Alltech Discussion Dinners Get Social

Chuck Zimmerman

Damien and BillyDiscussion dinners on a variety of topics were held last night at the Alltech International Symposium. I attended the Communications dinner which had a focus on social media. Pictured are our discussion moderators (l-r) Damien O’Reilly and Billy Frey. I will be sharing an interview with Billy in next week’s ZimmCast.

Our dinner discussion provided an interesting insight into what people in agribusiness know, or think they know, about social media. Most of those in the room were either personally involved or professionally in their business. Some comments that caught my attention included:

A European participant said that not many farmers are involved in social media. I don’t know what the environment is across the pond but here in America I would disagree with that to a certain extent. So many farm companies and member organizations have been conducting training programs and encouraging farmers to get involved in the online discussion that I believe we have “a lot” of farmers involved in social media.

Another participant wanted to know how you “control” what people are saying about your company or products. Control is a red flag word to me. You have no control! No matter what your desire is, you can’t control what people are saying. However, Billy made a good point about how you can “manage” the conversation by being involved and engaging people even if they write something negative about you or your company. I always say that they’re going to talk about you whether you join the conversation or not.

A student participant startled everyone by telling us to “get off Facebook.” She said there’s no way you can believe anything you read on it and she didn’t like the idea that a company would check up on an applicant by looking at their Facebook page. Sorry, young lady. Facebook along with other social media channels are open to everyone and I highly encourage you to be careful about what you post anywhere. On the point of believing what you read, I agree to a certain extent. You need to be careful about what you read and that includes product reviews. One participant was sure that his competition was paying people to write negative comments about his products online. He didn’t have proof though. But I certainly believe it does happen. I’m just not sure how much.

It was a very good discussion but showed me that there is a long way to go when it comes to companies integrating social media into their marketing communications mix. One other comment that I appreciated was on the subject of ROI for social media expenses. He asked why it is that companies don’t have a clue what the return is on their advertising expenses for traditional media and yet want to know exactly how many widgets they sold by investing some dollars in social media. Good question. It’s kind of like a double standard. Several participants said that their use of social media had positive returns for their business.

Follow the action on the Alltech Innovations Blog, including photos, interviews and there will be live streaming of certain sessions.

2011 Alltech Symposium Photo Album

Alltech, Social Networking