening of WellsFargo,

4. Richard Brewer Hayes of Ebay, awesome speaker and blogger.

5. Ofcourse I met couple interesting people who wanted to switch to PayPal, gave feedback about PayPal APIs and some who had attended Innovate09.

Awesome work by Daya and Rashmi of WebGuild with another successful show. Nice detail on a sit down lunch, excellent speaker, good workshops, crowd, mixer and care for detail on content.

I look forward to Day2. I am participating in a social media metrics panel at 2pm. Hope to see you there!

Tweet away, the conf hashtag is #smconference or some are using #sms