Welcome, I am Jaime Punishill, I’ll be your conference chairperson for the next two days. It’s great to be back in Boston. I worked and lived here for about a decade before I moved to NY 4 years ago, and actually stayed in this hotel when it first opened and there was literally nothing else around here.
In fact there are quite a few ex-Bean town residents here today. And for you locals, I’d like to point out that since our arrival yesterday afternoon, the Celtics won. The Bruins won. The Sox blew out the Angels. And the water is drinkable again. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Glad we could help.
It’s an honor to be hosting such a distinguished roster of speakers. I am going to spend the next 15 min or so setting the stage and getting you ready and excited for a great 2 days.
A year ago, if you had tried to put this conference together, you couldn’t have found all these speakers. Some like me, didn’t have their current jobs – in fact their jobs didn’t exist. I took my job as head of social media last September, and became the face of Citi in Social media.
You are here because you think, or you wonder if or how, social media is an effective way to communicate your brand and engage with your customers. As you can see, you aren’t alone, social media is now perceived to be as effective as corporate web sites in communicating with prospects.
Social media is white hot. Having lived and worked through the advent of the web, the dot com boom – and then implosion – it feels a lot like 1998 did. And much like that time, we are starting to see social media move from the fringes into the mainstream. From startups and 22 year olds to large brands and old guys like me.
I have been calling 2010 the year the kids give way to the adults. But really it’s the year of the brand, for the brands have arrived in social media.
Now there are all kinds of way consumers can both experience and share their thoughts about your brand. If you’d like a lesson in humility, head over to brand tags.
But no matter how you are rated here, there are tremendous opportunities for larges brand to better understand and positiviely impact their perception.
Here is a recent study, and not surprisingly, for lots of consumers being able to interact, to dialogue, to engage with companies in social media leaves a positive impression. And those brands who interact with customers in social media, are likely to be viewed more positively by consumers.
Now, not everyone has found their social media voice.
CLICK
PLAY VIDEO
When we launched our customer service on twitter account, we tried to be a bit more human than that. So one of the things we did was put my face on the page. To HUMANIZE the experience. But we did that right before we mailed 12 million letters raising the interest rate on your credit cards.
So I WENT from being the nice friendly human face of citi to
Most hated man on the I
To help you avoid similar pitfalls and build great engaging experiences using social media, nternet.
we’re going to hear from some great speakers… nope not the usual suspects
Meet the people on the battle lines of social media. This conference is unique because it focuses on people working for brands and facing social media challenges on the front line. You’re going to hear stories you don’t hear very often. I’d like to share what I think are the 5 salient points to pay attention to , if nothing else sticks.
You’ll hear excellent panels on brands who’ve succeeded in finding their voice.Heather Oldani, Larry Blumenthal, Bonin Bough & David Witt will speak on How can Brands Achieve big results: how can my large org use real-time social media?
And since external success in social media depends on internally embracing the new technology, You’ll also hear from Charlene Li on how social technology can change transform the way you lead. How you can find and foster Open Leaders. I have the priveledge of getting an advance copy of her book – and its great. She opens with a great story about the Navy and how they have become a highly transparent, engaged, organization. If they can do, what’s your excuse?
Once brands discover their voice entering into social media, they can build honest relationships with their consumers. That means turning to them for advice on how your business can perform better. Crowd sourcing can mean small changes that equal big differences in your customers lives..
Devo consulted their fans digitally on every aspect of their upcoming album, thus guaranteeing a record their community would love.
Caroline Dietz will speak on how Dell leverages Community for insights and Innovation & Lisa Aaron from Allstate will explore how here company uses Social Media to Establish dialogue with consumers to coninnovate
A social relationship is good, and online relationship that manifests offline as well- is better. That means integrating social into the marketing mix & synching traditional and social marketing efforts
There are brands that do an excellent job of mixing traditional and social media. Michael Donnolly, Michaeal Dilorenzo, Jennifer Cisney, & Sean Parker will discuss taking traditional media Social : How can I find the sweet spot where traditional media meets social media.
As everything becomes more real time, customer service also needs to adapt. This can be both through brand led service, but also through crowd sourcing. This customer service model will make different solutions to the same problems from people users trust available when people need them.
Steve of Ant’s Eye View will discuss how Microsoft leveraged it’s customers by creating consumer-generate answers to FAQs, Wells Fargo’s Kimarie Matthews will explore the lessons wells Fargo has learned after a year of social customer service.
At the end of the day what really matters is, how do you turn a customer’s passive interest in a brand into genuine investment in it’s success?
Just after this you’ll here from these brands oh how twitter has helped to innovate, interact, & inform. Each can likely tell you many stories of how customer dialogue has helped them build digital advocates and fans.
Even with all this excitement of social media, there’s still a lot of questions that need answ3ered. For example. Miley Cyrus deleted her twitter account, but yet her tweets live on.
Us gov to now archive social data
What will the long-term reaction be to using consumer data? What about privacy?
Brands exploring new ways to use, store & analyze social data against there customer base
The year of mocial. How will mobile continue to shape and move social media forward?
foursquare, gowalla, & others just starting to geo location
Humana
There are a lot of other amazing speeches & panels planned over the next two days- unfortunately I couldn’t mention them all here. For example, I’ll be talking about Citi’s brand tags and how we plan to fix them