Remember last year I told you about the 10 Things I Loved at Malaysia Social Media Week? Well this year I thought I’d share some of my key learnings from the panel sessions I attended too, so here we go!
PS. You can still win my awesome #geekchic MissMalini tees here, just tell me why you love Social Media! 🙂
1. FIGURE OUT WHO YOU ARE, FIRST.
Entrepreneur and Social Media Strategist – Evan Carmichael made us do a very compelling exercise during his “Money for Honey” panel session. First he asked everyone what their one word biography would be and then helped us find it (before he took off to salsa the night away that is!).
Here give it a shot: find the one word you find in common when you think of the books you love, the movies you watch, the friendships you keep and the quotes that inspire you. When I did that, it became clear to me that my one word is LOVE 🙂 Leave me YOUR one word biography in the comments below and tweet it with #MSMW1word to join the conversation now.
Why? Because once you know this about yourself, you can use it in all your social media messaging or even apply it to your brand campaigns!
2. FIND YOUR TRIBE.
My pal Sid Shah had an awesome session called “Glitter on Twitter”. He made some excellent observations about how celebrity-brand relationships work saying, “the celebrity-brand combo is very powerful, but figure out if their tribe matches your brand.” He used the HRX example and revealed that “there is no correlation between likes and revenue.”
He also noted that Rihanna‘s Twitter following is TWICE the population of Malaysia! And my favourite comment was, “in India, we use celebrities to sell everything from toothpaste to cement.” Hahaha too true, too true – so I couldn’t resist and tweeted this 🙂
A great example (shared by Shane) of celebrities not taking themselves TOO seriously is James Blunt who responds to his trolls in a funny snarky way 🙂 I like!
*LOL* +1
3. The Twitter Beast
Everyone has been trying to figure out the mystical world of Twitter and as the Shane Dallas aka The Travel Camel rightly said, “Twitter is a very difficult beast to master.”
Scott Eddy who runs his own digital agency (and has over 350,000 Twitter followers) exclaimed that, “before I see something on CNN I’ve already seen it on Twitter. Twitter is it!” I also loved this example he used about finding your customers, “follow your competition, see how engaging they are. The best place to open a Burger King is next to a McDonalds!” Makes sense no?
4. Be Human.
Well hasn’t Salman Khan been saying this forever? Just kidding 🙂 But the fact is, the resounding take away from this year’s social media week was this, “the company that is successful on social media is one that comes across as sounding human.”
I couldn’t agree more! In fact here are a few examples I used in my own presentation where brands came across sounding fun and real and people responded mega positively!
When KitKat noticed a fan had tweeted about her love for both Kitkat and Oreo they cheekily tweeted the competition challenging them to a game of tic tac toe!
Oreo replied by taking a bite out of the Kitkat “X” and even though they never played, they both won the hearts of loads of Twitter followers who absolutely LOVE when brands sound REAL and even more when they interact with each other. In the end, both brands came off sounding supercool and friendly! #WinWin
In fact, I ended up eating a Kitkat myself last night (after years) while watching Robocop in the mall theatre, just because I remembered this interaction when I was buying snacks, see it works!!!
Same goes for Burger King & Jeep who recovered from a massive Twitter hack last year and instead of issuing a plain Jane apology, tweeted each other like two pals. And just look how many RTs and favorites it got them!
Clever no? And btw same goes for the impact Burger King has had on me. I recently ate there over McDonalds because I recalled this interaction and it swayed my choice!
PS. I hope you appreciate that I’m totally revealing my chocolate & junk food addictions to you for the purpose of this blog btw 🙂
5. Blogging is an Art, So Blog With Heart.
My panel, in fact, was full of inspiring bloggers Shane Dallas, (The Travel Camel), Sue Lynn (Bangsar Babe) Kounila Keo (Blue Lady Blog) and Jose Antonio Diaz (Our Awesome Planet). I even tweeted a few key takeaways while I was on stage with them…
And I’m so glad people liked my slides 🙂 yay!
Here’s the whole quote…
Meanwhile I particularly enjoyed Shane Dallas (The Travel Camel’s) demonstration which lived up to his belief that, “travel writing is story telling that brings a destination to life. Effective blogs evoke emotion.” And that’s exactly what he did with is riveting tales of Afghanistan and Somaliland.
Plus he said he’d name his camel after me, so I’m sold 🙂
I Love SURPRISES!
Now take a look at a few fun surprises at Sunway Pyramid that I really enjoyed, including this case of Redbull that my wonderful peeps with wings sent me when I Insta/tweeted a picture of an unusual gold Redbull can.
The massive ice skating rink showed off some mega talent on display in the form of young skaters doing wonderful spins! I used to love ice-skating back in the day (in Ivory Coast of all places) so that brought back memories 🙂 check out my instavideos here!
I loved being on this panel of social media jedis, sharing knowledge and making friends I’ll take along with me wherever I go in my virtual world 🙂
Plus I got to wear my super #geekchic tees which was SO much fun 🙂
Can’t wait to come back for an even bigger and better Malaysia Social Media Week in 2015! Thanks for all the love Shahul Dawood and for being such a fabulous host every year 🙂 xoxo