The conference started with a very strong presentation:

Is Social Media Honest? 

A very good question that emerged then was: Do consumers believe social media?

Well, the study conducted by YouGov shows that we tend to trust influencers less and less. It’s a clear lesson for brands that they should choose influencers more carefully. They should not only look at each influencers’ engagement for similar content, but also analyze whether the engagement varies a lot between sponsored and not sponsored content.

Product placement should look more natural than before so that influencers’ communication will be trustworthy and the brand’s image won’t be ruined.

Let’s be honest, we all know that how Kim Kardashian looks on Instagram isn’t how people look on a daily basis. The phenomenon of people distrusting and mocking influencers was mentioned many times already during Social Media Week London 2019. I hope it will have finally an impact on how influencer based campaigns are run.

Russell Feldman “Is Social Media Honest? The Consumer Perspective”

Fun and social media – a surprisingly unsurprising alliance

“Social media was supposed to be fun” was the title of another talk which, surprisingly, was fun indeed. People like fun, desire fun and often miss the fun in their daily life. However, social media pretty often is not fun anymore. Rather, it’s just one more mundane daily chore, between checking mail and weather forecast (yes, it’s true). In their groundbreaking mission of making your newsfeed fun again, the speakers from Grey agency provided us with some examples of how a brand can contribute to reaching this ambitious goal while interacting with other brands. “Real fun is built on spontaneity and surprise,” they said. On the other hand, validation from others or showing others what we’re up to is definitely not fun. And in case you missed some fun while analysing and reviewing your social media activities, try Sotrender which automates tasks like reporting, benchmarking and category analysis, saving social media marketers time for creativity.

Is social media really fun? 

Even though social media was indeed supposed to be fun, the current generations are the most depressed ones. This is partially also true because of social media and the well-known FOMO. That’s why the current trend should be Joy Of Missing Out! 

Also, brands should be creating a positive digital environment and what now matters are small gestures and sharing positivity on a daily basis. Rewarding positive contributors and bringing people together, not only online, but also offline, is the solution to make some more good with the use of social media.

Verena Papik’s presentation

Thanks Verena Papik, from Ninety Play, for your touching presentation,  it’s much needed on such kinds of events! 

Don’t Just Hear, Listen: The Power of Social Listening

In the era when crisises are constantly a threat on social media, social media monitoring and listening are becoming increasingly important. 

While marketers still tend to treat them equally, social media listening is way more proactive than just monitoring. 

Do we all really know why should we listen to our customers and fans? 

Not only to improve customer service and manage a brand’s reputation, which is quite obvious, but also to: 

• identify market trends 
• assess sentiment and share of voice
• find thought leaders and topics but also e.g. influencers, which will match with their values our brand  
• identify opportunity leads

After the workshop with Jay Paul, we encourage you to think twice about that.

For now, just grab the ready-made checklist, prepared by Jay Paul from Hustle & Hive Marketing:

Listening checklist

Let’s just should stop creating and just start listening ?

#SMWLDN2019 experience 

The show is well organized. Many things changed since Social Media Week London in 2015, which we reviewed too. The venue at Queen Elizabeth II Centre is wide and well-lit. If tired with presentations, one can just have a walk outside to admire Westminster Abbey, the House of Parliament and Pro-Brexit protests. The audience is pretty diverse. There is a number of people from big brands and big agencies, especially among those sharing their experience at the stage, but also many representatives of smaller companies. Long queues at the entrance in the morning proved the value of this event.

Social Media Week London, venue

The talks were interesting, inspiring and entertaining, even those by sponsors ?. With panels, well, it depends… AI is mentioned often. It’s not seen as a brand new technology anymore, yet as an essential prerequisite to work with the massive volume of social media data. This is actually very motivating and uplifting for us at Sotrender, as our strategic direction is developing our own technologies based on machine learning.

A nice expo boasts with a dozen providers, half of them being social media analytics or listening tools. Sotrender is one of the proud sponsors. In our booth, we demo our social media reporting, analytics & moderation tools. We also showcase how we can help marketers with our AI solutions, namely image recognition and natural language processing, in analysing and optimising marketing communication. Come and join us to taste some Polish sweets! ?

Social Media Week London 2019 – recap 

Here are ready takeaways for any social media managers directly form #SMWLDN 2019:

• One of the biggest mistakes while running ads? Changing settings & optimizing them too early after kick-off; wait 72h at least.
• Do consumers believe social media? Actually, we no longer trust influencers and celebrities, and it doesn’t just relate to Kim Kardashian. These are great times we live in, bros!
• There were also interesting examples, especially from OMD’s Matthew Breen’s talk, on how creativity and technology interact and collide in order to create effective social media messaging.
• User-Generated Content? Why not Employee Generated Content??
• Joy Of Missing Out (JOMO) is a new trend, especially among millennials, whilst FOMO is passé.
• A trend for 2020 should be rewarding positive contributors. It’s rarely happening now! In an era when there are so many negative emotions online and social media has taken over our lives, brands should appreciate any positive gestures and activities.
• 2020 will be a year of Tik Tok! (hopefully not) ?

Did you enjoy our recap? Or would you like to tell me it’s dumb and superficial? Just come to our booth at 4S!

Sotrender is a proud sponsor of Social Media Week events in London, New York, and Los Angeles, so expect more on this topic coming soon.

Let’s chat on Sotrender’s stand!