The Tools of Change social media conference was another mixed bag – but it got me thinking about exactly what it means to be trained to use social media. The problem – and I suspect it’s something digital marketing shares with traditional marketing – is that it’s difficult to train people to communicate well, and good communication skills are at the heart of effective digital marketing. There were a lot of “well, d’uh” moments during the conference today, but that’s not because what they were saying wasn’t true (or wasn’t useful). It’s just that it is nearly impossible to distil knowledge of social media and digital marketing strategy without stating the bleeding obvious.
Aliza Sherman kicked off the sessions with a high-energy overview of her seven steps to an effective social media campaign. They boil down to having a clear objective and audience, effectively marshalling the assets at your disposal, having a robust (but flexible) plan and measuring the results as effectively as possible.
One slightly more specific point Aliza raised that seemed to make an impact, and was echoed later by Sam Missingham from Futurebook and Julia Lampam from Wiley: email is still a very effective medium to get people to act. Although it is only one part of a social media strategy, email newsletters are still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic, and engage with an online community.
Arne Klempert from Fleishman Hillard spoke about (amongst many other things) the importance of building a community and maintaining an audience. As he said, “a community is not a community just because you want to market to them.” He also underlined the importance of ensuring social capital isn’t squandered in community building that is subsequently abandoned after a project is completed. Digital ghost towns don’t build loyalty to a brand.
Following on from this were a number of case studies and a session on how to prepare authors for social media involvement. There were some great takeaways from all the sessions, but for me the most salient point was that good people will make or break the publishing industry’s ability to effectively market their content online. There are a thousand potential skills to learn, but learning them requires a basic level of communication skill, sheer bloody-mindedness and hard work. Software tools were born and died in the time it took to attend this conference, but the skills to those tools effectively carry across platforms and technologies and time. There’s no point waiting for the right moment – you just have to do it – and be sure to share your results.