Like Minds - morning session summary

Like Minds - morning session summary

So, the morning session of Like Minds is over and we’ve covered two interesting presentations which have generated a fair amount of debate.

First up, Jonathan Akwue, the “digital thinker director” of Digital Public, offered “an outsider’s view of social media”. He took a challenging stance, insisting - to gasps -that “Digital technology does not always make things better”. Jonathan cited the example of self-service checkouts at supermarkets, which may have created cost-efficiencies for supermarkets, but are a source of consternation for many frustrated shoppers (although several Marketing Donut correspondents actually said they like self-service checkouts).

What social media has done, however, is release the inner gangsta rapper in all of us. Like hip-hop, social media have given ordinary people the means to control the channel of communication and to get their personal message ‘out there’ in an unfiltered form. Social media are “open source” and they are transforming the way we communicate and interact with each other:

You can use social media to change people’s lives,” Jonathan claimed. “You can use it to save people’s lives. We can make massive behavior changes."

Unfortunately, if you have such an open source communication channel, you need to be prepared for what people are likely to say – a point many corporates have yet to really grasp.

Jonathan was followed by John Bell, digital PR guru for Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence Team, whose “Time for a strategy - Beware social media tokenism” presentation focused on the need for businesses to generate and measure proper business impact through their social media presence.

Citing the example of ITunes on Facebook - which has three million fans - John challenged the easy view that numbers equal success. “Does this really mean three million people are engaged?” he asked.

He went on to stress the need for businesses to find appropriate ways to measure the impact of their social media activities and to only continue with activities that actually have a measurable business effect. Otherwise they are simply tokenism.

His presentation gave rise to interesting discussions around the value of having a social media policy and the kind of voice you should adopt on Twitter, to which several of our followers contributed:

@atkirby I think it's important to try and sound like a human being on Twitter, not a robot.

@7db Like biz attire: Wear (voice) what (how) your customer does.

@global_lingo  Strong selling isn't the way forward but for B2B that can be a struggle.

So that’s it for the Like Minds morning session. We’ll be picking it up again shortly – please do follow our live coverage.

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