This year Social Media Week’s global theme was “Language and the Machine” which was brought to life through a week of inspiring talks, presentations, panel debates and workshops. iris participated in the conversation by presenting 2 workshops and 2 mainstage talks covering a variety of topics around the theme.

We kicked things off on Tuesday morning with “PBS: Serving the Public in the Digital Age,” a talk between Dipti Bramhandkar, iris New York’s Head of Planning and Don Wilcox, Vice President of Digital Marketing and Services at PBS. They sat down together and explored how PBS is adapting to technological trends, and how they’re using them to engage with their audience on different platforms. They dug into how the member organization is unique from traditional commercial broadcasting, particularly in the context of today’s saturated and fragmented media landscape, and reaffirmed the importance of PBS’s commitment to award-winning journalism, especially in the current socio-political climate.

Later in the day Mike Giannone, iris New York’s Chief Strategy Officer, gave a workshop titled “How to Get the Market to do the Marketing for You,” in which he presented our recent Participation Brand Index (PBI) to an audience of sixty highly-engaged attendees. During the first half of the session, he explained what it means to be a Participation Brand, and defined the 5 pillars of participation (Passionate Purpose, People Powered, Culture Shaping, Category Innovating + Distinctive Character). In the second half, he opened it up to the audience, encouraging them to select two brands and assess their participatory nature against each pillar. What followed was a dynamic and interactive conversation. Workshop attendees walked away with an understanding of the PBI study and an insight into how brands should and can give consumers something to buy into rather than just something to buy.

Our last speaking slot of the day was a “How to Pull Your Very Own Trump,” a talk from Adam Abrahami, Managing Director of Concise New York, iris’ business consulting arm, about how Trump used data driven marketing to win the election. He examined the Trump campaign’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica, a privately held company that combines data mining and data analysis with strategic communication to win elections, and discussed how their involvement has forever changed political campaigning. At one point during the session Adam asked the crowd “What if fake news was designed and implemented to identify the most vulnerable voters?” and the crowd reacted audibly, perhaps fearful about the possibility of the answer being yes.   

On Wednesday afternoon, Adam returned to SMW to deliver “Putting Digital Back In The Boardroom: Making Digital Metrics Matter,” our final workshop of the week. This time he left politics at the door and spoke about how to package up performance metrics in a way that has resonance at board level. He showed attendees how to give their award-winning, best-in-class campaigns the kudos they deserve. During the second half of the workshop he took the audience through the frameworks, approaches, and strategies used to develop campaign KPIs, measurement metrics, and reports that executives not only pay attention to, but talk about.

Keep an eye out for us next year!

by iris Worldwide