Last week I attended the Social Media World Forum in Olympia, London where had a chance to get insights of how global businesses embraced the benefits of implementing social media across their communications.
My main focus was to understand how marketers implementing social techniques to drive engagement among their customers and what place for mobile in their approaches. From my point of view, the most interesting conversations were concentrated at two tracks – Social Media, where such companies as FourSeasons, KLM and Ford had shared their case studies, and Social TV, where the current state of the social TV technologies, industry movements were discussed and revealed some interesting statistic from the Orange, Zeebox and Fremantle Media.
Big part of the conference was EXPO where a lot of agencies and social-media monitoring tools were exhibited. Want to highlight only three of them. First is 77Agency with their idea of Social Machine, which combine digital and real world, The Giant iTab with interactive screen technology which allows bringing life to the ordinary screen advertising and EX Machina – second screen technology for apps developers and TV channels.
Conference included plenty of panels with the brilliant participants but in most cases that was just general talks while keynote speeches and case studies were much more particular and informative. Directly on the event I was trying to do real-time visualization, hope it will be useful for those who like to learn visually :).
So following the event I have combined some of my main observations, insights and learnings from SMWF 2012 in the set of posts.
- Understanding the links between social networks and TV;
- Convergence of tablets, mobile and TV (Zeebox, Shazam, TV Check);
- Social media challenges for brands on the example of KLM and FourSeasons;
- BIG mobile trends from Ian Carrington, Google;
- Mixing online and offline user experience from Marco Corsaro, 77Agency.