Cuker At SMMW

Recently, the marketing team at Cuker had the opportunity to attend the first ever Social Media Marketing World (SMMW) conference, which took place in our backyard of San Diego, California. The conference covered a variety of topics including how to improve your social media reach, connect with your social media community and organize your content. We came back to work after the event with some great takeaways. Here are just a few tips and trends we want to share with you:

##Katie: Be sure to connect with your audience through social media outlets. The relationships you build are key. Build an authentic, engaged community by sharing your brand personality, listening to what your audience is saying and responding to their needs. You need to be present in your social media community if you want your audience to care.

##Joni: Consider these 5 elements when telling your brand story on social media:

- Who: Identify your target audience and create a buyer persona.
- What: Create a mission statement to answer why your audience seeks your social channels.
- When: Always meet with your marketing team to coordinate and produce fresh, relevant content.
- Where: Just because multiple channels exist doesn’t mean you need to use all of them. Be strategic when choosing your channels.
- Why: Because your brand matters and your community needs to know it.

##Christina: Social media marketing is about humanizing your brand. Take risks and be creative! Pam Didner, Marketing Strategist for Intel said it best: “Don’t just collect your fans - activate them!”

##Janet: Be responsive. Today’s consumers expect social media channels to provide them with an instant connection to their favorite brands, from a friendly “hello” to customer services inquiries to technical product questions and everything in between. While 50% of Twitter users expect a response within 2 hours the average brand response time is on average 13.7 hours and 60% of brands do not respond at all!