It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what aImage via Wikipediabout the rest of the people interested in these topics that frankly don’t have the travel budget and don’t live within driving distance?
Well, Bryan Eisenberg has done all of us a favor, and posted an online virtual conference mashup of recorded presentations from conferences he’s been to recently. At the very least, its a great place to start.
Yesterday morning, I conducted a roundtable for the Colorado Business Marketing Association titled Social Media 101. Now, certainly, that’s a broad topic, so to get a better handle on what to cover, I surveyed those people who were planning on attending. Here are the questions and answers:
What tools do you want to learn about (check all that apply)?
Are you interested in learning how to measure/analyze social media activity?
Yes: 86%
No: 14%
My last question was free-form, asking people what else they wanted to know about. The questions revolved around these issues:
What tactics work best in my industry?
How does this apply to B2B companies?
How do you use social media for a cleaning product?
How can you use social media to generate leads?
What are best practices?
I had time to scratch the surface on a small number of all the requests, and, we’re already planning for more workshops on specifics, but, we truly had an interesting discussion. The point I brought home is that the best way to think about social media (at least, from a marketing perspective) is to understand that it is a great opportunity to connect with small, niche groups of people online. The key to discovering those groups is by doing research using monitoring, search and research tools. I showed them these:
Topic-based news/blog search to replace RSS: Filtrbox
I also want to invite those of you who were at the roundtable to connect with the Denver/ Boulder Social Media Club. We had our first meeting on September 23, and are planning another meeting in late October.
Were you there? Anything I forgot to mention that you want to remember? Leave a comment.
Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:
I have heard many people talk about how every company should have a blog, which I really disagree with. Seems BL Ochman and I follow the same line of thinking.
A couple of us decided that it was about time the Boulder/Denver area had regular social media meetups, so we’re taking the plunge and setting up a first gathering. This is happening on September 23rd, at 5:30pm upstairs at the Wynkoop Brewery in Lodo in Denver. We’ll probably start off with some low-key shmoozing and drinking, so, feel free to come even if you can’t make it until 6 or 6:30pm.
So what’s a social media club? Really a chance for marketers, bloggers, business people and general fans of social media to gather, share knowledge and ideas and commune away from the computer. Come join us!
Here’s the link to RSVP on Facebook or if you’re not a Facebook fan, you can use this link instead. Interested in finding out more about Social Media Club? Visit the SMC web site.
Though there seem to be two a week that are “must be there” conferences — this week, for example, the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas and Web 2.0 in NYC — I was glad to come across this helpful list today, from Paul O’Brien:
Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.
It seems like every day, there’s yet another conference on social media, web and search marketing, blogging, etc. Many of the presenters at the conferences are the same. Amazingly enough, the conferences are still focused in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas and occasionally, Chicago. But, what a…
The very act of following up with a job lead or a contact who has potential to need my services is occasionally fraught with peril. The kind of peril when you get no response after initial enthusiasm. I’m not talking about no response from a cold call or even a …
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