Meltwater Summit 2024
Last month, our Director of Social Strategy, Julia Sullivan, attended the Meltwater Summit in NYC. We were excited to hear from brands like Google, TikTok, and NASCAR about social media, AI, social listening, influencer marketing, and more. Here are the top takeaways we took from the event:
#1: Speed is 🔑
A lot of brands talked about seeing success with social posts and product offerings that were turned around quickly. It’s crucial to identify trends and have the means to activate around them before the moment passes (Missing one or both of these capabilities in-house? Let’s chat!). Keynote speaker Ryan Reynolds (oops, dropped that name real casually) talked about “fastvertising” and said, “Too much time and money will assassinate creativity sometimes.”
#2: Winning on social (and beyond) in 2024 requires curiosity, creativity, connectivity, and cultural knowledge.
Perhaps there’s something else that doesn’t start with a “C” but let’s roll with it!
Curiosity: What’s trending around our brand or category? What posts are doing well and not so well? How much time can we save using AI?
Creativity: A running theme of the Summit was that AI can scale and enhance creativity, but it can’t replace it.
Connectivity: We are in a very distinct phase of marketing that requires teams to be more connected than ever. According to The State of Marketing Collaboration report, a collaborative effort by Meltwater and The Work Innovation Lab by Asana, more than a quarter (27%) of marketers feel disconnected from the rest of their organization.
Cultural Knowledge: Having an understanding of what’s trending and why can be a huge difference maker
#3: AI is great for kicking things off.
It’s no surprise that AI was mentioned in almost every session. Got a case of blank page syndrome? We’ve all been there. Speakers from companies like Microsoft and Google talked about using AI as a starting point for internal and external projects, then optimizing with a human touch.
Looking for ways to integrate AI into your team’s workflow? Here’s three tips:
- Be aggressive: There are so many ways to use AI that it can be overwhelming to know how to start, leading to procrastination. AI won’t be the solution to all your problems, but it can definitely help some of them. Start with your biggest problems/time consuming tasks and go from there.
- Use it for personal use before professional use: When learning a new tool, try using it in your personal life before bringing it into your workflow. We’ve done this with tools like Airtable and social listening and find that the familiarity/less pressure leads to things “sticking” easier.
- Make it fun: Creative challenges are another great, low-pressure way to get yourself and/or your team in the habit of using AI.
We could go on and on about these topics so reach out if you want to hear more.