Social Media Week Round-Up!

Social Media Week (www.bristolmedia.co.uk/socialmediaweek) came to Bristol for the first time this year and didn’t disappoint!

Packed with lectures, master-classes and practical skill-up sessions, it was a fast-paced five days that really hit the mark. At Synergy, we jumped at the chance to get involved, attending lots of events and even hosting a few ourselves.

Synergy’s sessions

Talking about…using social advocacy to drive your employer brand

Great employee advocates extend your brand reach, raise awareness and recommend your products and services. It’s powerful stuff, so here are our 6 steps to get it right…

• Workplace culture: Think about what you want to be famous for and demonstrate this to your employees
• Create a vision and objectives: Make sure you know what you want to achieve and tie this in with your marketing and organisational objectives
• Set guidelines: Provide support to enable advocacy NOT restrict it. Don’t impose rules but crowdsource guidance and reassurance
• Educate and train: Help your employees get on board
• Appoint influencers: Use your advocates as role models and find an executive sponsor
• Measure and monitor: Review your metrics regularly

Panel discussion

Social media on the inside: the role of ESNs in the network.

The panel: Lucy McKerron from Synergy, Mark Wright from Simply Communicate and Zak Mensah from Bristol City Council.

The big benefits of ESNs:

• Increased collaboration
• Responsive and agile knowledge-sharing
• Breakng down silos and hierarchy
• Encouraging action, boosting productivity and empowering innovation

The challenges

• ESNs require culture change, not just new tech
• Selling the benefits: What business problems are you hoping to overcome?
• Growing your network: Use offline campaigns to get people excited. Your super-users’ first task should be replacing inter-team emails with ESN groups
• Maintaining momentum: Keep the content coming and use a creative campaign-led approach.

Key takeaways: Make sure you…

• Have a clear purpose for your ESN
• Secure advocacy from leaders
• Use community leadership and management
• Take a campaign-led approach
• Measure, review, revise

The best of the rest

We attended as many of events as possible during Social Media Week (www.bristolmedia.co.uk/socialmediaweek), bringing back plenty of tips to share with our clients. Here are our 10 top takeaways…

 

1) It’s time to embrace data science: a hot topic thanks to the huge amounts of data now being generated

2) Did you know that hashtags can be trademarked?

3) Endorsing somebody? Then do your research – if they’ve done something illegal or immoral you could find yourself in hot water

4) Consider echo chambers: This is what science calls our tendency to follow people similar to ourselves, distorting our sense of reality

5) Thumb-stopping moments: You have 3 seconds to make your advert cut through on Facebook – make them count!

6) Transparency, trust and relevance are more important than ever in social media

7) Use smarter audience profiling and segmentation. Think about communities and wider interests, not just buying habits.

8) Don’t stop at vanity metrics, look at how people REALLY use social media

9) Encourage your advocates to blow your trumpet for you

10) Video content is key so:

• Be consistent
• Leverage your USPs
• Use bitesized, unpolished content
• Use intriguing titles or thumbnails as clickbait
• Use the first 3 seconds to grab attention
• Create a narrative

Let our social media experts help…

We’re experts in helping businesses to launch and embed ESNs. From initial audits of existing channels to creative campaigns to drive users, we’re happy to help! Give our ESN guru Lucy McKerron a shout on lucy@mccannsynergy.com.uk or call +44 (0)117 962 1534.