Updates from Tahoe #Snowcial 2013
Tahoe #Snowcial attendees take in presentations on social media marketing from some of the top minds in the field Thursday at Harvey’s Lake Tahoe.
By Milena Regos
Out & About Marketing’s Milena Regos attended Tahoe Snowcial 2013 for TQ–the event, in its fifth year, connects some of the best minds in national social media marketing at Lake Tahoe for speakers, seminars, and, of course, skiing. The overall message was clear–for businesses and brands hoping to make a name for themselves and turn social media effort into revenues, content is king.
Find below Regos’ notes from yesterday’s speakers and more links to thoughts from the key players at this year’s event.
John Wagnon, Sr. Director of Brand Marketing, Heavenly Mountain Resort opened the Snowcial conference with statistics about how little snow coverage we’ve had this season. “Hopefully we’ll get some fresh snow later on this week”. He gave a brief history of the conference and its sponsors GoPro, EpicMix, and Freeskier magazine. “Snowcial is equal amounts of learning, skiing and partying,” Wagnon says.
David Armano, the managing director of Edelman Digital Chicago, kicked his speech off with his “Who moved my cheese” story, the perfect analogy in terms of what’s going on in the world of marketing and especially in the world of digital marketing- constantly changing and evolving.
David Armano’s first job out of school was at Columbia House, followed by more media and digital experiences. “Content is currency” Armano said.
We share things online because it makes us look good. He gave an example of Oreo cookies responsive content during the SuperBowl. Content can focus on informing, leading, educating, changing minds and persuading. The future of infographics were playfully used with the Ryder Cup. Armano starts a private Facebook group to connect influential users around a topic and allow them create the content.
Converged media is paid, owned and earned and it’s all blurred together-brands need to use all in order to be successful. Baby Wolf commercial for cars.com showed how social media integrates with traditional media. Content will be currency and brands that are not afraid will be succeed.
A question from the audience came on what he thinks about paid content in terms of blog posts. Armano said you have be careful with how far you want to push it. Sometimes backlashes occur and you can’t fool people. People will have to learn to filter and read more than one source and form their own opinion.
Dean Eckles, Facebook’s director of data science
Dean showed a cool interactive display of how photos and content gets shared on Facebook. He described peer effects (refer to photo). Buying a season pass is a peer effect because you like to ski with your friends. Everybody can be influencing everybody else. He went on describing social advertising and how it uses social influence at work. Dean showed a test of how different ads with different social cues can create different results. He finished off saying that Facebook is very social. Ed: Wait, really? We needed a Facebook data scientist to tell us that.
Chris Heuer, director of social media at Deloitte
Social business is about people, performance and leadership that can support and orchestrate this holistic strategy. Aligning the passion of the people with the interests of the market you serve is what social business is all about. Each company is a media company today from a restaurant to a ski resort. Hire people who can be socially active. Competition for attention is even more difficult than ever before. This is why cultivating your customer relationships is more important than ever. Because customers are now more connected than ever before a negative experience gets shared so much faster and as a company you just can’t afford to make a mistake. The connected customers have a lot more to give than just money- attention, data, story, labor and capital are all elements of what they can give away or give to your business. Social reengineering is empowering everyone in an organization to their fullest potential to use the tools we are familiar with.
Stephanie Naegeli, brand manager, Nestle
Stephanie took the Snowcial audience through the 8 month story of creating the Nescafe brand in Switzerland through snowboard sponsorships targeting young people who haven’t decided on their coffee of choice yet. What worked for them was a snowboard design competition where fans can design the snowboard for the Nescafe champs getting the word out through art school projects and magazines. A fan voting mechanism was put into place to allow fans to voice their opinion. Next were three qualification events reaching 12,300 people on site and achieving coverage in the biggest newspapers while reaching the German speaking part of Switzerland. Prior to the events they built snow jumps in specific cities and supported the events with videos. They accomplished to get 1,200 visitors to the event and 30 hours of TV coverage with live coverage through Facebook for people who couldn’t attend. With all of these successes, Nescafe increased its ratings as a modern brand but not necessarily saw an increase in sales. The ROI of social media is not necessary reflected immediately in direct sales. Ed: It will be interesting to see what happens with them in the future.
Paul Crandell, vice president of marketing for GoPro
One of the most interactive presentations loaded with video content. Paul was actually filming with his GoPro during the presentation. GoPro allows people to share their experiences, whatever they may be: cats, babies, skiing, etc. They use-user generated content for most of their ads. A video tagged GoPro is uploaded to YouTube every minute. They have 500K Twitter followers, 450K Instagram followers, 200+M YouTube Views, 4.5 M Facebook Fans, growing 10 percent a month. Their product is now sold in 100+ countries and the GoPro is the #1 revenue small camcorder brand at Best Buy.
Paul talked about how his passion for sports and wearing shorts and flipflops brought him from selling T-shirts to GoPro. His passion for the outdoor lifestyle got him involved with events – from biking to snowboarding.
Paul got involved with RedBull events. RedBull stood for:
Athletes first
Generate word of mouth by creating unique experiences
Sponsor anything a bank wouldn’t
Paul liked the brand and what they were doing and GoPro/RedBull commonalities.
Category: Arts & Culture, Organizations, Uncategorized
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