Smash Summit Attracts the Best Marketers & Brands in Silicon Valley

Smash Summit, which was held in San Francisco yesterday, explored social media marketing strategies, tactics, tools, & campaigns used by successful online companies to acquire and retain customers on search, social, and mobile.

Some of the speakers included Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang, Google's Hunter Walk, Twitter's Anamitra Banerji, Facebook's Bubba Murarka, Mattel's Cynthia Neiman, Dogster's Ted Rheingold, RockYou's Lisa Marino and Paul Kim from Automattic.

Also on stage was Marcus Nelson from Salesforce, Comcast's Frank Eliason, David Lifson from Postling, Rowen Payson from Virgin America, Rashmi Sinha from Slideshare and Victoria Ransom from Wildfire.

Payvment's Christian Taylor talked about the use of shopping carts to enhance your campaigns; one simple line of code embedded on your web page transforms into a shopping cart system without a lot of effort. You can use it to sell your products anywhere or with affiliate/referral links to increase your affiliate revenue.

It's important to create social sharing components in your copy: the more social your copy is, the more effective your click through rates will be. He used an example of how KISS in the 1970s made their fans become part of their army. The same thing applies today but online -- create your army and keep them satisfied.

A few Facebook fan page tips for big brands: give users an incentive to become a fan of your brand by offering exclusive deals or merchandise. This can triple engagement as well as up the number of fans. For example, Pampers offered 1,000 diaper packs for $10 each on its Facebook store and in one hour, they not only sold all 1,000 diapers, but got 1,000 more fans.

20,000 brands & retailers have launched stores on Facebook, 120,000 searchable products have been added to Facebook, and there are 400,000 Facebook users shopping across these 20,000 stores.

Google's Hunter Walk talked about how to more effectively broadcast your business on YouTube and how it should be part of your overall SEO strategy.

Rule #1: create the right content and make sure it’s the most effective it can be in the YouTube environment. He reminds us that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world with over 1 billion video playbacks each day.

So, what is a content strategy? Creating something people want to watch AND helping others create content for you.

Sure, you have to create something that is not only compelling in a YouTube environment, but also authentic, the overused but still relevant word when 'playing' on social media platforms. Being authentic is not enough however.

The basics: create a YouTube channel, upload demos, make sure you offer lots of content so there are more opportunities to engage with people and offer value through fresh content. Other tips include showing some behind the scenes visuals and audio, such as interviews and amusing moments.

A few takeaways -- ask yourself the following questions:

How does your product relate to what people are talking about & searching about now?

Are you adding the most relevant meta data - description and tags?

Once you upload your video, are you participating in your community?

There is higher value in the comments people leave behind - you want to make sure you are participating in those discussions. You should have an anchor video (for your anchor, you should shoot for 5K+ views, which will help you surface in search and related videos and ultimately lead to more organic traffic.

You should also cross-promote your videos on Facebook, Twitter, your website and blog. You can auto-share your uploads, favorites and other links directly to other social networking sites. According to Hunter, for every auto-shared tweet, they see about 7 click backs on YouTube. You can also promote your video by getting a custom overlay which will improve your conversation funnel. You can then check your cost-per-view in your content and maximize/tweak it to get more click throughs over time.

Salesforce has a YouTube presence and with over 300 videos and more than 6,000 views a day, that's roughly the equivalent of 35 hyper-efficient sales reps on the phone.

Twilio's Jeff Lawson talks about how their solution is the intersection of communications apps and web developers. They have over 10,000 developers and are currently being used by Sony, 37 Signals, Tumblr, SalesForce, Duke and more.

With Twilio, you can call people from Twitter. We see a demo of Lawson calling Dave McClure who has opted into the system, directly from Dave's Twitter account.

Twilio allows you to use social media to connect to people you already know. He then shows the Zappos Twitter page and talks about how Zappos could have analytics around the content is reading when the person calls, i.e., Customer X was reading this particular tweet when he called Zappos. It's an interesting way to connect social media with voice and SMS.