We hope you’ve enjoyed the last two days of interactive debate and discussion at #SMWF as much as we have! Thank you to everyone who attended and made the event so productive and engaging. Here are our photo highlights of the last two days!

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Thank you to everyone who came along to this week’s #SMWF at the Sentry Centers in New York. With some of the social media industry’s brightest and best headlining the agenda the two days were jam packed with debate and discussion around the future of social media marketing.

Special thanks go to our friends at Doodle.ly for all their great live doodles during the show! Doodle.ly is a free social drawing platform available online and all mobile devices, find out more here.

@Robharles of @Bloombergnews welcomes everyone to #SMWF
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Recent research from analyst house Gartner has forecast that not responding to social media will become as fatal to a brand image as not replying to phone calls and emails are today.

Gartner focused on a three point strategy for organisations looking to fully utilise their social media response:

• Participate and don’t let a negative remark put you off
• Don’t have a blanket reply; develop appropriate responses dependent on the comment
• Plan for a spike in social commentary and develop communications practices to cope with it
Perhaps worryingly, Gartner found that while over half of companies monitor their social media usage and response, just under a quarter (23%) collect and analyse the data.

This includes keeping records of individual conversations, as well as maintaining profiles on people companies have interacted with.

These records should be reviewed “constantly, to analyse the interactions to see what insights can be gleaned from them”, as Gartner vice president Carol Rozwell puts it.

Yet Gartner is keen to stress that it’s “impracticable and counterproductive” to reply to everything, with “clearly inflammatory and unsolvable” comments not requiring response. (more…)

That’s SMWF Europe over for another year; thanks to everyone who took time out of the ludicrously summery weather to come indoors and listen to a host of social media experts waxing lyrical about the developments in our industry.

After Chris Brogan tore down our preconceptions and misapprehensions on the morning of day one, before building us back up again based on fundamental common sense, we knew we were in for a good show. Thanks to all our speakers and chairs for the benefit of their insight and expertise over the two days.

There’s much debate about whether social media has matured as a market, and as such, whether there’s anything new to be said, but what we saw this week the answer to that question is a resounding no. It’s true that many of the basics and best practice areas are out there, including commonly know tips and tricks, but many of the less glamorous organization’s wide issues are still being worked on. In many cases it’s the organization wide role that hasen’t been addressed, and how ‘social’ is being approached from a top down perspective.     Fundamentally how social is approached from a strategic role and its integration within an organizations wide approach either from a campaign generation or service quality and relationship management perspective. As always, much still needs to be done in terms of best practice, and delivering on the basics is always important.

This year we’ve seen delegates approaching our speakers and exhibitors with complex strategic and operational questions about how they achieve pre-defined objectives. They understand the channels and they know what they want to achieve. That’s a big jump from last year when the majority of conversations centred on why social media was worth getting involved with; the question used to be ‘why’, this year it was most definitely ‘how’.

The top end of social media is forcing its way into the stratosphere, with measurement strategists burrowing ever deeper into the data, returning with philosophical questions about how we define engagement, why we measure it and how we mine applicable insight from it to inform future strategies. As the understanding increases, so the hunger for more data driven insight also grows.

Next year SMWF is moving onwards and upwards to a new venue. Look out for some massive developments in the format and content too. We’re constantly developing, and will introduce a number of new facets, including more in-depth content and new innovation only sessions, breakout workshop sessions, barcamp discussion only tracks for audience participation,  more speed networking with multiple parties and networking opportunities around the event.

We look forward to continuing to connect with you until then. Here’s how this year unfolded, in pictures.

 Keynote conference room

Chris Brogan – Keynote Address

‘Who should create content within an organisation? Everyone.’

‘Checking your Smartphone is the new smoking’

It was great to see everyone and celebrate the industry at the Social Soiree! We hope you’re all feeling fresh and ready for another exciting day of discussion and insight. Today alongside the keynote track the Enterprise and B2B Marketing workshops will be taking place as well as the Mobile Marketing track, there will also be some exciting free sessions taking place in the Marketing Tech area of the exhibition. We’ve picked out our highlights for the day ahead… (more…)

We hope you’ve enjoyed the action packed agenda today, now it’s time to sip some drinks and catch up with everyone at the show at tonight’s Social Soiree!

We’ll be at JuJu in Chelsea from 7.30pm tonight for some serious social media networking, with a DJ, dance floor and a top-notch crowd of movers, shakers and deal-makers from around the social media world.

JuJu is an 8 min taxi ride from Olympia & The Hilton Olympia Hotel, a 10 min taxi ride from the K-West Hotel and 15 mins from South Kensington Tube Station. Get directions here.

See you tonight!

Retailers and brands are discovering new ways to gain valuable customer insight through their use of social media. By creating online social communities, retailers are not only able to build brand loyalty but receive feedback on their products and gain insight for future projects. A recent report found that 85% of marketers believed customer insight is one of the most valuable advantages of social media.

We decided to put the spotlight on the customer insight panel at this year’s SMWF. Lars Silberbauer, Social Media Director at LEGO will be speaking on the dedicated panel discussing how customer insight managers are using social media, and what the best approaches to using social media for market research are. We caught up with him for a chat ahead of the event.
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Twenty years ago Gerald Ratner described the jewellery his stores sold as ‘crap’ at the Institute of Directors annual conference. Days later his organisation had seen £500m wiped off its value. It’s reputation unsalvageable. Had Gerald made the same faus pas today his company reputation would have been destroyed in minutes due to the instantaneous sharing of news, information and off the cuff remarks through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube et al.

Social media has revolutionised the way that individuals, organisations and brands communicate with each other. Life is never going to be the same again. But while there are so many positives, potential disaster lurks around every social media corner. In the last year alone we have seen brands such as Dell, United Airlines, Chrysler and Domino’s Pizza fall foul of social media, so why do so many ‘marketing and communications professionals’ get it so spectacularly wrong in the social media sphere? (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…)

By Christer Holloman author of ‘The Social Media MBA’ 

For how much longer will we call ‘smartphones’ just that and not simply ‘phones’? ‘Smart phones’ will be the de facto standard in a not too distance future (it’s already the case in certain clusters), the long name will eventually be made redundant. The same will now happen to the words ‘Social Media’. (more…)