Matthias Lüfkens of the World Economic Forum (aka. the people organizing the Davos summit) was kind enough to replace Nils Andres of the Brand Science Institute as a speaker in the track of “Getting Your Customers Talking”.

It made for an intriguing session on the opportunities offered by digital and social media, which in the end no company can ignore. For this, Matthias took the audience on a tour of the various initiatives undertaken by the World Economic Forum’s social media team (consisting of himself), imparting valuable nuggets of advice along the way.

The most important ones I retained from the session were:

• Website visitors have become irrelevant

In the past, there was always a fascination by the number of people that “visited” a website, but today, this number has become much less relevant. People surf, mish, mash and compile their world view from a large variety of sources. If you want to be part of their reality, this means you have to place your brand where they are, and not expect them to come to you.

• Store content everywhere

But a mere presence by “having an account of Facebook or Twitter” is not enough. You have to actively participate in these environments and store your content everywhere. As an example Matthias gave his decision to also publish most of the WEF photo library on Flickr, and even make it available under a Creative Commons License.

• Be prepared to lose control

Getting out there means that good, but also bad things can happen to your brand, and the content you share. This is also the case for the W.E.F. where those opposing the Davos Summit, defame the event and its participants online. In the view of Matthias, this is however something to “live with”, and by countering it with lot’s of positive information, you can “drown out” most of the negative comments.

• Create Communities

While you cannot control, you “can” influence. That is why as a final piece of advice, Matthias advised to actively reach out to online relationships and create special communities which received privileged information in return for an open dialogue (in this Davos created a special mini-community of journalists who receive information still under embargo.

For the rest Matthias shared some real gems online, of which my personal favourite was the effort by Queen Rania of Jordania, who actively reaches out to the country through her own blog and website. Also he showed examples of how the W.E.F. gave people on the internet the opportunity to directly ask questions to the speakers at the Davos event.

All in all, this was an inspiring session, which left many of those present with an appetite for more information and action in the areas of digital and social media.