It was a great Social Media Breakfast/Minneapolis St.Paul #24 held at the Mall of America on Friday 3/5. The panel consisted of @derickson of Tunheim, @jenniferrock of Best Buy, @bmjewell of the Mall of America and the co-founder of @izzysicecream.
The panel was focused on the retail environment and had both large businesses (Best Buy) and a two location business Izzy's ice cream. My key take-aways were:
Social media right now is still about experimentation. A good example is what Punch Pizza did recently after the Vikings playoff loss to New Orleans by offering free pizzas the next night - and they generated great press coverage and people lined up around the block to get their free pizza. Also the Mall of America (a Preston Kelly client) started doing a Twitter announcement for parking last December and get great mainstream press coverage and yet they only had 1,000 followers on Twitter.
In talking about how to handle "crisis" situations on social media - all the panelists agreed that people, especially your brand loyalists will come to bat for you and defend you if someone is making outlandish claims against you.
One other key takeaway was the importance of knowing your audience and what's of value to them. When you understand this you can truly have great conversations with your followers/community.
And finally there was a great comment from Jennifer Rock of Best Buy who mentioned that people there had started a "Supportipedia" along the lines of Wikipedia to help people with various electronic questions that they might have. It just goes to show how important is to engage and involve your employees in the power of social media platforms.
As always I come away energized with the discussion and information exchange at the Social Media Breakfasts.
Do you think you could learn something at the next Social Media Breakfast? Try it you'll like it.
Great post, Mark. I enjoy reading about other people's key takeaways from various events they attend.
ReplyDeleteI thought SMBMSP #24 was one of the best yet, and I thought the panel did a great job of discussing how social media has had an impact on B2C, and C2B, communication in the retail industry, as well as internal employee communication.
-Brad