AiMA Recap: Advertising & Social Media
Last night, I attended the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association’s event “Advertising and Social Media.” The event was very entertaining and featured a panel that had diverse experience and, thus, a wide range of information to share. All too often, these types of panels can result in the same information being shared over and over again.
The panelists were: Carol Kruse – VP Interactive for The Coca Cola Company, James Wilcox – Interactive Media for Tuner Media Group, Michael Tchong – Founder and CEO of Ubercool, and Kevin Ertell – VP Retail Strategy for Foresee Results. Dave Williams, the CEO of BLiNQ Media, moderated the panel.
Michael Tchong opened the event by sharing many interesting, and at times humorous, statistics about the impact technology and social media has on our daily lives, such as:
“2/3 of Americans spend more time with their computer than with their spouse.”
“Social notworking is the act of updating your status at work when you’re not supposed to be.”
Tchong’s biggest advice was to “catch the next wave before it catches you.”
Carol Kruse from The Coca Cola Company had a very different story to tell. Coke reluctantly entered the social space when Facebook forced them to take over a fan page that had been created by two Coke fans. At the time, the page had over 1 million fans. Since then, Coke’s strategy has been “fans first,” which means Coke will be everywhere their fans are, including Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, and YouTube.
Kruse shared a piece of advice that I wish that many of my advertising comrades would abide by:
“Being a fan, friend, or follower does not mean one has opted in to receive unsolicited advertising messages.”
Kruse said when Coke has used their social channels to advertise has been one of the few times they saw a significant drop in fans/followers.
James Wilcox from Turner Media Group shared information on how Turner effectively used Facebook advertising to precisely target specific markets. Advertisements for The Closer, for example, only showed to female users age 24–29. This type of specific targeting allowed them to reach the show’s demographic and drive traffic to the website or fan page.
Kevin Ertell of Foresee Results shared information on how retailers are using social media to increase offline sales from their fans and followers. For retailers, Facebook is the place to be. (Not surprising, Ertell wrote a book entitled The Key To Driving Retail Success: Focus on Facebook. Ertell said that 69% of survey respondents had friended a retailer online, and 81% of those people did so on Facebook.
Lots of great information was shared last night, but it was certainly clear that topic at hand was “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” I counted only one mention of FourSquare (none of Gowalla, MyTown, or BrightKite) and shockingly enough, only a few nods at Twitter and YouTube. All hail, King Facebook!
In the end, I think Carol Kruse offered the best advice to anyone in the audience who was new to social media (if there were any), and that was to listen first, and don’t dive right in. She compared social media to a cocktail party. If you were new to the crowd, you would not instantly (or drunkenly) approach everyone and make conversation. Instead you would listen, survey the crowd, and learn how to best approach someone and make a positive impression.
All in all – great event. For a further recap check out some live tweets from the official AiMA live tweeter, Tessa Horehled, or myself.
(Oh, and I sincerely apologize to Carol Kruse for misspelling your name in my tweets all last night.)
