Social Media Week

Social Media Week kicked off on Monday and here in London there are more seminars and events than you can shake a stick at. Once you've discounted the sales pitches your still left with a handful worth attending.

One such session was run by Ogilvy at the Design Council yesterday. It featured a panel including Amex (who recently launched the Link Like Love app), IBM and Ford (who launched the Explorer 2011 on facebook). The hour long discussion gave an interesting insight into how big businesses have adapted to the seismic shift in brand communications created by the rise of social.

Three things of particular interest...

1. Social was equally important internally - used in the right way it can galvanise the workforce internally and have a huge impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of internal process, even more so when different global offices are collaborating on projects

2. Culture eats strategy for lunch - coined by Jon Mell of IBM, i liked this phrase. We've all been there - it doesn't matter how good your strategy is, or your social team are, or even how switched on your marketing director is... if the culture throughout the business isn't right, the business is unlikely to accept change and in turn, is unlikely to embrace social. So that means getting buy in from the top down and engaging everyone within the organisation be it through the CEO using You Tube videos at Amex, employees writing the social media guidelines or reverse mentoring.

3. Measurement is still a challenge - this is turning into a real bug bear for me. Too many speakers and agencies are talking about social in a way that carefully sidesteps the golden question about proving return on investment. The client knows what they're getting when £200k goes into TV or into a sales promo, so it's only fair they understand what the return is if it goes into social. Ford's Alex Hultgren gave a well reasoned argument for taking the debate away from ROI and into long term employee and consumer value and the notion of 'calculated risk taking' and constantly working in Beta were interesting points that I'll return to in a post at a later date.

In the meantime, if you fancy attending an event, they run until Friday night and most are free, just sign up here.