Social Business Summit CEO Address—David Eldridge, Alterian

Social Business Engagement Summit CEO Address—David Eldridge, Alterian set the tone of Alterian’s 2010 User Conference, Engaging Times Summit, with these highlights:

• The change of control we’re witnessing is a major societal change. Young people immerse themselves in social media, don’t watch TV at all.
• Brands have lost trust, and there is major misalignment, too much marketing speak.
• Collaboration is the thing now, people don’t want to be interrupted (by marketers). Brands need to reduce broadcast and increase listening.
• Only 5% of people trust advertising, while 88% of people would like to help firms create new products. Consumers want to interact, it’s independent, individual interaction.
• The U.S. has highest adoption of social media—and the lowest trust level (in legacy marketing, brands).
• There needs to be a new kind of agency that excels at creative, analytics, strategy; maybe it’s called a customer engagement agency (CEA).
• Clients need a roadmap that describes the process of using (social) technology.
• Social media is beyond marketing knowledge, it’s a new kind of information, and technology enables people to get engaged.
• All processes are at risk (for firms that don’t understand this change and that don’t offer deep, genuine engagement).

Thoughts

• David cited some pretty significant Alterian social media research, which I highly recommend.
• David only spoke for 15 minutes, but he covered a lot of ground and hit the key points: definitely not business as usual and CMOs to get that and act decisively have an unusual opportunity.
• Loved the concept of a “roadmap.” ,^)

This is part of a series of my notes and thoughts on Alterian’s Social Business Summit 2010. To see all of them, hit the Alterian tag (also in the gray box under  any post in the series). Next up: the legendary Stan Rapp’s keynote.