#SMWLDN — TWELVEA.M.’S TOP TAKEAWAYS
Last week saw hundreds of Industry professionals, influencers and brands under one roof, the BFI at Southbank to celebrate a week of social media, insights and trends for Social Media Week London 2016.
From the likes of The Economist, to UNILAD, to National Geographic and LinkedIn, a wide variety of organisations spoke on a number of topics, with the underlying conference theme being; “The Invisible Hand: Hidden Forces of Technology” — the way in which, mobile technology, networked connectivity, data and machine learning are changing how we connect, consume and communicate.
Rather than list some quotes and stats that have been live-tweeted already, we thought providing our top takeaways — a series of observations and trends, would be most beneficial. Here goes:
Churnalism vs Journalism
Often at conferences, it’s all sunshine and rainbows. Discussing the latest trends, how marketing budgets go in the favour of social, and how more and more brands are harnessing social for successful campaigns. But it’s the discussions that take a deeper look and question ethics of the industry that are often most rewarding.
Ogilvy’s “Generation Y And The Rise Of #LAD Publishers” panel kicked off without UNILAD’s CEO, Liam Harrington, after he arrived 20 minutes late. This allowed for the former Telegraph consumer affairs editor Harry Wallop and freelance reporter Emily Gosling in particular to set the scene around their feelings of LAD publishers.
When Liam arrived, he was welcomed with a sea of criticism on his content. If anything, it seemed the panelists used Liam as an outlet for their frustration and huge success. UNILAD boasts almost 3 billion monthly video views, and claims to reach 1 in 5 people on the planet every month. A stat most publishers could only dream of.
That brings me onto undoubtedly the biggest trend in social, video.
Video, Video, Video
This year, we hear little mention of GIFs or Emoji’s, but instead, crazy stats like “1.7 seconds viewing time”, “10x comments”, “3x organic reach”. It’s hard to get caught up in the numbers and create video just because it’s trendy. And that’s exactly what’s happened. Especially live video. Facebook’s live feature has made it even more accessible to its 1.6 billion users, and even more accessible for brands to reach those 1.6 billion people.
In a panel with The Economist, a 173 year old publication that has experimented with video on social for 8 years, BBC News and it’s 30M fans and BuzzFeed — undoubtably pioneers of live video, it was interesting to see how each were experimenting with live video, and their relevance.
Our conclusion is that live is great, but only as great as its content. Some of BuzzFeed’s most popular Facebook live videos include employees putting rubber bands around a watermelon (the suspense saw over 10K people watching live) and their Brexit discussion with David Cameron, utilising Facebook’s reaction tool to showcase live sentiment feedback for the Prime Minister’s latest speech.
BuzzFeed have nailed their content. They go live for a reason, creating suspense. The BBC and The Economist less so. The BBC goes live after breaking news stories if they have a reporter there to broadcast to Facebook. But imagine if they employed thousands of freelance (trained) live broadcasters, that could be called to broadcast in any city around the world as the news breaks — could this be the future of live news?
The Economist on the other hand, have opted for an unconventional route. Their demographic of typically “white middle class men”, demand more than “amateur broadcasting and low production value” said Adam Smith, Deputy Community Editor. Instead they used SMW to announce their bi-weekly live Q&A with Editor-In-Chief Zanny. A somewhat pointless effort of going live for the sake of it. With a duel camera setup, and complicated extra’s — it seems they’re asking for it to go wrong.
A place for Instagram Stories & Snapchat
We Are Social’s Snapchat 101 talk showed evidence that despite the controversial news around Instagram’s copycat product, it actually saw no effect on engagement or active users for snapchat upon release of Instagram Stories.
Instead, a place for both. Brands such as PepsiCo and Adidas are testing ways in which both platforms can be used, and optimised. Snapchat is great for campaigns — with “user retention as high as 80–90%” (Chris Watt, Social Media Manager, Adidas UK). Brands can use tools such as Geofilters and Lenses to market to global and local audiences.
Instagram Stories is being positioned as an extension to a brands Instagram feed. Typically on a feed we see beautiful crafted images, whereas stories offer a behind the scenes feel. It has also been used for product launches and giveaways for fashion brands. A great way to reward your most engaged users and brand advocates.
Direct Marketing is as important as ever
The notion of direct marketing isn’t new. But Tumblr’s example of how Taylor Swift uses direct marketing to engage with her fans on the platform is certainly interesting. She’s the queen of memes and GIFs, and user generated content it seems.
At the Tumblr talk, ‘How Social Media Has Transformed Entertainment Marketing’ Sales Director, EMEA — Michael Pennington, said “young people don’t care about the brand, they care about the celebrities that care about that brand”.
And that’s why they’re using celebrities to endorse their brand partners. A clever move from a somewhat dying platform, eager to generate cash as well as engage it’s users.
Social for business goals
One trend that everyone mentioned, yet no one seemed to discuss, was how social can be used for a lot more than just impressions.
A few years back, it was all about community. How can brands build up a following on social media to rival one another. They seemed to believe that they could win customers off the back of large followings. The latter; it created a partition between them and their users, dehumanising the brand. They quickly back tracked to offer customer service (often 24/7 — take XBOX for example) using social media. Re-humanising their brand.
Brands moved onto tracking impressions and sadly this has become the norm. Maybe now we can start to look at genuine engagement and how it can be used to generate sales, not just ‘creating awareness’.
That’s our goal.
TwelveA.M. is a full service creative agency helping to make brands relevant to a youth focused audience. If you’d like to find out more, follow us on twitter or send us and email.
