What happens in Vegas does not need to stay in Vegas!

If you’re a traveler, a travel industry expert (or interested in all things travel) and you tweet, you likely already know about the #traveltuesdays hashtag. To add my own ‘social spin’ to #traveltuesdays and join in on the conversation, we’re starting this weekly post all about the travel industry and the social web.

To kick off, I begin with the EyeforTravel’s Travel Distribution Summit North America 2011 in Las Vegas, also known as #eftamerica. This popular and well-attended travel event is perfect for connecting with industry folks in the travel, transport and leisure world as it relates to social media.

My self-imposed goals were simple. Listen, measure and engage. Oh, yes I know, those are the same three golden rules of social media that we keep whispering in your ear. But this time, I took these steps a step further and engaged with these industry experts IRL (‘in real life’).

I listened in on great sessions and discussions (more to come in another post), measured the conversations happening around #eftamerica and I engaged. Oh boy, did I EVER engage.

As we have been talking a bit around the Radian6 blogosphere lately about social connections and social talent, I thought it was only fitting to share my first hand experiences in that arena.

To start, I began tweeting about the conference before it happened. This established my presence before I even entered the event and by keeping up with the tweets, I was able to start establishing relationships upfront.

By the end of a two day conference, almost all of the 600+ attendees recognized my face and Twitter handle. I was also awarded a lovely prize from EyeforTravel for most/best/craziest tweets (actual title can be disputed).

The ROI of tweeting at a conference = a bottle of nice champagne.

Social connections online are incredibly important when we venture into the face-to-face interactions. As we expand our networks and grow our true reach, it is no secret that having a following is crucial. Everyone is vying for your attention online, so how are you planning to get the right attention?

In-person social connections enable you to meet people you might otherwise have never had the pleasure of engaging with – even online perhaps. Those bigger-than-140-character-or-less conversations are valuable to create and deepen relationships.

There were 1,636 tweets at #eftamerica. (And only 254 of them were from me!) @CravenTravels hit 175, and #eftamerica’s very own @Rosieakenhead had a whopping 119 tweets.

Merging online with in-person connections is valuable. I have formed new travel relationships that I believe will be solid for a long time ahead.

Jenn Seeley is a Community Engagement Specialist in the worlds of travel, transport, leisure and entertainment. She still gets excited every time she flies. You can tweet with her as @jenn_seeley.

Did you attend #eftamerica this year or in years past? What were the most valuable connections you made? Please share!

We’ve always said that our community is of major importance to us and it is. We love seeing the same faces in our social streams and enjoy the great feedback we gain on daily basis. Dreamforce 2011 gave us a unique advantage to not only engage with our current customers, but meet new people that might not be part of our community yet. The benefit of the journey towards being a social enterprise enables you to grow your communities.

With an event as massive as Dreamforce, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and find comfort in your well known and trusted community. But we think fighting against this urge and meeting some new folks is the way to go. What are some ways to make sure you are engaging with a new community during an event while still maintaining your existing one? We thought you’d never ask!

Share, Share, Share
We know sharing on social media is something we say over and over again, but when you are engaging with a new community of people, it’s a great way to start off a relationship on the right foot. It’s like telling your new friends all your stories from high school. Old friends may groan when you retell the “and then we jumped over the fence..” story, but it’s guaranteed that the new person in your group will enjoy the story the first time around.

Start with a Question
You want to get to know someone? Ask them about themselves! At an event, everyone is there for a reason whether it’s because of current work responsibilities or career growth. Start a conversation by simply asking what brings them to the event.

Be the Middle Man
When you make a new connection in your circle of friends, you generally introduce them to everyone else you know. When you’re at an event, why not do the same and introduce your new connection around? Not only will it allow the new person to learn more about your community, but it may provide them with really valuable connections.

One great thing to see from our community was the leaders in the social media industry. They were lending their voices to connect with this new community that came from Dreamforce. For us, that was a way of sharing, asking questions and being the middleman around subjects we love! Of course, as always, our community feedback is most important. So while it’s fresh in your mind, we’d love to know –  What brought you to Dreamforce? What was your favorite social session? Who would you like to meet next year?

Perhaps this blog title is a bit paramount. Defining the social enterprise is a large task and one that may not come to a common consensus. It’s like finding one definition for the word “success.” The definition of success is different to each and every one of us.

Today’s post is not about defining the social enterprise for all but from one relevant point of view: Dreamforce 2011. Now this is paramount. The world’s largest cloud computing event filled the streets of San Francisco last week and plastered the town with the phrasing: “Welcome to the Social Enterprise.”

