Meltwater Social Media Festival – Summary

Lance Concannon Lance Concannon, Marketing Director, Europe

If you’ve previously attended one of our annual Social Summits in New York, London, or San Francisco, you’ll know what inspiring and informative events they are. Because of the challenges of this year we were unable to do another live event, so instead we created the Meltwater Social Media Festival, and we called it a festival because we think this year, of all years, social deserves to be celebrated.

The two day event began on October 6th with the second day taking place on October 13th – all of the sessions from both days are now available for on-demand viewing at the event hub.

 

Day One

Our keynote speaker opening up day one was social media marketing expert, Neal Schaffer, whose session “It’s Time to Reset How You Measure Social Media ROI” asked marketers to reconsider how they measure the success of their social media campaigns.

Neal was followed by Facebook’s Weronika Sobolak, who shared some inside tips for success with her session “Marketing Strategies for Success on Facebook’s Family of Apps.” Her advice included starting with clear objectives and KPIs, and using data and insights to understand consumers, with some case studies to show us successful examples.

Next up was Instagram marketing expert, who gave us her advice on how businesses can get more value from the image sharing platform, including liberal use of hashtags and improved photography skills: “Make Instagram Work Better for Brands.”

Leo Morejon, Senior Manager of Social Media Marketing at Applegate came next with a session encouraging people to see the wider value of social listening platforms, beyond just the marketing team: “Social Listening as a Business Tool.”


The day’s penultimate speaker was our own Chris Caro, a product specialist at Meltwater Social, who presented a deep dive into the value of podcasts for brands, along with some practical suggestions for how marketers can begin to work with the fast growing medium: “Why Brands Need to Listen to Podcasts.”

The final session was presented by Tammy Luke, a Senior Social Media Researcher at IBM, who gave us a case study on how IBM used social data to build audience insights for ESPN’s Fantasy Football game: “Play to Win with Audience Insights: A Fantasy Football Case Study.”

Day Two

The second day began with content marketing expert and founder of MarketingProfs, Ann Handley, giving us her advice on: “Storytelling in a Chaotic and Unpredictable World.”

Davitha Ghiassi from agency, Red Havas, took a deep dive into Facebook Groups, explaining the value of this tool for building branded communities, with some great tips and examples of how others have used them: “Cultivating Community Through Facebook Groups: 5 Best Practice Principles for Brands.”

Next, Carmen Collins from Cisco gave us a fascinating presentation on the power of employee generated content, explaining how Cisco uses it as “proof of culture” to help attract and retain the best talent. “The Circle of Goodness: Employee-Generated Content.”

Twitter’s Paul Bowes came armed with a mountain of social data to explain “What the Public Conversation on Twitter is Telling us About the 2020 Holiday Season” – showing us how its possible to use Twitter data to make predictions about consumer behavior.

Next Callie Schweitzer from LinkedIn got into a popular topic at this event, community building, with her presentation: “How Brands can Build Authentic Communities in 2020.”

Finally, to close the Festival, Danny Gardner from GlaxoSmithKline went into a lot of detail about how he built an in-house social intelligence capability for the pharma giant, and gave us some great case studies on how the company uses social intelligence across its portfolio of consumer healthcare brands: “Unleashing Social Intelligence as an In-House Capability.”

It was a great session to wrap up two days of social media insight and advice. We had a lot of fun putting this event together, and even if you weren’t able to attend the live stream we hope you enjoy the on-demand recordings.