The 1st Marketing Cloud User Group: This is what you missed!
The Marketing Cloud user group has been steadily growing on the Success Community, now at around 100 members. It seemed about time that we took the leap of faith and ran our first person event on 30th March 2017. In return we welcomed the best part of 50 people through the doors at the Salesforce Tower, thanks in no small part to all the help from highly active and connected members of the community.
The topics of our first meeting included Social Studio & Email Studio. On the latter, discussing the implications of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on email communication.
Over the coming meetings we aim to cover different aspects of the Marketing Cloud platform.
Siobahn Rafferty: Social Studio
To kick us off we had Siobahn Rafferty from Media Measure give an overview of Social Studio. Many of us start on the platform in one of the studio products, so it was great to get an overview of an area that is less familiar.
Siobahn spoke about the different visualisations that are available and explained how she has seen organisation use the Command Centre.
Siobahn has worked with many of Salesforce’s social media customers, some of whom manage a mind bending amount of Facebook pages. Something that I hadn’t appreciated is that you can customise the sentiment model in Social Studio. The sentiment model is used to determine if the content of Tweets are positive or negative. Sentiment deletions works for 10+ languages out of the box.
Stephan Gracia: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
Next up was Stephan Gracia talking about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This is a really important topic that most companies have not yet got to grips with, but will need to by May 2018.
‘I have given this talk a couple of time now and only about 10% of people raise their hand when I ask who knows about this.’ – Stephan Garcia
The General Data Protection Regulation, will affect all companies that store or process Personally Identifiable Information of people from Europe. Three of the key principles that companies are going to need to adapt for are:
- Transparency — Why the data is collected
- Consent — What permission has been gained & when it expires
- The Right to be Forgotten — Withdrawal of consent & permission to store
As Stephan highlights this will be the biggest change in regulation since the we were all enjoying the Spice Girls movie, which to me feels like a lifetime ago
‘There are alway many questions. I have even been asked if I think Marketing is dead, which obviously it is not, but it will force a change in focus to the number of engaged contacts rather than just quantity.’ – Stephan Garcia
The Thanks
A big thank you to Richard Lewis (EMEA Customer Success), Clelia Lancelot (Director — Customer Success Marketing Cloud). Also thanks to John Stevenson (Salesforce developer evangelist) for helping ensure everyone got to eat.
Also a big thank you to my co-lead Jimson Lee, Phil Walton and Tom Te. They have been the custodians for much longer than me. My goal was to connect to some people who work with Marketing Cloud, and back last year I would have been happy with 5 people in a pub so this has well exceeded my expectations.
Joining in with further events
If you would have liked to attend but just didn’t hear about the event in time, don’t worry, there will be many more to come. We are planning to run the events monthly, except in May due to the Salesforce World Tour. The most likely date will be the Thursday of the first week of every month.
We know that Salesforce Meetup schedule is busy in London so we are working with the other User Group Leaders to avoid a clash.
We will also be standardising on how you can sign up for the events using Salesforce Splash, the Salesforce Events Platform. We are just waiting for a Single Sign On issue to be sorted out then we are good to go. #NoPressure
Call for Speakers
We are always looking for content. We also need you to tell us what you want to see, what you find useful and what to avoid. This is a group for the user community, served by the community. If you have a topic you can talk on let us know. If you are not sure, still let us know, I am happy to work with people to shape ideas and content.
If you are interested, email us at londonmarketingcloud@salesforceusergroups.com
Keeping in touch
For the latest news join the London Marketing Cloud User Group Success Community, you can also follow us on Twitter @LDNMktgCloudUG.
This is where we will make announcements of the next meeting. If you have a Salesforce login you can join us on Splash already here. If you are not able to join us, look out for the #LDNMktgCloudUG on Twitter. I am also planning to experiment with live streaming.
If you haven’t attended a SF User Group before there are so many to choose from, they are a great way to meet people with similar successes and struggles. You can find a list of some of the other User Groups and a link to their Success Community page below.
