Our Day at #smileexpo17

A day of workshops for social media in the large enterprise

On Tuesday May 23rd, we attended smileexpo in London. We were behind the decks working our social media magic, managing the organiser simplycommunicate’s social profiles.

Smileexpo is one of the largest events in London dedicated to internal comms professionals. Attendants can choose from 12 expert-led workshops covering collaboration, platforms, and engagement.

It was an exciting day for our team, the audience is usually made up of socially savvy guests so there’s always a lot of conversation on Twitter, today was no different. It was Camille’s first time at smileexpo, so it was a day full of fun and discovery.

It was a successful event, the hashtag #smileexpo17 trended nationally for over 7 hours, and was in at number 2 in the UK for the majority of that time.

A snappy kick-off with Workplace by Facebook

After the warm welcome given by the organiser Marc Wright, Julien Lesaicherre, the EMEA director of Workplace by Facebook, introduced us to this exciting new platform.

If mobile phones were still making the clicking noise of fingers pressing the buttons when you text, we would have heard a thunder of them. Attendees started to tweet, to interact and to react. He told us that millennials will make up 50 the of workplace by 2020 — a contreversial statement on Twitter. Many said, so what? Communication platforms should be firstly about communication, not technology. Perhaps people are sick of hearing about millennials. At this point, the conversations were flowing both offline and online.

This session was livestreamed via the simplycommunicate facebook page (it is still available to watch here), many tuned in from around the world to watch Workplace by Facebook’s first ever onstage presentation of the RBS case study. Opinions differed and a lively debate kicked off on Twitter — many tweeters sharing their opinions who couldn’t make it to the conference.

Workplace by Facebook uses the same principles of communication as Facebook but it’s a completely separate platform. It enables employees to use all the features of facebook in order to interact, to share files and even live stream meetings and announcements.

It was a first powerful talk showing off the potential of internal social media and a good insightful start for the day.

The workshops

Our team split into the different workshops during the day. Behind our laptops and phones we would tweet and share pictures to Joanna via Slack. She would then publish them directly from simply-communicate’s Twitter account. Our newbie Camille was buzzing with adrenaline; it is a true art to listen, to quote, to take a picture, to write and to send the information.

We learnt that employee’s wellness is driving the change within the internal communication industry. They want to interact, to talk about their achievement and their problems, they want to access information efficiently, to share files and to have the ability to ask questions. We discovered — and tweeted — about many wonderful solutions. We were definitely amazed by the different intranets (or should we say digital workplaces?) available, the innovations and the different ways to engage employees.

We enjoyed Sharon O’Dea’s session on chatbots — where we got to make our own. Jo has still not slept as she is finishing her list on all the reasons why we need our very own Glass Digital Media chatbot.

Camille went back home with a duck from the workshop on the Periodic Table of Internal Communication. The elements of this table are an amazing online source of knowledge for all internal communications professionals. It has been created cooperatively by people in the industry and approaches 7 key themes.

Phoebe showed off her Snapchat’s Spectacles at the adoption maze. The Adoption Maze is a fun, interactive activity that brings alive the new ways of working required to get colleagues in your company to support a new collaborative platform or social intranet.

And finally

We had a very good day and we are very satisfied by the success of our live event social media strategy. Tweeting at an event is a double way to be present on the day, it is another way of communicating and an opportunity to open conversations.

That’s the case for #smileexpo17 which was trending nationally for most of the day.

However, we do have an issue: we are still looking for the person that wrote this at the event — could anyone help us?