CMO roundtable discussion on social media

Drew Neisser, President of Renegade, led a breakout session entitled, "Leveraging Social Networks in this Economy." (Note: that's NOT Drew in the photo.) He first asked what level of social media engagement CMOs had in the room. And it was a huge range from nothing to "kicking butt and taking names."

To see YOUR social media quotient, take The CMO Quiz.

It was a round table discussion where everyone was offering some input. Here's a summary of some of the insight and questions:

• Being present in social networks, you're not changing the behavior of what they're doing. You don't have to drag them somewhere else. You're catching them in the environment where they're already interacting.
• One company asked customers what their horror stories are and they took those stories and turned them it into a weekly online cartoon strip.
• First inclination of a company was to ignore social media. But then quickly realized that consumers are savvy and they can sniff out B.S. and they couldn't ignore social media.
• One company cut back press releases by 50% and increased the number of videos. And for those remaining press releases, they made sure they include the videos. Wasn't extra resources, just a realignment of resources.
  
• Social media release allows you to embed multimedia beyond just ASCII. One other CMO tried it and said it didn't dramatically increase their coverage.
  
• If you're creating videos, you want to make sure people are seeing them. You need to concern yourself with distribution.
• On negative comments associated to your brand, sometimes you just have to let customers' comments ride. But when it's your employees making negative or off target comments, you need to step in.
• If the goal is to drive revenue through social media,
  
• Suggest responding to RFPs with multimedia. In one case of a Google RFP, videotaped an employee using Google's services to complete the RFP.
• Give a reason every single day to come to their Facebook page, blog, etc. They constantly have events.
• Who has nothing to say, joked one CMO?
• Have a clear path to ROI before you even embark on social media.
• Social media is about talking with and engaging. It's not about marketing to. If you do start marketing to then you lose your audience.
• People started admitting to mistakes and I pointed people to an article I wrote for Mashable entitled "Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus."
• Another recommended story that I wrote from Mashable that got a lot of coverage is "Sixteen Great Twitter Moments."

Check out all coverage at The CMO Club Peer to Peer Summit.