Speed Summary / Mitch Joel on Social Media @ Social Commerce Summit

Here’s a speed summary of Mitch Joel’s (Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image) talk at this week’s Social Commerce Summit, with advice on how to adapt your digital marketing strategy for today’s social-powered web.

1. We need to reboot digital marketing, Control-Alt-Delete it, and build new digital platforms with social features that allow us to 1) promote real communication between real people (not brand-pap) 2) market to people who want to be marketed to (brand/category fans)), and 3) help those people to market to each other

2. Ultimately, social media is not about conversations – social media is about enabling and empowering people to share things and thus making them more find-able to others. The opportunity for digital marketing is to assist in this enabling and empowering, and thus provide real value to people

3. Social media is not about tomorrow’s shoppers, it’s about today’s shoppers – more grandparents on Facebook than high school kids.  Silver surfers have taken to social media in a big way – like Neo in the Matrix, right down the rabbit hole they go…

4. Just as e-commerce transforms retail (Amazon Prime turns all shopping into impulse purchasing 1-click to buy and get it shipped, return it for free if you don’t like it), social media transforms e-commerce by changing peoples expectations – shoppers expect social features to help them make smart choices

5. But social media doesn’t mean people are becoming agnostic to brands, and more focused on price; social media does not undermine brands and margins, social media can build brands and margins (Apple) because it amplifies and accelerates word of mouth about stuff worth talking about

6. Together, social and mobile digital technologies have a transformative effect on e-commerce; untethering e-commerce and making it smarter – mobile barcode readers that provide reviews, geo-local comparative shopping data (e.g. Amazon’s Snaptell), augmented reality apps that work as shopping assistants (e.g Yelp).

7. Build your social media strategy with Google Goggles on; Google is not a search engine, Google is your home page (people navigate from Google search directly to the page on your site they want), Google is your brand (it’s what Google says about you, not what you say about yourself that defines your brand, and Google is your brand experience (the mix of comments, positive, negative and neutral that make up the results page). Google is your business card (contact details)

8. Successful social media strategies focus on who you reach, not how many people you reach; two key targets – brand fans (customers who love you) and category influencers (example; Joel, as a seasoned traveller on speaker circuit recommended the Eagle Creek Tarmac 22 as the perfect bag for the business traveller to a fellow speaker Chris Brogan, who not only bought it, but reviewed it online for his readers – many of whom were also business travelers themselves. 158 retweets later, Eagle Creek Tarmac 22 is now a top consultant/speaker luggage of choice. Lesson; target networks with social media by influencing the influencers, not the masses.

9. Simplicity is the key to a successful social media strategy – why are Facebook, Twitter (and Google) so popular? The answer is simple, because they are so simple

10. Building a social media strategy; key questions you need to answer; Who are you are you trying to speak to, not how many but who, how do you connect to them, how are they connected, what can you do to fundamentally add value to their experience – it’s about what you do, not what you say.