BlogWell L.A. 2012 Recap

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10 Dec BlogWell L.A. 2012 Recap

Posted at 18:47h in Events by [social_share]

We attended BlogWell in L.A. last week for the first time ever and were pleasantly surprised by the content and the quality of attendees. BlogWell is a half-day conference presented by Social Media Org where big brands like McDonalds and Microsoft get together to share case studies. Two tracks provided a choice between presenters with sessions running thirty minutes; a twenty-minute presentation and a ten-minute Q&A. The format was productive for those of us with A.D.D. tendencies and informative. The conference offered insights into real-world experiences tried and tested by other brands.

Social Media Club SD was invited to the conference and we happily accepted as it aligned with our mission to educate the industry. Melonie was an official live blogger on SocialMedia.org for two sessions: Mattel and Raytheon. She posted up-to-the-minute updates and captured key takeaways presented by the brands. Here’s a recap on the sessions we attended followed by the top tweets from attendees.

Mattel: Barbie for President: Social Media Case Study Recap

Mattel’s Senior Manager, Social Media, Travis Harding, and Manager of Social Media for Barbie & Girls, Jessica Kimiabakhsh.

To get insight into Barbie and her social footprint, Mattel developed the “Barbie For President” 2012 Campaign with the following objectives: create cultural noise, optimize trending topics times to election buzz, leverage aspirational DNA. Because they are shifting away from microsites, Mattel used Tumblr as the focus platform with great success. It was supported by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where they leveraged hashtags to their full advantage to generate discussions and user generated content fueled by a giveaway and rich media. The most surprising thing you might learn from this is that they did not use paid advertising, at all. Nor did they have intentions of driving traffic to their brand site or direct sales.

Key learnings on tracking ROI when you are not selling to the end consumer:

  • Use POS data to track back to post timing – however it can be hard to track the exact spikes in sales to a single Facebook post for example.
  • Get value in engaging consumers and fans.
  • Focus on building brand equity among consumers.
  • What to measure: Facebook metrics, use a social listening tool such as Sysomos to capture all of the conversation about Barbie. Track increase in engagement.
  • Talk very little about products.

Read the full post

Raytheon: Building a News Operation in a Top-Secret World Recap

Raytheon’s Managing Editor, Digital Content, Chris Hawley shared how they created a Farnborough Air Show microsite offering near real-time features, news, videos, and photos. The air shows in Farnborough, UK and paris (alternating years) are the most important trade shows of the aerospace and defense industry. There were many challenges in making it successful including a multitude of high profile stakeholders including the Ministry of Defense, conversations with controversy, potential PR landmines, and management of secretive, government content.
Lessons learned:

  • Get all the stories written ahead of time, top off with fresh quotes as necessary
  • Quality over quantity
  • One-company stories and big-picture context
  • Make sure photographers understand journalistic focus and don’t over-program them with assignments
  • Plan for dumping photos and video
  • Give the audience what it wants

Read the full post

Ethics, Legal & Blogger Outreach Recap

Here are key points we live tweeted from this session. Get Disclosure best practices toolkit here.

Aria Resort & Casino Recap

Here are key points we live tweeted from this session.

General Mills Recap

Here are key points we live tweeted from this session.

Useful Downloads

Disclosure best practices toolkit>
All sessions live blogs>
Microsoft presentation from Rob Wolf>

Top #BlogWell Tweets

Here is a round-up of the best of Twitter with presenter quotes and key takeaways from event attendees.

Mattel

 

McDonald’s

 

 

Raytheon

 Microsoft

 

 

Ethics 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaiser

 

Aria Resort & Casino Las Vegas

 

General Mills

 

 

 

 

Life Technologies

 

BlogWell

 

 

 

 

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