dmexco Night Talk, “Social Media 2.0 – More Strategy, Less Experiments!” : See you tonight in Berlin!

Everything Social

It seems as though the social bandwagon has finally made its way to Germany’s marketers. The dmexco Berlin Night Talk brought together representatives from German media agencies, PR professionals, and brand managers to listen to and engage in a discussion about the need to get “More Strategy, Less Experiments!” into the business  side of social media. Keynote speaker Sebastian Küpers (Senior Consultant, Pixelpark) hit the nail on the head when he (power)-pointed out the ludicrous number of variations on the SOCIAL meme: Social Media, Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring, Social Gaming, Social Reviewing, Social [insert any word here]...

His point was that “social media” and all its manifestations shouldn’t be the focus — the CUSTOMER should be the focus. A customer-centric mindset must be the first rule for any business using social media.  It’s not enough to just use social media — you have to make discoveries about your customers, then carry those findings back into the heart of your organization. There must be a digestion process for the social media feeding frenzy to have any lasting impact.

After the keynote, there was a brief debate about social media practices. These were some of the key points made by the debaters:

• “Social” will evolve to the point of becoming totally standard and mandatory channel/tool for every business, regardless of brand type or industry
• This is just the beginning — everyone is still expecting a major growth spurt
• Right now all the focus is on control — PR and Brand managers scrambling to make sure their brand is safe out there. This is important, but there are other measures to be taken with social media, like product innovation, etc.

Conclusion: German marketers are discussing many of the same topics and the U.S. guys we saw speak at M2C in Paris this March. Most professionals somehow feel that there is something “going on” with social, and all seem to agree that it’s becoming a must for every business to position themselves in the social context. The tools and stories are the same, but so far there isn’t much answer to the big question of ROI.  In the end, it all comes down to defining the concept of “influence” and “word of mouth,” as it seems that most ROI is expected to be found somewhere inside these concepts.

Tonight we’ll be heading over to 40seconds for the dmexco Berlin Night Talk, hosted by Wolfram Kons. The social media talks will also feature the following speakers:

Hubertus v. Lobenstein, Agentur Von Lobenstein
Dr. Markus Schröder, Bereichsvorstand Marketing EnBW

We’ll report back here with our learnings soon!