SASCON 2016: The Candidate Live Blog

Day one at SAScon, a lot of ground covered! Read on to learn about Chat bot's, Search marketing, paid search, PPC, Paid Media, Social Media, Display, Analytics, Tag marketing, influencer marketing, CRO, native advertising, virtual reality media and much much more. Read our live blogging from sessions here! 

SAScon is a two day Social Media, Search and Analytics conference, this year held in the MMU Business School on Thursday 16^th and Friday 17^th June 2016. Now in its 6^th year it has become a must in any Digital Marketer's diary. We are here to keep you updated on what is happening and you can do this by following this our live blog, that we will be updated constantly throughout the day.  

08:30 Stand set up and ready to go....

09:32   

Richard Gregory welcomes us to the 7th SAScon event!

What's new this year: play around with technology!

09:37

Talk to the SASbot - use the Messenger app and ask questions about the event! It's the first UK event bot. Like the SAScon facebook page first and then get started!

09:39

09:40

Lawrence Jones from UK Fast is welcoming us all

Manchester businesses have become number one for technicity and it is events like this where we can bring ideas together.

"Let us be the Manchester search company"

People demanded: Rather than clicking through each page, can you give us search results?

Speed is in our DNA of the company and we are here today because to meet fantastic people to create business ideas. Manchester is famous for creativity! It is the creativity up here that gives us the opportunities. I always thought: as long a i outsmart and outthink people we can achieve absolutely anything. Go out there and have fun with search, share everything you have learned!

09:50

Jim Banks from GROOVE is taking to the stage! This is his first speech in the North!

09:49

"There's no fool like an old fool". Making mistakes is where we learn how things work. So we're gonna talk about paid search, but how businesses works.

09:54

Follow Jim banks on Twitter @jimbanks and please follow him on LinkedIn as well

09:56

PPC history!

This is how websites used to look like! Blue and yellow were the perfect contrast colours (back then!)

Organic search was very important back then. But paid is getting big now. Back in the day, according to Jim Banks, PPC was Porn, Pills, Casinos.

In 2005, PPC was so simple displayed on the search engine result page.

This was the coolest search tool we had back then!

10:05

I built my summer house on one keyword! The keyword costed me 10 cents: Teletrack

Teletrack is like a credit racing bureau. I call this a Unicorn keyword! Which means that it is a keyword no one else have found.

10:14

Best Practises for today's PPC landscape

This is how paid search looks is now!

Don't be obvious! Don't name your campaigns - "Top 10 keywords" unless you are throwing your competition curve ball. Think about how you can be better than everyone else! Find out through their data analytics. Use the human factor - Man will win over machine, every time. Use labels to "group" your cool stuff, keep the campaign/adgroup structure.

2. ZAG vs ZIG

Don't do something just because search engine tells you! Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can work...Always use dedicated PPC landing pages - Devoid of fluff and don't just import Google to Bing and think you are done. It is a starting point! All platforms are different.

 3) TAKE RISK

Always be testing hypothesis and be friendly with the search engines! Get on Betas. Be prepared to make mistakes and set aside ROI = 0% budget for tests.

TOP THINGS TO FOCUS ON

Extentions (sitelinks, App, call, callout, image, location, review). Ratings have a massive impact on businesses image.  

Remarketing

Analytics

Tag Management

Quality Score = User Experience.

Move with your audience

WHAT YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON

The 7 P's
People, Product, Place, Promotion, Process, Price, Patience

THINGS FOR THE FUTURE

Cross device tracking

Virtual reality

Social growth

Bing growth

Google market share  

10:45

We are ready with Stacey MacNaught from Tecmark and her talk about Creativity and Data!!  

10:48

The 5 stages of content failure

Step 1:

You have this amazing idea. Literally amazing.

Step 2: You convince your client that this will be the best thing to invest in.

Step 3: you invest hours into graphic , dev, etc.

Step 4: You launch your beautiful piece and things go down!

Step 5: You work out how you are going to salvage something and make things good again!

10:53

Using data to create content that answer questions. Everything starts with data and is the origin to predict customer behaviour.

10:54

WINNING with data. We're looking for National Press links, not social media likes..

Link building with data, you may have a lot of great content, but if there are no links, it will not be shown on the SERP. Data without stories, is just a load of old numbers.

10:58

What is good data?

Commission surveys, Your web analytics data, proprietary data, freedom of information data,

Credible

Timely

Impartial

Transparent source

If you really can't source your own data….There are options for that

Statista.com gives you access to alot of consumer data

Google Public Data

Gov.UK Statistics

WHAT MAKES A GOOD STORY

Timely

Relevant

Unexpected

New

Close to home

The linkable asset: How you can get the best coverage! It can be very simple. But needs links!

FEW TIPS

Buy consultants time from someone working in journalism right now. Bring someone in who has no interest in liking you. Then they are honest. But feel free to disagree in what they are saying.

Sanity check your story before you invest too heavily in promotion or assets. Use Reddit or Usability Hub!

Have a backup plan

Don't launch without a linkable asset

SOCIAL CHAIN- Steve Bartlett

11:51

11:54

Their Performing Monkey Trick: creating trendy hashtags on half an hour.

Millennials are heavily influenced by their peers. They created a football player  Rex Secco, taking from the event name: Soccerex. Twitter went crazy about this made up footballer, who was 16 year old and bought for £34 million. It created a media storm and was featured on 9000 websites around the world.

