SOCIALMEDIAxSCIENCE was held on July 18, 2018 in San Francisco.

Featured Presentation

The Complexities and Challenges of Social Media Planning

Beth Mach – Chief Digital Officer, Initiative
Noah Mallin – Head of Experience, Content & Sponsorship, Wavemaker North America
Moderator: Paul Donato – Chief Research Officer, ARF

How do you design programs that help brands earn attention and have it pay off with measurable business results?  How do you bring brands to life using content and social media as fuel? This fireside chat delved into best practices on social media planning as well as opportunities and challenges in this space.

Key takeaways:

• Before starting a social plan, understand the business objectives – Look beyond marketing. Once you understand the business challenges, then you know what audiences to reach and the right story to tell on the right platform. For new product introductions, do testing first to make sure that it’s what people want and that it works.
• Think holistically. How will social fit in with the rest of your communications? Are you touching every single touchpoint of your desired consumer? How do different platforms work together? You should plan for different conversations for different time frames at different speeds on different channels and platforms to optimize engaging the desired consumer at exactly the right moment.
• Don’t think of media and content in siloes – They are connected to each other as well as influenced by external factors like culture and societal changes.
• Have a hybrid mindset – think like a planner/buyer. An increasing number of media planning activities are being automated and/or taken in-house by clients. But the core value of agency partners lies in their ability to be counselors to clients. Also, just because something is automated, doesn’t mean that it takes less people. Automation can help create time for planners to be more thoughtful.
• Be careful to balance facts and intuition. Don’t just crunch numbers. Understand what the numbers are actually saying, whether the data feels right, and communicate this throughout in an ongoing dialogue with your client. Without the layer of intuition, you are just meeting the numbers instead of breaking through. Also, if the client team has already experimented with things and have a “gut” feeling, take it into account.
• Have the right team/talent. You have to make sure that the talent in your organization can support the upstream conversation and how to implement on a platform.
• Know your strengths and weaknesses so that you can make the right partnerships when needed. For instance, it can be more efficient to co-produce with a media agency partner than doing everything in-house. Research from an independent, third-party can be more persuasive to clients.
• Walled gardens can be both an obstacle and an opportunity. Walled gardens inhibit your ability to understand consumers’ media consumptions holistically. However, big walled gardens allow you to follow the consumer path sequentially and avoid losing out on audience reach even when targeting granularly.

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