LSS’11 Day 2 Report & Trends for 2012 (free, 34 pages)
This report covers all seven session from day two of Local Social Summit 2011 (LSS’11). Additionally, we have pulled together our view on the most important trends to watch in 2012 - including:
Incumbents are at risk
Data is everywhere
The rebirth of local
Mobile broadband
The next Internet arrives
The death of daily deals
Social outsourcing grows.
Plus this covers our 2 session on social network analysis and one on Big Brand Local, which is 2012 evolves into “big brand social” and raises questions around how best to leverage Facebook without spamming your friends/customers/community.
LSS’11 Opening Talk - Day 2, Session 1: The First Digital Olympics – London 2012 & the BBC
This is a recap and key insights from the opening talk on Day 2 of LSS’11. With only 122 days to go until the Olympics we figured it was high time to get this post published. To kick things off we think this video with Idris Elba from The Wire is nice way to start the excitment.
Opening Talk - Day 2, Session 1: The First Digital Olympics – London 2012 & the BBC
Speaker: Tim Plyming is the Project Executive; Digital & Editor Live Sites in the BBC’s London 2012 project team. He leads the day to day activity of the ‘Digital Olympics’ project which is responsible for the delivery of all 2012 content across digital platforms including online, mobile and connected TV.
Background:London 2012 will be the first tablet Olympics, the first connected TV Olympics and the first 3D Olympics. The BBC is the host nation broadcaster of all the Games and have one amazing year planned for 2012. Tim provided LSS’11 attendees with a sneak preview of the BBC’s plans.
LSS Key Insights from this session:
London 2012 in the first truly digital Olympics.
100% of the content will be available. That’s 3000 hours of TV.
A massive four screen event with HD video at the heart of it.
All the meta data will be made available plus custom page for each athlete making for a rich data experience – “a wiki-Olympic-pedia.”
This will be a social media Olympics. People will be adding to the official content.
There will a local angle – both in the UK and globally. This includes the torch relay, outside local screens and how fans interact with the events.
London 2012 will show the way for future Olympics. Innovation from London will lead the way for Brazil 2016.
Session Summary:
“We’re calling the 2012 Summer Games the first truly digital Olympics, because 2012 is also the year we switch off the analogue signal [in the UK]” explained Tim Plyming, project executive, digital & editor live sites, BBC London 2012.
2012 Massive Digital Content Year in the UK: But that only tells half the story. As Plyming explained, the amount of content generated by the Olympics is equivalent of six World Cups happening every day for 16 days.
“In fact, 2012 is a massive year from the start of the summer,” he said. “It starts with the analogue switch-off in April, then there’s the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in June, when our operation will be four times the size of the one for this year’s royal wedding [Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding in May 2011]. Then there’s the 70 days of the torch relay, which will be when the Games comes to people outside London, and which will be a huge outside broadcast operation. After the Olympics there’s a two-week break and then the Paralympic Games. And then there’s all the events of the Cultural Olympiad. Every outside broadcast truck in Northern Europe will be in London next summer.”
100% of the Olympic Content Available: For the BBC, the London Games will represent a step change in the amount of material it broadcasts. “The Olympic Broadcaster creates 3000 hours of television,” Plyming explained. “For the Sydney Games, we were only able to show 300 hours of that. By Beijing, we showed half of it. In 2012, our commitment is to allow people to watch everything live – up to 24 different events at a time – and the internet will be a broadcast-critical service for that.”
Four-Screen Event: Plyming also explained that the BBC is thinking of the London Games as very much a four-screen event. “The Coronation in 1953 was the first mass TV event, and there was one TV per street. 2012 will be another defining moment in the move from analogue to digital broadcasting. “The heart of it will be the video services. There will be 24 HD feeds, immediately on-demand. It’s the basis of the iPlayer service taken to the next level. Then mobile and tablet will be a complimentary experience. Users will be able to pull up the commentator information service, and we’ll do video where we can.”
Content Enrichment – “wiki-Olympic-pedia”: The other big step forward will be the amount of metadata about the Games that the BBC will make available to the audience for the first time. “The commentator information service has always been privileged information for the commentary teams. It’s how commentators know all the statistics and details of the events,” Plyming explained.
“We’re stripping it out and providing it to viewers, allowing them to pull it up alongside the video. Then we’ll allow the audience to play with that. It’ll be interesting to see how all the platforms are used, both separately and together, and it’ll be useful to see how content trends across those devices. There’s such a huge amount of content that we’ll be seeing trending as a means of navigation.”
