I am Fred's Bow Tie - Part 3 (the Finale!)
Cliffhangers are the worst! Sorry to keep you hanging. Here’s what happened:
No, I did not get onstage, nor backstage.
And got this sweet pic with security:
And as it turns out, there were a TON of people who looked just like me at the show (hipster nerds!):
No comment on this last pic. I just had to include it... just because.
In all seriousness, seeing the band Fun. was the perfect way to end a week-long conference of meetings, sessions, vision-setting, demos, customer meetings, hands-on labs, and general carousing. Fun!
Back in IAFBT – Part 1 we talked about goals and metrics. I had a personal goal with FBT to “gain more followers”… Which developed into “drive fun and excitement yet provide value to conference-goers”... But those are words, not numbers. I saw my Twitter followers increase from about 150 at the start of the conference to over 400 by the end. Not too bad. And thankfully, we have a whole social media team who was able to articulate goals and numbers in a much more quantified way. Thanks Kelly Rigotti and the Social Media team!
Fred’s Bow Tie Results for Convergence March 3-7, 2014:
478 @FredsBowTie mentions!
I may not be great with numbers but I am super competitive, so I took these numbers and compared them to the rest of the Convergence social metrics and found some positive and not so positive results. For example, my number of retweets was 23% of the conference’s overall retweets (with hashtag #conv14). But my reach overall was only 1% of the overall conference reach. Meh.
With social media, the path to success is to get your content shared across a lot of people that gets them to DO something. Expose -> Influence -> Engage -> Action/Convert. So without the reach, the influence and some sort of conversion measurement, who cares?
Was this an enormous waste of time?
Maybe, maybe not. My goals were: have fun, drive excitement, and provide value to conference-goers. I believe I did that according to my favorites and retweets. But it was an incomplete goal without the So What. So what kind of business impact did I drive? Is that every fully known? Should I have sprinkled in calls to action in my tweets? Should I have had some links on hand to drive folks to more content, downloads, webcast invites? Maybe, but then it may have taken away some of the authenticity and spontaneity.
But not all hope is lost. Let’s get back to the “provide value” part and see if we can do anything there.
First, I’m looking at business value in context of the technology. Here are some examples:
CRM “Leo” release in Spring Wave ’14 is for Online AND On-Premise customers – 15 retweets, 3 favorites.
Options to avoid autosave in CRM 2013 – 9 retweets.
Form Diagnostics shortcut – 5 retweets.
But then there’s value in making the audience feel special. Examples:
Attendee Love – 10 retweets.
Customer Success at Delta – 11 retweets.
Shout out to Umberto Milletti at Insideview for their great partnership – 7 retweets.
Based on the content shared in highly retweeted posts we can derive “So What” value and drive specific follow-up actions. We can take follow-up actions as a business to ensure that our existing customers, partners, and prospective customers understand that the Spring Wave ’14 release for core CRM functionality will apply as an on-premise update (this wasn’t the case in early communications). We can look at providing more tips-and-tricks type content via blog posts and webcasts to power users around diagnostics and autosave options. We can continue to build and share great customer and partner stories.
And we can always, always find ways to make our audience feel special by complimenting their successes and thanking them for being with us.
Because with amazing customer experiences, it comes down to this:
People will forget what you said
People will forget what you did
But people will never forget how you made them feel.
And in leveraging social media to drive business value, perhaps connecting with people emotionally is the most important thing.
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