Kevin Van der Straeten on social media

Kevin Van der Straeten is a full-blooded internet entrepreneur and a specialist in social media. Recently, he discussed the subject in The Content Room. Afterwards, we caught up with him.

Kevin, how do you use social media yourself?
As a speaker and coach, I use it in moderation. I don't produce any content myself, but use social media to share interesting things I find elsewhere. At my company Eventplanner.be, things are reversed. Here we produce content ourselves and use social media as a distribution and promotion channel. We also launched eventplanner.tv by means of social media. We raised funds by means of crowdfunding, but didn't reach our target amount through this. However, our crowdfunding attracted a lot of attention on Twitter, Facebook and other social media and in this way our story was picked up by the traditional media. Ultimately, all that attention resulted in us actually securing the necessary funds to enable us to start.

Traditional media and social media have therefore reinforced each other. How do you develop a communication strategy that integrates the power of social media?
How do you integrate telephony in a communication strategy? We don't think about telephony anymore, we just use it. This is how we should also think about social media. The strategic objectives naturally vary depending on the service that uses it. It's obvious how to use social media for the support desk: in the same way as you use the other channels. For HR, you'll post jobs on Facebook, which isn't so different from what you do elsewhere. With marketing it's a little more difficult. Companies must learn to be a little more modest in this respect. To begin with, you need to learn to listen. A health food shop can respond via social media, for example, to someone looking for recipes. That's more interesting than creating your own recipes and publishing them, although of course that's also fine as long as you're not too commercial. The essential element is always to listen.

Is this where social media differs from traditional channels?
No, I don't think so. A good sales letter also seeks to meet people's questions and problems. A good TV commercial can do that as well. What is different is that you can receive more direct feedback through social media. Companies are sometimes afraid of this. But if someone has something negative to say, you can't stop it. Even if you're not connected to social media.

"The essential element is always to listen."

Are negative responses the main reason why companies are sometimes reluctant to use social media?
Fear of negative responses is one of the main reasons, but there are more. Some companies are simply out of touch with social media or lack the know-how. Sometimes they also don't see a direct link with their business. Another important factor is time, the fear of losing a lot of time on social media. I think this fear is only founded when you don't have a plan in place, when you don't know beforehand what you're going to do. If you're sure about what platforms you're going to use beforehand, for what purpose and for which audience, you can already be very successful with half an hour's social media a day. It all depends of course on your objectives. A large company that wants to use social media for support purposes will probably have to dedicate more full-time staff to this.

What has been your most interesting experience with social media to date?
When I worked at Telenet, we launched Yelo via social media. We gave our press conference at the time via live streaming, and that was a huge success. So successful in fact that for a while the servers had difficulty keeping up.

What do you think will be the new developments in the coming years?
I read an article recently about an American study in which it appears that huge numbers of teenagers in the United States are abandoning Facebook in favour of Twitter. There's no sign of that trend with us at present, but that can quickly change. It's something you shouldn't be afraid of. As long as you're focused on your target group, you're doing well. Always follow your target group. That's the most important thing.

Kevin Van der Straeten is the founder of eventplanner.be