Social Olympics: Plyming is also interested in how social element will change the content, on top of that, how the fact that people’s devices know where they are will affect the way the data is sliced.
As well as all the data from the commentator information service, there will be a page for every athlete from every country, with all their stats and all the video of them from the Games, both live and on-demand.
Local Olympics: Beyond this, Plyming said, are the big screens. There will be 30 of them around the UK, and the BBC sees part of the role of these screens in reaching out to expat communities, what it calls “Find the world in London.”
“There will be one million Russians in London next summer, so we’re expanding the outdoor experience in Hyde Park, allowing communities to watch what they want to watch across six screens. Half of the 204 competing countries have communities of more than 100,000 people in London.”
Response to Questions: In response to a question, Plyming said that the BBC would like to do a lot with social media around the Games, but that it was restricted by the IOC’s concerns about video leakage. Instead, he said. All the data would be shared and that would be used to drive people back to the BBC coverage. This led on to a question about monetisation, which he answered by saying that the BBC was looking to commercialise “the London story”, what Plyming referred to as “what’s outside the fence” via the BBC Worldwide. But he admitted that the BBC having sole UK rights did pose a problem for sponsors.
London’s Impact on Future Olympics: He also said he sees these Games as a staging post for the future. “It’ll be interesting to see what these Games mean for next Summer Games in Rio,” he said. “We can try lots of things and see how they work, and Rio is looking for UK companies to see how they can help with the 2016 Games. It’s a big opportunity for people.”
Please note: this session summary will also be part of our LSS’11 Day 2 conference report that we will publish in April - if you want a copy please email info[at]localsocialsummit[dot]com or contact Dylan Fuller.
LSS’11 Day 1 Report & Trends for 2012 (free, 39 pages)
The LSS team finally published the LSS’11 Day 1 Report. Below is a copy (embeded from Slidshare). The report also includes a set of awesome insights and trends to watch in 2012, helping to make it relevant 4 months later. You can download the report from Slideshare and also from DropBox (its a pdf, 1.3mb).
Please feel free to share this report. To quote it and repost. We would be grateful for any comments and feedback. Just email us on info[at]localsocialsummit[dot]com.
Here are some interesting stories that we followed this week. All of which we’re adding to our “watch list” - if they become important or significant we will report back.
Local Social Summit also released our first report on LSS’11 Day 1 & Trends to watch for 2012 [FREE pdf download, 1.3mb, from DropBox]. More on this next week.
Everplaces is a new app that essentially functions as a Pinterest for the real world. It lets you capture and store places in the physical world that you want to keep track of, whether that’s a swank bistro in your hometown or a boutique in Buenas Aires that always has the best cutting-edge fashions.
[Note: this is the third post in a series which will recap key sessions from Local Social Summit 2011. We intend to publish 4-5 of these recaps here, before a final full report on LSS’11 will be publisher later this month. The report will cover all LSS’11 sessions. Update on this: we plan issue a report on Day 1 LSS’11 tomorrow, followed by Day 2 report in April…]
Recap and Summary from Day 1, Panel 5: Super Social Business – Field Studies
Leader: Dylan Fuller, Co-Founder Local Social Summit
The Super Social Business panel brought together four entrepreneurs who are using social media to power the growth of their businesses. The aim of this panel was to highlight real case studies from business owners using social media that all have some link to local. These businesses are probably all outliers, they are innovating and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. These are super social businesses. Two of the speaker (Stephen & Daniel) were alumni who had spoken on similar panel at LSS in 2010.
Session Summary:
The discussion started with introductions to each business and speaker to set the scene, first by Dylan and then each entrepreneur spoke,
Stephen Leighton, Owner Has Bean Coffee:
“In the past we focused very much on educating our customers through social media,” he said. “When someone buys coffee from us, we send out a video of me talking about the coffee so we’re tasting it together. We’re now taking our business into cafés, so we’ve made a couple of videos explaining to café owners what we offer and shared those via social media.”
Daniel Young, Founder Young & Foodish:
Young explained that he had been a New York-based author writing cookery books before he realised how competitive that was. He relocated to London and launched a pop-up restaurant business. He looks for “greasy spoon” cafes to take over for an evening, then brings in top chefs to cook one café-style dish for each event, recruiting the audience via social media.