The rationale for this phrase is simple. Since Dreamfore 2010, the rapid adoption of social platforms became even more apparent, changing the way we do business. It’s a social revolution. Dreamforce jumped on the social wave and took along it’s 45,000+ attendees for a few days of understanding, experiencing and capitalizing on this movement.

Dreamforce 2011 was about transforming your business into a social enterprise.

For Salesforce, the father of this annual user and developer conference, the social enterprise is defined by a roadmap made up of many key parts. Let’s take a drive.

Collaborate

Have a shared vision of your business future that permeates all areas of your organization. The social web affects each and every department so ensure they all play a role. Incorporate social elements into marketing, finance, HR, sales, service, etc. and see how your internal and external collaboration grows.

Connect & Sell

Understanding your customers and their use of social media will enable your business to join their social experience and connect. Developing relationships, sharing ideas and stories and gathering feedback can all happen on the social web. Instead of trying to get that information elsewhere, such as on your website, go to your prospects. Don’t wait for them to come to you!

Service & Engage

Feedback, compliments and complaints about your business are happening online. Find these conversations and join them! Use your customer service team, support staff, marketing and community teams to engage with customers. You’ll gain insights, address customer challenges and develop deeper customer relationships as fast as real time.  

Automate & Extend

The social web can be an extension of your business and serve as your eyes and ears. It’s on the ground, in the trenches and housing the conversations around your brand. Use this to extend your presence, your service and even your selling opportunities.  Using automation technologies, such as RSS feeds and social media aggregators, you can reach your audience further and faster.

Listen and Analyze

With all of these prospect and customer conversations happening across the social space, it’s important to listen, measure and analyze. As Chuck Hemann noted in a recent guest blog post, “The foundational element of successful digital programs is listening…It’s a proactive engagement mechanism to be sure, but at its roots, listening is a method for us to gain valuable market intelligence and benchmark our success.” For more information, check out last month’s eBook, which dove into analytics.

Social Marketing

Since it’s likely that a bulk of your prospects are using social media, it seems like an obvious place to go for brand promotion. But hold on. It’s not like other media and shouldn’t be treated as such. Social media is all about two-way conversations. It’s a place for sharing and relationship building. Therefore, find a balance between promotional messages and engaging with your community. Consider a promotions calendar to balance the weight between promotions and engagement. Lisa Barone, co-founder and chief branding officer at Outspoken Media, Inc. says “Far too often SMB owners fall victim to innocent (and very preventable) marketing mistakes that cause them to lose potential customers without even realizing it.” She has some great tips on what not to do in her blog.

Product and Partners

Working with great partners and products will only escalate you in your journey to becoming a social enterprise. Partners can share insights to your roadmap and provide opportunities across your customer base and beyond. Products, much like technology, are a critical factor in the social enterprise. Your business will use technology to connect with colleagues, customers, prospects and each other. SaaS (software as a service) joins together the idea of technology and collaboration. As part of Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled new products in the SasS arena that serve as “a vision for the social enterprise that brings together social, mobile and open cloud technologies,” as stated by Government Computer News.

Do you feel these key parts make up the social roadmap? Are there other steps along the social enterprise journey that you’d add on?

Dreamforce was a visually-stimulating, insight-packed three day adventure and what better way to sum up some of the excitement than with some eyeball-popping photos? Here we go.

The Cloud Expo was packed with registrants and excited vendors and sponsors. It ran all three days, all day, with over 275 booths to experience.

Our booth was in amongst the expo excitement. Here, Tom Hasselman shares some demos.

There was lots of fun swag to grab at the event, including the Radian6 iPad covers! Jon McGinley and I share our shiny new cases.

Salesforce rang the NYSE closing bell.

Some great meetings with some great collegues. Jeff Cohen, Jason Falls and Dave Thomas take a moment to smile for us at our booth.

Metallica preforms on Wednesday night, August 31st.

If you’re looking for more visual excitement, check out more pictures and videos. Enjoy!

Did you attend Dreamforce or a large conference recently? What did you think? Do you have photos to share?

It is awesome that I have the chance to attend Dreamforce 11, the world’s largest tech conference with 45,000 registered attendees, with my new Radian6 colleagues. But what has been even more amazing is watching the Salesforce.com and Radian6 Community teams in action.

At this conference, we keep hearing about the importance of incorporating Radian6′s social DNA into Salesforce.com. This is the first step in Salesforce.com becoming a social enterprise, so they can help their customers create a roadmap to do the same. And while many people think of Radian6 as a social media monitoring platform, the community engagement functionality of it is pretty critical to social media success.

Watching our onsite team practice what we preach is a sight to be seen. I sat in the social media command center, overlooking the trade show floor, while Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff gave his keynote address. In addition to the in-person attendees, it was estimated that 35,000 people were watching this event streaming online. Radian6 mentions started popping up throughout the keynote, but once the Radian6 demo started, the community team’s dashboards were flooded with mentions. The calm and professional way our team dealt with this event got me thinking how their approach to this real-time event applies to any large marketing event.

