Putting Social Media to Work

Today I had the pleasure of presenting a talk of the same name as this post to the IFEC Institute.  IFEC is the International Foodservice Editorial Council and is a very influential and important organization of foodservice professionals.  It’s made up of many of the people that represent companies, products and brands in the foodservice space.  The Institute portion of the conference is part speeches and part hands-on workshops to educate its members on the important trends in media (and other aspects) to enable them to evaluate and implement those trends in their and their clients’ businesses.

The focus this year was on social media and how it integrates into an overall marketing and communications plan.  Steven Bava led off the day with a discussion about how digital advertising and media is changing the way consumers make decisions and in turn how brands and organizations need to change how and where they interact with consumers in order to win their business and loyalty.

It was a great prelude to the talk that I gave in concert with Jack Abbott, my former boss and now head of my marketing agency that I’ve retained to help me in my current role.  We really tried to drill down on how to put social media to work for marketing and public relations professionals in the space.  There are numerous amazing case studies in the foodservice space of wildly successful social media campaigns (Kogi BBQ, TGIF, Costa Vida, Naked Pizza, Joffery’s coffee, more) and we wanted to provide insight and takeaways from these case studies to give the audience actionable takeaways that they could take back and implement them for their clients and their businesses.

You can view the presentation here:

This presentation is derived from a bunch of different sources, including the infamous WTF is Social Media presentation on SlideShare, the Socialnomics video, and other sources.  While many of the sources are cited as Socialnomics, there are primary sources for each of those, it was just late when I was adding them to the deck.

My big takeaways for the group were:

• Don’t start with the tools – start with finding the right conversations. Find the white-hot center of the conversation and become an integral part of it.
• Don’t worry about the size of the audience online.  Find the right 10, 100 or 1,000 people. They will help you spread the word.
• Social media marketing is commitment marketing, it’s not hit and run. (commitment marketing coined by Rick Liebling
• Use the Forrester POST framework to develop your social media plan and sell it into your organization
• Find and activate the “magic middle” that David Sifry identified and Brian Solis has built on

A few things that I didn’t get to cover that I wanted to are:

• The importance of mobile in foodservice (I hit it a bit in the Dairy Queen case study, but it was a passing glance)
• The importance of building assets instead of renting eyeballs
• The concept of finding your Tribe on the Web
• The rising importance of game theory in marketing and communications

I have a video of the talk that I’ll chop up and post shortly as well.  It was a great experience and I really enjoyed interacting with an audience that was super-engaged and asked very savvy questions.  If you’d like me to speak at your conference view my speaking page for more information.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.