Last night we held our biggest event yet at the fantastic Saatchi building in Parnell and it was a really valuable experience for all involved.

We kicked things off with a few words from our gracious beer sponsor Monteith’s about how Social Media is only as cheap as the time you want to devote to it.

Next up was Rebecca Smith, who leads the digital and direct marcomms team at Telecom. She shared some fascinating insights into what it was like for during the XT network outages. She also gave some pointers as to what she has learnt from her Social Media experiences. According to her, it’s all about “picking the right people to look after your business’ Social Media presence.” Those who are ‘naturally’ on-message and on-brand are the people who need to be fast-tracked as digital voices for the company in question.

She also emphasised the increasing importance of speed in turning around press releases and mentioned that it’s a good idea to keep a low profile when learning the ropes in Social Media, which I thought was a very pertinent point.

Rebecca was followed by the effervescent David Farrier, entertainment reporter/ blogger for TV3 and bfm DJ. David talked about a whole range of topics, from odd cult movies to how platforms like Twitter have superseded his beloved gamer forums.

He also said something that I’ve heard before and definitely agree with: try not to tweet anything you wouldn’t want your Mum seeing. Very true.

Last on the podium was Vaughn Davis, creative director at advertising agency Y&R.

Vaughn talked about what we can learn about brand voice by keeping it real like Hurricanes star Ma’a Nonu’s recent expletive filled post-match interview.

Basically, it’s all about being real, open and transparent and engaging honestly with customers. If you don’t want to ‘open the windows’ to the outside world then maybe you should take a long hard look at what you’re doing that isn’t suitable for public consumption.

More on that here.

All in all, it was a great night and we are all looking forward to the next one – June 8^th featuring the social networks themselves.

If you have feedback you’d like to share or suggestions for events/ speakers, please drop us a line or leave a comment.

How do you calculate ROI when it comes to Social Media? How do you measure buzz? How do you quantify the seemingly unquantifiable?

I’m not sure. And I don’t think anyone else is really sure yet either. But there sure are lots of nice lists of brands ‘doing’ Social Media well.

This list from US event and community building company Social Fresh is an interesting starting point for debate.

They asked brands, agencies and vendors for their top three brands using Social Media and the usual suspects were there – Ford, Starbucks, Dell… as well as some that aren’t as well known over here in NZ. Like Best Buy and Chevrolet.

 The guys from Social Fresh make a couple of interesting points, which they found from the survey:

·         Judges looked, very often, toward mastering multiple platforms in concert

·         Car, beverage, and computer companies own the list

Their survey was by no means exhaustive, but it’s wise to note that simply having a presence on one platform isn’t seen as being different or dynamic anymore; it’s just standard procedure now. Also, the sectors with lots of resources are perhaps still the ones to create the most buzz because they can afford to facilitate different platforms.

Anyway, it’s been a area of debate in our office at Bullet HQ today. What’s you take on these sort of lists?

Now that there are so many free and good quality blogging platforms out there, will traditional websites one day be a thing of the past?

Even traditional websites, where someone buys the domain name etc., tend to be increasingly simple in terms of layout. This follows a consumer trend for clear and easy-to-understand messaging and functionality on websites. Presumably this comes from the saturation of content we face on a daily basis and people needing to disseminate information quickly. The next step in the road to simplicity is surely blogging platforms being used more widely by big brands.

There are some things blogging platforms aren’t yet internally capable of doing; having a back-end e-commerce springs to mind. However, I wonder if one day e-commerce functionality will be properly integrated onto blogging platforms like Posterous or Tumblr. (Here is a head-to-head breakdown on Mashable between Posterous and Tumblr for those who are interested).

Using blogging platforms does raise certain issues over who ultimately ‘owns’ the site, but maybe this will become less of an issue over time. Maybe having the ‘.posterous’ or ‘.blogspot’ puts people off as they feel it dilutes their brand. You can remove this from the url, but it will always have reference to the blogging platform somewhere on the site. I personally don’t see that as an issue and, in time, I think the vast majority of consumers and brands will feel the same: what matters is the core content of the site and it’s functionality.

What do you think?

How should you react if your brand (or your own persona for that matter) is being impersonated on Twitter or another Social Media platform?

Mike Werch was the imposter who tweeted as ‘HJ_Heinz’ for a couple of weeks, until Twitter removed his account. Here is an interesting interview with him on the prTini website.

How would you react if you were Head of Brand at Heinz? Would you get the account removed and try and bury the incident or (assuming they weren’t being derogatory about your company), get them on-board as a brand ambassador?

Heinz, for the record, have decided not to contact the Twitter imposter.