Common Understanding of the Goal

With any marketing campaign, especially one that involves a significant number of tactics, it’s important that everyone work toward the same goal. In this Radian6 example, the high volume of chatter did not change how the Community team approached any single post. All engagement had a consistent company voice. The job was not solely to move things along as quickly as possible. These are the types of things that can get cloudy if you don’t understand both the tactic goals and the strategic goals, and how they relate.

Preparation Cannot Be Underestimated

With most situations that marketing teams encounter, even ones of huge importance like a being part of trade show keynote or a product launch, there is plenty of time to prepare. Plans are written with strategy, goals, tactics, and metrics of success included. The one category that is frequently left out of these plans is the process. What are the roles of each team member during the launch? Do other company members have roles? Is the sales team ready to respond to their customers? Are there any messages or links that can be written or collected beforehand?

Our Community team is familiar with a series of steps to take with every online mention. The macros, a set of tasks that can be accomplished with one click, are already set up and are second nature to them. This makes a high pressure situation easier. They do what they know, but faster and more often. Their experience and preparation allows them to scale their speed without a loss in quality. Anything that can be done ahead of time that makes it easier to approach the event is worth considering.

Ongoing Communication is Critical

As communicators, we understand that communication is key to accomplishing anything. If you don’t tell your customers or online followers about your new products or services, how are they going to know about them? The same is true within a marketing team. Communicate the goals at the start, so everyone is pulling in the same direction. Communicate throughout the organization, so everyone is informed. Keep the lines of communication open throughout the campaign or event and constantly review what is going on, in case changes need to be made. Communicating lets you iterate faster to make sure you meet your objectives.

This was one place where our Community team really demonstrated their star quality. Everyone had their roles and were keeping up. Things got busier and there were questions between team members offering to help. And not just once, but every few minutes. You got that one? Everything still okay?

Everyone is on the Same Team

The above example from our Community team would not have gone as smoothly if they did not work as a team. They are called a team and they act like a team. Do whatever it takes for your marketing group to feel like a team. Every group has natural leaders and natural followers, but the sense that they are working towards a common goal and succeeding as a team goes a long way to getting them to act that way.

While this is a real-time example where everything is happening fast, the next time you have to create a marketing plan, think about these ideas so you can improve both your execution and your results.

What are some pointers you recommend during a high-volume moment for your brand? Is this worked into your strategy? Share your thoughts!

Walking by downtown San Francisco’s Moscone Center revealed an awe-inspiring sight. The massive sea of eager faces blanketed the streets with the blue backdrop of the Dreamforce 2011 color scheme. Yes, it was day one of the world’s largest cloud computing event and a few sessions, demos, presentations and booth visits are already under our belts.

But today’s post is not a recap of those sessions, demos, presentations and booth visits. We’re looking to you to give us your debriefing on yesterday’s kick off day! So use the comments below to write your synopsis. Whether you’re an event staff member, a Radian6er, a customer, partner, colleague or just a Dreamforce dreamer, we want to hear your thoughts. After all, isn’t the social enterprise all about collaboration? Join in!

“When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town, down around San Antone’….” ahhhh, who doesn’t love the Doobie Brothers? Their hit “China Grove” still kills it to this day, almost 40 years after its release. Take a quick dance break, and watch it here – you know you want to!

What’s interesting about the tune is this – singer/guitarist Tom Johnston wasn’t completely aware that he knew a “China Grove” when he so named his sleepy little town. He said this in an interview: “The funny thing was that I found out in 1975 in a cab in Houston that there really was a China Grove…..in 1972 we were touring in Winnebagos, and we were driving into San Antonio. And there is a China Grove, Texas, right outside of San Antonio. I must have seen the sign and forgotten about it.” A case of subliminal messaging perhaps? If China Grove had been a brand instead of a town, its marketers would have died and gone to heaven.

San Antonio, Texas is where we start our tour today, and where the annual Eduweb Conference is held – this year on August 1st to the 3rd. This internationally recognized event for the higher education community attracts those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology. So, it makes sense that Radian6′s Director of Community Lauren Vargas will be there, as well as Account Manager, Business Development, Barry Pope, and Salesforce.com Account Executive Joseph Kogut. Radian6 is proud to be among an incredible lineup of sponsors for this important event.

Continuing our music theme, we keep spreading the news, and on August 8th Radian6 VP of Strategic Alliances Ed Sullivan, and Manager, Strategic Alliances Bob Faigel head to the Big Apple for CRM Evolution. If you’re attending also, you will come away with strategies that will help you streamline business processes, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, prepare for customer trends that are reshaping the marketplace and leverage the latest technologies that will change customer relationships. And heck, you get to do all that in one of the greatest cities in the world.

