Last Wednesday, we were lucky enough to attend the Windy City Social’s 3rd Annual Social Media Masters Summit at the School of Art Institute Ballroom. The day-long event was filled with engaging discussion about the power and future of social media from a diverse group of experts. Some of the most interesting topics included marketing to women, the strategy behind the Museum of Science and Industry’s Month at the Museum, small businesses with big impact and brands’ relationships with bloggers.

Here are highlights and key points we took away from the eye-opening experience:

• Women have incredible consumer power. Not only are there countless industries targeting females, but they often buy for every other market. One way for brands to successfully reach them while increasing visibility is pairing up with a cause or a different brand for twice the community. Two interesting case studies mentioned include Sear’s Kenmore Baking for the Troops program and Bluefly’s team-up with popular television show “Project Runway.”
• Campaigns work in mysterious ways. As the Museum of Science and Industry will testify, brands cannot always predict how a campaign will take off. After announcing their Month at the Museum competition in a local press release, they quickly received thousands of applications from every corner of the world. The response was overwhelming but also incredibly exciting – not only did they see a major increase in museum visits and web traffic, but they also found long-lasting qualitative effects, like kids becoming more interested in science. Using something like an event, competition or experiment can be an entry point of interest that brings focus back to your business.
• Tell a story. When companies allow for two-way communication with customers, it increases their brand’s authenticity by empowering consumers. Jockey proved this when they invited user-generated content interaction by asking people to submit videos of themselves dancing in their underwear. Obviously, something like this doesn’t work for everyone, but it demonstrates how a campaign can transcend a product or service and shift the focus to what really matters: human connections.
• Be quiet and listen: Social media managers feel pressure to pump out interesting, well-timed content everyday, but another key part of their job is listening to what others online are saying. This kind of quiet monitoring helps businesses gain insight about who their followers are and what they’re talking about and measure up against competitors. It’s also important to identify your advocates along with your detractors. A few valuable monitoring tools mentioned were Radian6, Brandwatch and Sysomos.
• Nothing beats face-to-face time. It’s a little surreal to attend a live event based on online experiences and realize everyone around you is simultaneously tweeting, blogging, checking in or updating their status. To demonstrate how strong the connection between people and their mobile devices is, Panelist Heidi Skinner of Critical Mass made us hand over our cell phones to a stranger – and half the audience looked about ready to cry. Yet at the end of the day there’s nothing like old-fashioned direct contact, which is why Katy Lynch of SocialKaty carves out a few hours of her workday to visit her clients in person.

Social media has proven itself a wonderful and transformative tool for businesses and individuals alike, but the truth is it could never exist without people’s fundamental need to communicate, connect and express themselves. Luckily for all of us, neither of these things is going anywhere anytime soon.