Social Media Integration

The Social Media Integration, a conference recently held at Kennesaw State University, line up was filled with the top social media experts and top companies from around the world. They covered everything from the basics, the intricate and the innovations in social media. Social Media Integration was hosted by the Sustainable Journalism Center at KSU, which will host SoCon 2011 in February.

Among the most notable presenters at Social Media Integration were Shiv Singh (@shivsingh) with PepsiCo., and Olivier Blanchard (@thebrandbuilder) of The Brand Builder. Oliver spoke on the misconception that social media does not have a significant return on investment. Oliver believes the reasons for this misconception are that most companies do not build a proper strategy, and either do not have a monitoring solution to track their data or do so inefficiently. When planning a social media strategy for a company, the goals set by the company must be able to meet the data in which they are collecting. Companies need to look at a monitoring platform that can be integrated on multiple networks in order for the data to be accurate and useful.

Day two of the conference began with Shiv Singh who is the author of “Social Media for Dummies”. Shiv mainly spoke about the Pepsi Refresh campaign, which has been a huge success not only for Pepsi, but the projects and communities that Pepsi has helped support. For the first time in twenty years, Pepsi did not run a commercial for the Super Bowl, but chose to use Pepsi Refresh instead. Pepsi was so pleased with the Pepsi Refresh campaign that they have extended the campaign through the end of 2011. Fans of the Pepsi Super Bowl ads can rejoice because they are returning for Super Bowl 2011. After Shiv’s keynote, multiple break-out sessions took place throughout the remainder of the day. The break-out session on legality issues in regards to social media was interesting. The basics surrounding what is and isn’t legal under the law regarding social media is still largely undefined and awaiting precedence in the U.S. legal system. The two obvious companies who are bringing social media legality to the forefront are Facebook and Twitter.