Ben Hopkins, Co-Founder Naked Wines:
Hopkins was originally one of the founders of Virgin Wines. “That’s where we made all our mistakes,” he joked. He described Naked Wines as “a farmers’ market for wine”. “It’s a community of wine lovers and wine makers. We recruit customers via partnerships with other online businesses, either through vouchering, paying commission or paying advertising fees, and we also promote like-minded businesses to our customers. “We’re trying to cut the 33% sales and marketing cost on a bottle of wine and give that back to the customer, and we do that via an investment model. So we have “angels” who are our regular customers and their money is invested in allowing winemakers to make the wine they want to make.”
Eric Partaker, Co-Founder Chilango:
Finally Partaker explained how he had been inspired to launch Chilango by working at Skype. “There’s nothing revolutionary about what I’m doing, and that was what struck me about Skype. VoIP had been around for a while, but Skype just did it better than anyone else. “We use feedback via social media to improve the business,” he said. “I do all the Twitter management myself. I used to worry about what I should say, but then I decided I should just talk.” Everyone on the panel agreed this was a crucial point.
Authenticity is Key:
“People buy from people, and that’s what builds a brand on Twitter,” Leighton said. “Having your own voice is super-important. I’ve done 156 video podcasts now; I edit them myself and people know that I edit them myself, they know it’s me talking.”
Building Businesses Around Community:
Young pointed out that the link between all the businesses represented on the panel raised the issue discussed earlier in the day, that each is built around a community. “It’s about interaction and engagement,” Partaker said. “There’s so much choice that loyalty happens through the restaurant experience, and through keeping a relationship with customers afterwards.”
A delegate asked what the panellists thought of Groupon:
Hopkins replied that, while it’s the same model as Naked Wine, it’s not an audience he wants to promote to. “I think Groupon’s got a limited life,” he said.
Partaker too was unimpressed. “I don’t think they’re local enough; people walk five minutes to our restaurants,” he said. “The type of people Groupon attracts are just looking for the next deal, so it’s not attractive to me to sell them food at a 60% discount.”
The rest of the session focused on how the panellists balance the time they spend on social media with the other aspects of running their businesses:
Partaker picked up on a point made earlier in the day by Dennis Yu. “It’s a huge trap to make social media justify itself,” he said. “It’s just a tool that allows you to do the fundamentals of business more effectively. In terms of ROI, it’s hard in the restaurant space, which is a cash business, when you give people a voucher. Are they going to come back?”
Hopkins reinforced another view from a previous session, that people think there’s something strange going on if they can’t find you on social media.
“We don’t sell through Facebook or Twitter; it’s more about them being another channel,” he said. “Also people would question why if we weren’t there. But social media is also starting to look like CRM. We’re finding our customers defending us against criticism online.”
The extension of the question about balance is whether social media can be outsourced. One delegate asked if the panellists would have outsourced their social media activities from the beginning, if they could. Partaker replied that he would have done, because he was scared of what to say in what was new medium for him. “Now we’ve tried PR people doing social for us, and the tone-of-voice they used was off, and our followers noticed I, so I do it all myself.”
Young admitted he’d made loads of mistakes in social media, but he argued the same mistakes would have been made even if he’d outsourced, because he’d have told his agency to do the same things he did. And he learned from his mistakes. “People have to figure it out,” he said.
Hopkins too rejected outsourcing for similar reasons. “It’s really important to do social media in-house,” he said. “That’s the way you get the skills to run your business. Absolutely get advice, but at the end of the day it has be your voice.”
And Leighton echoed the point. “Social media has nearly killed me,” he said. “If I could outsource it I would, but there’s no PR company or social media agency out there that knows as much about coffee, about the effect of altitude, about the different varietals, about the roasting process. “What we’ve done rather than outsource is add more people in house to help me with the social media workload.”
Here are the top 3 quotes and seven (yes its always 7) main insights from the Search vs. Social panel at LSS’11… [Please see previous post for the full recap on the session.]
1.
Social media is a return to the way commerce used to work in the past…
-Kelvin Newman, Sitevisibilty
2.
If you strip out the brand effects, the conversion rates for social and search are similar.
-Grant Muckle, UpCast Social
3.
In social media, you know who the consumer is, but not what they’re going to buy. In search, you know what people want to buy, but not who they are. So you need different strategies for both.
-Dennis Yu, Blitzlocal
The Insights:
Social media is about word mouth marketing.
Social media is an overlay for everything else.
Social media is an important customer acquisition and retention/CRM tool.
If a business doesn’t have a social presence then people will think there is a problem.
It’s not a customer funnel but an hourglass. Funnel starts with acquisition to a waist (a transaction) and then the other side is retention (social CRM).
To make social work you need great content.
Panel agreed you should use both social and search as a business
