CM1 Toronto Recap

By Lauren | May 23, 2014 | 1 Comment

Yesterday marked the second CM1 Conference in Toronto. For those of you that are unaware about this conference, it is hosted by The Tite Group, FITC and DX3. This conference was developed to bring Community Managers together for a full day of presentations and networking. There was about 9 speakers this year, plus one panel of three Community Managers. I would love to write endless amounts of reviews on all of the speakers, but instead I’m going to go through some of the key takeaways from my favourite presentations of the day.

The 10 Golden Rules of Engagement
Presented by: Clarke De Pastina, VP of Engagement at Ipsos SMX

Clarke defined the 10 rules of engagement in his presentation. He stated that these rules are the most effective when worked in conjunction with one another as oppose to separately.

• Demonstrate & deliver value – make sure to ask yourself, “would I do this?”
• Build relationships – share about yourself so others are comfortable sharing about themselves.
• Be transparent – make sure you aren’t missing context in anything you do, this way you don’t come across as hiding something from your target.
• Involve the brand – 2 way conversation between executive and brand.
• Show impact
• Recognize & reward – make community members famous within your community.
• Write engaging content
• Communicate regularly – include a strong call to action.
• Refresh the member base – don’t let the number of followers give you a sense of being comfortable.

Tapping Into Your Community for Support
Presented by: Andrew Zimakas, Chief Marketing Offices at Tangerine

For those of you that are unaware, with the recent sale of ING Direct to Scotiabank, ING had to undergo a re-branding. This presentation when it depth of how ING Direct turned themselves into Tangerine with the help of their current customers and staff. The 3 top takeaways of this presentation were:

1. Be kind to your community before you need them. Therefore, you’ve already built a strong relations and foundation with them that they’ll be more than happy to help you out and advocate for you when you need it.
2. Build your community online and offline. Make sure your prime focus is not just to build your online community but also your brand awareness and community offline.
3. Employees are your biggest advocates.Utilize your current employees to help advocate for you. Tangerine had all their employees on board, keeping them in the loop during the entire process.

Tangerine’s new position to ensure to their customers that they were still the same inside was; “The only thing we’re changing is our name, everything else is just getting better.”

FYI – take a look at the linked slides for this presentation as there’s a lot of great videos that explain the re-brand.

Building a Community Management Organization
Presented by: Keith McArthur, VP of Social Media at Rogers Communications

In this presentation Keith broke down how they conquer community management in a business that is so large that one Community Manager is not enough. Here’s his 5 tips to developing a great community management system that can be applied to businesses large or small.

• Give Your Org Ears: All good conversations start with listening, be sure you know what to say and when to say it.
• Mind the Hippo: A hippo refers to the “highest paid person’s opinion”. Make sure you know why you’re taking to your customers.
• Live the Bridge: Put yourself on the side of the customers and become the customers advocates, even when they may be angry about something.
• Embrace Boring: Process, structure and measurement are often the boring part of a Community Managers job but learn to embrace it for optimal results.
• Unfail: How can you take a super negative situation and spin it to be a positive one?

Surprising and Delighting Your Community
Presented by: Mitchell Fawcett, Founder & Agency Director at Motive Communications

This was a particularly interesting presentation as Mitchell took us through ways you can surprise and delight your community by going that extra mile and building even stronger brand advocates. Mitchell took us through ways you could turn a negative into a delight or just add value to your customers and community while emotionally connecting with people.

Mitchell discussed how easy it is to learn more about the people in your community. You can go to someone who “likes” your page on Facebook’s profile and see their likes and interests. Take those likes and interests and find a way to make that customer feel like a rockstar. An example was Edge Shaving Gel and their Solve Irritations campaign. Which basically consumers typed in random irritations they had, and Edge would send solutions via mail for these issues.

Mitchell suggested to prioritize who you can surprise and delight. Look at new customers, loyal customers, customers with past complaints or milestones etc. Target a few people and go out of your way to learn more about them and create an exceptional brand experience.

Many businesses don’t take their time to appreciate the people of their community but it goes a long way.

How to Build a Community with YouTube
Presented by: Bob Cornwall, Brand Activation Lead at Google Canada

Bob offered us ways to really use YouTube to your companies advantage. He went through 5 ways to help build your YouTube community:

• Define your target strategy – look at your targets world, and your world, then see where they meet in the middle
• Structure your content strategy – dividing your content into Hygiene, Hub and Hero content. Hygiene being content that’s the most frequent, always there and available. Hub being content that happens multiple times through the year and is regular content to easily push. Hero content being content designed for max reach and are your “go big moments”.
• Don’t just create but curate and collaborate
• Don’t expect engagement – ask for it!
• Be relevant and find trends – watch and look at analytics

Influencing the Influencers
Presented by: Casie Stewart

Casie is a social media director, speaker, innovator and blogger extraordinaire. She chatted about how to utilize your brand influencers, and online influencers to help improve your brands presence. I found this presentation very interesting as Casie chatted about what it’s like being an influencer for different brands and how brands can benefit from utilizing their influencers. A few key points that stuck with me from Casie’s presentation:

• Find people that already love your brand and are naturally already talking about you. These are your best influencers.
• Give your influencers an experience so they have something to talk about and create a lasting memory. For example: Express sent Casie to Justin Timberlake. Yes she wore Express clothes, but she also got this awesome experience from Express that left lasting memories about their brand with Casie.
• Don’t expect influencers to write about you. Sometimes influencers may just not like your brand or product therefore not have anything to say about it.
• As a brand; research, invest in people, create experiences, develop relationships – no one night stands with your brand.
• As a influencer; be yourself, talk about budgets so you’re getting paid, trust your gut and don’t sell out on anything and everything.

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