Inspiration from Spredfast Social Summit

Our team was grateful to participate in Spredfast's Social Summit this past week. Spredfast - an industry-leading social media management system for enterprises - hosted the 3-day knowledge sharing event. FeedMagnet and Spredfast have a lot of clients, industries and opinions on social media practices in common - and both are local to Austin.

Special shoutout to our friend @A_Gallman at Spredfast for championing our partnership for the event!

Photo credit: @AndreaGenevieve

Social trends are changing at such a rapid pace that the rhetoric and best practices are new every quarter. As our own Frank Burns said during his panel on content planning, "brands are striking a balance between insight-driven 'strategy' - and making it up as you go along." Educational opportunities like this Summit are key to staying up to date with the latest social campaign strategies, buzz applications, and changing verbal lexicon.

Trendspotting

The current trends we saw at #SFSummit? Content is king, and "culture eats strategy for lunch." We met companies with literally hundreds of unique social accounts representing branches across the nation. To deliver content that resonates, digital marketers have to intimately learn the identity and preferences of their audience. Find out where your fans are already spending their time online, meet them there, and give them content that delights. Whole Foods Market, a company that presented a few times at the Summit, is a great example of a company espousing this logic.

Most importantly, it isn't enough to just publish good content; brands have to engage their customers and fans on a personal level, joining community conversations and curating them. From Hershey's (via agency WCG) we saw that sometimes a picture of a Reese's wedding cake is more powerful than the most expensively-produced marketing material, and from Jive Software we learned that even B2B companies can spark high engagement. Jive's Office Hero campaign was a really nice case study we'll proudly be supporting at their JiveWorld conference.

Another tip shared by AT&T's social team was to "merchandise your accomplishments" in social engagement throughout the organization. FeedMagnet has often been used to jump start a culture shift by powering displays in corporate headquarters, so the rest of the organization can see and feel what the social team is achieving. To the agencies and marketing directors slowly but surely opening their coworkers' eyes to social, we humbly salute you.

The FeedMagnet team is thrilled to be a part of this evolving industry, and even more thrilled to know we're not standing alone. Thanks to Spredfast and their many smart Summit attendees, we learned (and got inspired!) a lot last week.