11:57

How did we get here?  How do we get their attention? = Steve created WallPark. They started anything University related. All the most popular social media pages are run by young people in their bedrooms. The next thing was influencers, who are influencing on social media? Social Chain owns most of these pages.

12:01

Why influencer marketing now?

There are few things that drive a sale more effectively than a positive WOM recommendation. As well as authority, one of Robert Cialdini's famous principles of persuasion is consensus / social proofing.  Everyone is talking about it and it's an arbitrage. Consumers are tired of paid advertising.

12:05

How do we do influencer marketing:

Pre-search: checking data. Think about consumers and what they care about. If someone like Puma and XFactor, then they can find out what influence them as consumers

Make people feel something-Don't introduce or tell people what something is. Just make them feel something about the content.

Driving consensus- Drive scarcity. People convincing you to something.

12:12

Each platform speaks a different language.  Always talk in the brand's own language. Growth on Snapchat is all about Word of Mouth

There is a massive impact if you just ask people to tag a friend in a post.

The psychology behind a good competition:

Perceived value of the reward

12.23

Average age of Social chain worker 22? We are too old to work at social chain :(

12:25

Q&A

Do you face copyright issues?

Watch out for Steve's advice on how to grow your snapchat- tomorrow!

AFTERNOON SESSION

13:34

We are here with James Hart, founder of Head & Hart and Francis Turner CRO at AdYouLike.

13:41

We're all native now! This presentation is about branding in the digital age. In the real world, people don't care about advertising. Why is it true? We have more likelihood to be in a plane crash than clicking on a banner ad. You can't be considered if you haven't been noticed.

13:49

We expect high quality content on all media channels. Publishing is becoming a cost we're less willing to pay for.

13:49

We expect high quality content on all media channels, but publishing is becoming a cost we're less willing to pay for. There is a massive war with block ads, as more and more people in the world has downloaded software for adblocking. When brands stop listening people stop trusting what they say. When we forget we are being sold to we are more likely to buy!

James argue: Native is culture. Brands can be this - blend in to the culture.

James suggest books: How brands can become icons! Douglas B Holt and The hidden Persuaders Vance Packard.  

13:57

CULTURE BRANDS

Think about your brand being native

Great framework: Customer, Culture, Context, Content. Start with the customer, then understand their culture and understand their story.

LESSON:

Culture connect people together and give you a mass audience. Culture keeps brands connected to people, not advertising. So listen before you talk - remember the 4 C's for communication: Customer, Culture, Context, Content

14:06

Now catching up with Francis Turner, CRO at Adyoulike, who are a native ad platform through technology. Deliver better ad experiences for brands, publishers and users.

Francis talks about the history of native.

Interesting facts:

6 out of 10 people don't read beyond the headlines

59% find native ads interesting

14:32

Change of scene! We're ready with Social Commerce. Talks from Ann Stanley from Annica Digital and Rob Hughes from JD Williams.

14:34

Convert Paid Media:

Get the creative right // Price - promotions - discount led

Device // bespoke content

Targeting

Engage :

We want to understand the value of our socially engaged audience

Hypothesis// socially engaged customers are worth more

Process// which of our customers are socially engaged? How does this affect buying habits?

Confirmation

14:44

Ann Stanley talks search!

About Annica

14:50

Shopping in search

Previous research on Bing PLA's vs AdWords shopping has also shown smilar variability by brand and sector.

14:56

KEYNOTE 

Robert Scoble, Futurist- Rackspace

16:41

We're here with Robert Scoble from Futurist-Rackspace who will talk about beyond mobile!

Everything you are about to see, exist today. Rendered visions of the future are not used. He showcase videos using Google Tengo and city-scale mapping in three dimensions. Such as real time 3d room capture on your phone but the problem is distribution - we don't own this as personal items. Maybe next year 2% will, but there is still alot of development.  

They are expensive and strange looking, but they are showing a new future world. The glasses can also be used and understand things, as we can see things.

Magic Leap got a $3 billion dollar investment of software, so people can have 4K screen on top of the real world through the glasses. This will replace screens, so we will virtualise the screens using glasses. The software works, but it is so early stages that needs a lot of development and investment.  Amazon is working on one, Facebook is also working on this. They are gonna put high speed wireless around us, so we actually don't need mobiles anymore! You can even control computers with these glasses only by using your eyes.

17:04

17:07

Google tilt brush, where you can draw things in the air, but you see it virtually through the glasses. The new disney park in China that opened yesterday was completely created through VR. Companies like Ford use VR instead building clay models etc. to showcase new products. A guy in Seattle use VRM to show apartments.   

A guy in Seattle use VRM to show apartments and they say in the future that they can show virtual cosmetics and we will definitely buy this.

Rob believes that there will be big cultural changes in the future.

17:14

A lot of new campaigns will come with VRM. These glasses are gonna control your car and interact with the world.  All machines we are using today will have internet and be controlled by machines.

17:20

Self-driving cars. Mercedes one is behind the Google system.

The Google car has 7 censors that grabs data and bring the data in, so it starts learning about your behaviour.   

17:25

This technology is gonna put a lot of people out of work, but there are lot of companies coming up using machine learning which takes data. This technology can even assist agriculture to optimise profit and production.    

17:32

A camera in Madison Square Garden which has all the information about everyone at the stadium through his technology. Apps are evolving, where you order, pay and go get the product at a certain time, so you don't have to interact with other humans.