From girl power to chatbots: Young Women in Digital conference recap
“As a woman in a male-dominated office, how do you find your voice?” came a question from the back of the conference room.
It was the first time I had attended an all-women’s conference for my field of social media and digital marketing and I found it really special to have a space where these kind of honest questions could be safely asked.
While I fortunately work in a more female-dominated part of the industry (PR has historically skewed more female) and also work for a company where this has never been an issue for me personally, there was such power in women being there for each other at this conference run by Young Women in Digital.
At one point, when a panelist was asked to introduce herself, she blurted out “I don’t feel cool enough to be on this panel.” She was obviously joking out of nervousness, and perhaps no one else noticed this, but I reveled in seeing a conference attendee immediately tweeting a response with the conference hashtag that said: “of course you’re cool enough to be here!”
Beyond the girl power shared throughout the conference, there were three anecdotes / case studies that stuck with me, along with an excellent presentation on chatbots, which I’ll try to briefly share below.
- Building an integrated social team at Reebok: I was impressed to hear how PR, social, digital and paid got together for a one-hour brainstorm three times a week. Blair Hammond from the Reebok team told us a bit about the structure of the brainstorm; each person was assigned a different media outlet to monitor (based on the brand’s target audiences) and they were charged with bringing new ideas for discussion. I’d be curious to know if any other social teams have this kind of brainstorm structured into their weekly schedule, especially at this frequency. I think this says a lot about their commitment to crafting integrated social content that speaks to their audience. I’d also be curious to know how Blair and her team keep the energy level going with a reoccuring brainstorm series like this.
- How to drive more tune-in for events on Twitter: If you’ve ever promoted an event on Twitter, you might have had the following thought: “ok great, my audience knows I’m doing a webinar in two weeks, but how will they remember to tune in the day of?” I’ve seen some cool developments from Twitter in the last couple of months, and during the conference, Nina Mishkin from their team showed us a custom activation developed for Apple. It included an initial tweet promoting the Apple event with a call-to-action that told users that if they RT’ed the tweet, that @apple would send them a follow up tweet the day-of the event. It’s so simple, but something I haven’t seen from Twitter before.
- How to poke fun at a competitor on social: I learned of this case study from another attendee during the conference coffee break and thought it was brilliant. The in-house social lead at a financial company told me that they heard that a competitor’s services had been down for three days, so she quickly developed a social activation to leverage the moment. She created an Instagram story with some clever copy (somehow involving the poop emoji!), which she then geo-targeted to the area that was experiencing the issue. Any person that engaged with the content (and she says there were about 20–30) was sent a swag bag with branded materials. How clever!
Lastly, the closing session was about chatbots and it really got me thinking. Vivian Rosenthal — the founder of Snaps — presented a strong case for how Messaging (i.e., Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp) is the next frontier and how it’s already bigger than traditional social platforms. It’s an argument I’ve heard before and I had obviously seen different media companies create branded chatbots to operate on these platforms, but I hadn’t really seen an activation that got me excited until now.
Vivian talked about a sports brand that wanted to rebuild the experience on their website within a chatbot. What they decided to do was prompt users to take photos of what they found beautiful (a painting in a museum, a blossoming tree, etc) and then the program would take the colors and the design of that imagery and project it onto an object, in this case a sneaker.
With this case study, the chatbot wasn’t this pre-programmed app that recommended movies to you in a slightly awkward fashion, something you could clearly sense was written by a person who was trying to be witty. Instead, this sports chatbot operated as an easier mechanism in which to personalize your shoes; it was more fun to send the picture to the bot and have it spit out a sneaker image than do it on a website.
I wondered what other applications would make sense for this platform. At the end of Vivian’s presentation, I raised my hand and asked her what she thought it would take for this technology to become mainstream. In other words, did chatbots need their equivalent of a Pokemon Go? She said it would happen as machine learning technology advanced and as more companies encouraged customers to opt-in with simple tactics like asking people if they wanted to receive their receipts in a chatbot and then building the relationship from there.
What are your thoughts on branded chatbots? Do you follow any that you find valuable and do you think this is a strong opportunity for marketers? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Lastly, a big thanks to the Young Women in Digital organizers for putting together a great agenda and creating such a warm and welcoming community of women. I look forward to future events!
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