The Forum for Business Education Research and Development (FBERD) two-day conference themed with the subtitle ‘Advances in Business Education Research and Practices‘ was held at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Hotel in Valletta. It notably encompassed several stimulating conversations and discussions on current issues and practices in business and economics as well as challenges and emerging trends from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Lending his years of experience as IT Law Consultant and Director of Strategy and Business Developer at the web development company ICON Dr. Gege Gatt delved into emerging channels trends and success stories in Social Media in his presentation entitled ‘Social Media and the changing patterns of consumer engagement’.
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| Photo by cngfotography |
“As organisations scramble to the Internet to foster deeper ties with their customer-base most fail miserably while some rant and rave about their successes in the Social Media environment ” said Dr. Gatt. Accordingly in order to identify current tendencies in social media and subsequently scrutinise them Dr. Gatt utilised the findings of ICON’s most recent 2011 Digital Marketing Report throughout his presentation.
Placing ultimate importance on the consumer Dr. Gatt emphasized the need to engage said customer through social media. To this end he elaborated ICON has developed a consumer engagement model that is used to discover the main strategic pathways one would want one’s customers to walk through; it is the business company that should determine the target audience and what type of social media must be used to reach them.
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| Photo by cngfotography |
Likewise the company must subjectively represent specific information that will engross the customer. Rather than engaging in hard selling companies must share their knowledge and entertain their audiences on social channels. The covert with social media is in “balancing the brand-value messages and the consumer-value data”.
Dr. Gatt further described how users on social media are more likely to keep in touch with friends than ‘like’ brands making it somewhat challenging for the latter to win the users’ attention. It is consequently through smart techniques that a company can rave about its success in the social media environment.
Dr.Gatt’s presentation was very well received by the audience.
ICON will share further knowledge about Business and Social Media at the upcoming PwC Social Business Conference.
Tags: Consumer engagement, Gege Gatt, Social Media