Social Media Marketing World is a must-attend annual conference for social media marketing professionals. John O'Reilly, Naomi Salad and I just returned from the 2016 event. 

The biggest takeaway is the big future for live video (a.k.a. streaming video).  Periscope and Facebook Live for events and Blab.im for webinar-type learning sessions.  

Live video was a discussion point in nearly every session. I most appreciated the tactical hands-on training we received from Kim Garst who actually had us do a Periscope right there in the session.  She also addressed how to become comfortable with video for those of us who don't have a shy bone in our bodies until the video camera comes on. 

Best live video tip below!

Five other takeaways from the two-day conference:

• While Snapchat still dominates on the younger end of millennials, it is not too soon for design and construction industry brands to start experimenting with it for activations and other special events.  (I'm personally experimenting with it and invite you to follow along for extensive posting of cat videos. At least for now.)  

Scan me! nora.depalma on Snapchat

• Cross-functional integration is an issue of urgency for large companies, as social media bridges not only marketing/PR and customer service, but also human resources as an active recruiting tool.   As it happens, HBR just did a blog post on this very topic last week.  
• Social media success metrics are nearly always measured in website clickthroughs through campaign tagging. Reach and engagement metrics are measured as an awareness tool at the early stages of the customer journey, much like public relations impressions. 
• Hashtags are an important listening tool, but impressions and reach by hashtag are not generally used for KPIs, given the difficulty in tracking across platforms. 
• Absolutely NO one, uses automated sentiment tracking.   One guy said, "It can't track irony and there is a lot of snark in social media." (For the record, we don't use it in PR measurement, either, preferring the gold standard of an actual human review.) 

My new way of looking at social media since the conference is to develop strategies based on two types of social media: engagement platforms vs search platforms.

• Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are engagement platforms, where users interact with content.  
• Pinterest, YouTube and Houzz  are primarily search platforms--people search for styles and products, more than they engage.