With two jam-packed days of content, frequent networking opportunities and the best of the industry at your fingertips, it’s easy to miss some of the messages being spread at #SMWF N. America.

Merlin Ward, account strategist at Renegade, has six lessons from some of social media’s brightest brains at last year’s New York show:

1. Pair Your Social with Ads

Chris Thorne, Vice President of Social Media & Media at EA, the sports game developer, found that content was more effective when coupled with Facebook advertising. They put extra care into creating content that users could “play” with, essentially gamifying their Timeline; then they made the monetary spend to promote it to as many users as possible. The result was more than just extended reach—they increased virality and sales.

2. Your Content Doesn’t Work Everywhere

Morgan Baden, Director of Social Media and Internal Communications for the book publisher Scholastic, shared their failures and successes with Pinterest. Pinterest is a natural social network for this brand, but they found that not all content is created equal. While female users enjoyed sharing book covers and special quote memes from books, photographs for events and other physical spaces didn’t attract the same interest. It seems that content made for collecting does the best on Pinterest, while amateur point-of-view photography is better left on the shelf.

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With spending on customer service processes and applications to assist sales expected to exceed $1Billion globally this year (Gartner Research),  the hype around Social CRM software is over and  companies are rolling up their sleeves and getting down to business.   While B2C markets have seen the biggest adoption of social CRM, B2B businesses are now aggressively investing in social.  By the end of 2013, it is predicted that organisations using social CRM applications will increase to 25% of all projects worldwide (Forbes). (more…)

By Lance Concannon, UK social media lead at Text 100

Speak to any senior corporate comms exec about the barriers that prevent them from using social media more in their organisation, and I guarantee that the issue of ‘risk’ will usually come close to the top of the list. This raises a couple of questions; what exactly are the risks posed by social media, and how can we negate, or at least mitigate, them?

What if people say bad things about our brand?

People often think that creating social media channels for the brand will add fuel to the fire of criticism, but that really doesn’t make any sense. Almost all brands have detractors, and social media makes it easier than ever for those detractors to share their opinions online and there’s not a lot you can do to stop that. (more…)

Companies in the social media space are constantly looking for advice and new ways that they can make sure their efforts in the space are working. While there are no definitive answers, as every company’s goals will require different methods of showing success, there are a few tips that can be followed for guidelines along the way

The following is 10 tips that I’ve learned from the fantastic community that participates in #SMmeasure. #SMmeasure started off as a weekly Twitter chat that I’m fortunate to host. It has since turned into a community that shares interesting articles and ideas throughout the week, but still gather to chat for an hour every Thursday at noon(EST)/9am(PST). This list is the second part in this series. If you missed part one, be sure to check out our first 10 tips learned through #SMmeausre here. (more…)

The Sixdegrees team are very excited about the launch of our new events blog.

We will be keeping you up to date on all our new event developments in the lead up to our Social Media World Forum, Social TV & Cloud Computing events. (more…)

The events team have been busy behind the scenes looking at the structure of our events and how we can bring you, our audience, the most value from attending the events.

Social Media World Forum, Social TV World Forum & Cloud Computing Congress events will now be a platform to bring together all sectors from across these dynamic industry under one roof at the same time for unique networking opportunities. (more…)