Learning from social brands at Media Aces France

I’ve been digesting the wealth of info from Media Aces, the Association for Corporations and European Social Media conference I attended in Paris earlier this month. The aim of this event is to gather professionals (every 3 months) from corporations and encourage them to share their social media uses and progresses. It’s been founded by two leading personalities in the digital marketing space in France: Yann Gourvennec and Hervé Kabla.

Credit photo @FrenchWeb: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchweb

Media Aces is an important conference for anyone wanting to have real/concrete case studies and not only the hyped ones, so I suggest you to join the Linkedin group for updates.

Loic Moisand (CEO at Synthesio) did the first presentation with a focus on the different types of brands. He selected four criteria to label them: conversation volumes, sentiment, social media presences and the [comments/post] ratio. He underlined the fact that health brands were the most talked about, as reflected by the research in Molly’s blog post last week (example: Doctissimo online forums in France).

The need for carefully strategic dialogue was also reinforced by Deborah Drai (communications manager at Kapa Santé), especially as the legal environment around this is very strict. All shared content should remain independent and as honest as possible, but also informative and clear for the audience.

Philippe Incagnoli (marketing director at Wall Street Institute) talked about their immersion into social media. They mainly use it to engage in conversations (with individuals on Facebook) and avoid “just” pushing information. They also use professional social networking site Viadeo to find HR directors and/or Training Managers, aiming to start conversations about how their service could be interesting and to follow-up. One essential rule is that they don’t go for too many tools but stay focused on their goals and priorities first.

The last (and very entertaining) talk (by Nicolas Sauvage from Reed Smith) was about the legal aspects regarding social media. It raised a couple of very important questions:

• What if a salesperson creates a Facebook page for himself, without asking if it’s ok with the company? Interesting or to be forbidden?
• What are the impacts of social media activities on the working hours and the contract of employment?
• Should we exclude any uses of social media at the office?
• How to avoid confusion between personal and professional uses?

The main take-out was that there still are many questions and few answers, so it’s essential to start experimenting and learning ourselves.

With this in mind, there’s a similar session being run by WOMMA UK in London this Thursday 21st October at 9am, when ReACTS, the leading advertising compliance team at Reed Smith, will be presenting How can companies navigate the social media minefield? – exploring the benefits and pitfalls of social media in the workplace. It’s free to attend but places are going fast so check out the WOMMA UK website for further details and how to register.

The more case studies and learnings we can all share, the more quickly we can all learn and grow…

Brought into the world on Monday, October 18th, 2010 and filed under Events.