And what would a little music/event roundup be without a hat tip to the city that started a revolution in contemporary music? The birthplace of grunge, Seattle spawned such talents as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, to name just a few. And Seattle is where you’ll find Blogwell, on August 9th. You’ll also find Tom Hasselman, Product Marketing Manager at Radian 6, and Shannon Hofmeister Sr. CSM, Strategic Accounts. We’re thrilled to be able to help sponsor an event that, according to some past event attendees, is “A great forum for social media professionals to collaborate and learn from each other’s lessons and successes.” and “The most valuable source for staying current on B2C and B2B social marketing techniques in Fortune 500 companies.”

So that wraps it up for this edition of Where in the World is Radian6. In the spirit of all that is great in music, as well as the astounding pace of change and innovation that those of us in the social media world live in daily, we leave you with this quote:

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.  ~Lily Tomlin

It must have been an amazing thing for the young British sailor aboard The Endeavour on April 19th, 1770. After a fitful night on the storm tossed seas, he awoke to a miraculous sight – an uncharted country of wooded hills and gentle valleys. It was, of course, Australia. And in no time at all Captain James Cook set about populating this strange land with boat loads of Brits, and doing to the indigenous people what conquerors world wide have been doing for centuries. But that’s another blog post for another day.

This blog post is about history and journeys of another sort, though it does begin in that amazing land down under, where I’ve been told there are scary spiders the size of dinner plates. Thankfully, we have a dedicated and fearless team of Radian6‘ers in Australia, and they do the Southern Hemisphere event hopping for us scaredy cat northerners.

The Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre, Darling Harbour, Sydney, June 23rd to 26th was where you found Radian6’s Vice President – Asia Pacific Business Development, Charlie Wood. With him was Salesforce.com’s Matt Loop, Vice President, Corporate Sales to Drive Customer Success in Australia and New Zealand. They were attending the Photo Marketing Association International conference and co-presented a talk about, what else? Cloud computing.

Speaking of Salesforce, two Cloudforce Essentials events blew by us this week in Brisbane (July 12th) and Melbourne (July 13th). At each event there were leading sales professionals, customers, and the opportunity to have your toughest questions about cloud computing answered by their team of experts.

Back in North America now, the San Francisco Bay area played host to Digital Pharma West (June 27th – 30th) and Radian6 was happy to be a sponsor. A mashup of leading pharma marketers and the most cutting edge topics in digital communications, the event was attended by our own Director, Agency Relations Craig Comeau and Manager, Business Development, Mike McGinn.

Radian6‘s Senior Partner Relationship Manager Robin Seidner was in Park City, Utah shortly after the Fourth of July for EVO 2011 – The Evolution of Women in Media (July 7th – 9th). Self described as “a conference that blends workshops, networking, parties and the wind-in-your-hair relaxation that can only be found by spending summertime in the mountains” it sounds like a great spot for an annual event.

And finally, to wrap up July, Rob Begg, Director of Sales Support for Radian6 will be attending the  Masco’s Digital Media Conference, July 26th in Michigan.

Watch for another “Where in the World…” update in two weeks. Happy travels for the rest of the summer, and try not to do any conquering while you’re out there. Oh, and watch out for spiders.

Note: I might have made up the part about the dinner plate sized spiders. But I’m not going to go down under to find out.

Last week we shared our tools of the trade on sampling data for effective analysis when dealing with large data samples. Gathering the right data, and using the right tools can save you time and precious resource in the long run. To do this we’re launching a range of webinars to help you make sure that you are getting the most out of Radian6. Understand key features of the system, how to use them and in return maximize the benefits.

Whether you are undertaking social media on an ad hoc basis or monitoring and engaging daily there are several ways in which you can optimize your use of the system. Our webinars are designed to help you make the most of the investment you have made. The 30 minute sessions will assist new users, provide best practice for existing users and present the latest upgrades and development for Radian6. Our weekly webinars will cover: (more…)

At our recent event Customer Service 2.0 | Proactive and Social, we highlighted and explored the principles behind the move towards social customer services and the impact this is having on engagement and business strategy across multiple industries. We also explored the idea that social media is less about the form of technology utilised and more about the interactions between individuals in this medium.

As the event clearly highlighted, effective communication in any medium (be it social media or otherwise) is multi-faceted and involves using facts, insight and feedback to inform on-going strategy. As such, we wanted to share with you some feedback from the event. We feel this feedback gives a valuable insight into important issues within social media customer service and the varied aims our delegates have, when embarking on their own enterprise-wide social media strategies.

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