SES Hong Kong 2012: Biz Optimization, Driving Conversions, and Creating a Movement

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The SES Hong Kong 2012 conference kicked off for the third year on Tuesday with a roomful of captive audience listening to Avinash Kaushik, Google's digital marketing evangelist talk business optimization in the digital age.

Using local examples from Ocean Park's official website to Fortress and Manning's Sina Weibo, and G.O.D and Cable TV's Facebook pages, Kaushik shares three key themes that digital marketers need to take note: Influence, Experience and Value.

He also shared that web analytics tools are "glorified data pukers" on their own, so marketers need to customize reports to look for metrics that measure acquisition, behavior, and outcomes.

For instance, acquisition metrics would include measuring your brand's paid, owned, and earned,  channels.

Whether it's Hong Kong or even in the West, some marketers make the mistake of not optimizing the right metrics in social media. Kaushik pointed out the crazy obsession of measuring 'likes' and 'number of followers'.

Right after Kaushik's session, Mike Grehan, publisher of SES, ClickZ.asia and Search Engine Watch moderated the keynote panel on Integrated Marketing – What does it mean?

Panel speakers included Barney Leohnis, head of digital at Ogilvy & Mather, Asia Pacific; Basker Rangachari, SMO at Standard Chartered for Hong Kong and North East Asia and Crispin Sheridan, senior director of search marketing strategy at SAP.

Highlights of sessions throughout the day:

Achieving Biz ROI with Social Media

Jayne Leung, North Asia director at Facebook shared that social media now allows brands to connect with consumers and know their real identities. However, success metrics has not changed just because it's social. Marketers could still continue to use the same business metrics from reach, brand resonance, reactions to consumer insights.

left: Michelle Au, Sony Mobile GM and Facebook North Asia exec Jayne Leung

The 4 dimensions to achieving business ROI on social media are:

1. Connect (focus on quality, not just quantity)
2. Engage (build relationships and loyalty)
3. Influence (word of mouth marketing at scale)
4. Integrate (use deep integration with platform to make all customer touch points more meaningful, on and off of Facebook)

Michelle Au, general manager at Sony Mobile for Hong Kong and Macau shared a case study using Facebook as the core media platform for its Sony Xperia phone at the session.

Keyword Optimization Loop: How to choose the best keywords to drive traffic to the website

Richard Mabey, CEO at The Egg shared the following takeaways:

• There's no set keyword methodology, they have to match to your site.
• You have to select tools accordingly.
• Baidu is your competitor in SEO. Long tail SEO is one strategy to overcome it.

Driving conversions through performance marketing

Anna Chan, MD of iClick Interactive for Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan shared these takeaways:

• Understand the value of each online channel to maximize your ROI.
• Display is not only for branding, it has an assist effect when it comes to conversions.

Introduction to Analytics

Madhu Malkani, digital analytics manager at Estee Lauder gave the following takeaway from her session: "Segment your data and always be testing".

Sean Rach, regional director at Prudential with Con Apostolopoulos, senior director at Turner Broadcasting Asia sharing the case study of Cha-Ching - Asia's animated musical edutainment series designed to help parents build money-smart values for kids at a panel session on how to create a movement.

Day 1 of the conference wrapped up with the Meet the Experts Roundtables on wide ranging topics from Baidu SEO, link building, International SEO, digital attribution analytics to PPC and SEO integration, mobile marketing, and social media.

David Shen from Acronym Media on PPC and SEO integration

Allen Qu from Netconcepts on Baidu SEO

More tips and insights on Day 2 of SES Hong Kong Conference here.